The usual false conclusions of mankind are these: a thing exists, therefore it has a right to exist.

There is nothing for which men ask to be paid dearer than for humiliation.

In a friend one should have ones best enemy. You should be closest to him with your heart when you resist him.

In those days it was possible for a Greek to flee from an over-abundant reality as though it were but the tricky scheming off the imagination-and to flee, not like Plato into the land of eternal ideas, into the workshop off the world-creator, feasting one's eyes on the unblemished unbreakable archetypes, but into the rigor mortis off the coldest emptiest concept off all, the concept of being.

... hitherto we have been permitted to seek beauty only in the morally good - a fact which sufficiently accounts for our having found so little of it and having had to seek about for imaginary beauties without backbone! - As surely as the wicked enjoy a hundred kinds of happiness of which the virtuous have no inkling, so too they possess a hundred kinds of beauty; and many of them have not yet been discovered.

One should only question gods where none but gods can reply.

He who thinks a great deal is not suited to be a party man: he thinks his way through the party and out the other side too soon.