The Refinement of Shame. People are not ashamed to think something foul, but they are ashamed when they think these foul thoughts are attributed to them.

Whoever aims publicly at great things and at length perceives secretly that he is too weak to achieve them, has usually also insufficient strength to renounce his aims publicly, and then inevitably becomes a hypocrite.

That lies should be necessary to life is part and parcel of the terrible and questionable character of existence.

One has to pay dearly for immortality; one has to die several times while one is still alive.

Not the intensity but the duration of high feelings makes high men.

He who bestows something great receives no gratitude; for in accepting it the recipient has already been weighed down too much.

Very early in my life I took the question of the relation of art to truth seriously: even now I stand in holy dread in the face of this discordance. My first book was devoted to it. The Birth of Tragedy believes in art on the background of another belief