The hour when you say, "What does my happiness matter? It is poverty and filth, and a wretched complacency. Yet my happiness should justify existence itself!

There is nothing we like to communicate to others as much as the seal of secrecy together with what lies under it.

From the State the exceptional individual cannot expect much. He is seldom benefited by being taken into its service; the only certain advantage it can give him is complete independence. Only real culture will prevent him being too early tired out or used up, and will spare him the exhausting struggle against culture-philistinism.

Compassion for the friend should conceal itself under a hard shell.

People buy their necessities in shops and have to pay dearly for them because they have to assist in paying for what is also on sale there but only rarely finds purchasers: the luxury and amusement goods. So it is that luxury continually imposes a tax on the simple people who have to do without it.

Women and egoistic artists entertain a feeling towards science that is something composed of envy and sentimentality.

That for which we find words is something already dead in our hearts.