Men use a new lesson or experience later on as a ploughshare or perhaps also as a weapon; women at once make it into an ornament.

There is a universal need to exercise some kind of power, or to create for one's self the appearance of some power, if only temporarily, in the form of intoxication.

Noble and wise men once believed in the music of the spheres: noble and wise men still continue to believe in the "moral significance of existence." But one day even this sphere-music will no longer be audible to them! They will wake up and take note that their ears were dreaming.

The state lies in all languages of good and evil; and whatever it says, it lies-and whatever it has, it has stolen.

The arrogance that accompanies merit offends us even more than the arrogance of people who are lacking in merit: since merit itself offends us.

Man alone resists the direction of gravitation: he constantly wants to fall--upwards.

I too have been in the underworld, as was Odysseus, and I will often be there again; not only sheep have I sacrificed so as to beable to speak with a few dead souls, but neither have I spared my own blood as well.