His (the theologian) basic instinct of self preservation forbids him to respect reality at any point or even to let it get a word in.

On the mountains of truth you can never climb in vain: either you will reach a point higher up today, or you will be training your powers so that you will be able to climb higher tomorrow.

Man is more sensitive to the contempt of others than to self-contempt.

Only idiots fail to contradict themselves three times a day.

It is only great pain--that slow, sustained pain that takes its time, in which we are, as it were, burned with smoldering green firewood--that forces us philosophers to sink to our ultimate profundity and to do away with all the trust, everything good-natured, veil-imposing, mild and middling, on which we may have previously based our humanity. I doubt that such a pain makes us 'better'--but I know that it makes us deeper.

Does wisdom perhaps appear on the earth as a raven which is inspired by the smell of carrion?

The secret of reaping the greatest fruitfulness and the greatest enjoyment from life is to live dangerously.