The criminal is quite frequently not equal to his deed: he belittles and slanders it.

People who have given us their complete confidence believe that they have a right to ours. The inference is false, a gift confers no rights.

In pain there is as much wisdom as in pleasure: like the latter it is one of the best self preservatives of a species.

Whatever we have words for, that we have already got beyond.

Truth is a mobile army of metaphors, metonyms, anthropomorphisms, in short a sum of human relations which have been subjected to poetic and rhetorical intensification, translation and decoration […]; truths are illusions of which we have forgotten that they are illusions, metaphors which have become worn by frequent use and have lost all sensuous vigour […]. Yet we still do not know where the drive to truth comes from, for so far we have only heard about the obligation to be truthful which society imposes in order to exist" from, "On Truth and Lying in a Non-Moral Sense".

Man is a rope stretched between the animal and the Superman-a rope over an abyss. A dangerous crossing, a dangerous wayfaring, a dangerous looking-back, a dangerous trembling and halting

When one has not had a good father, one must create one.