He who denies his own vanity usually possesses it in so brutal a form that he instinctively shuts his eyes to avoid the necessity of despising himself.

What then is truth? A movable host of metaphors, metonymies, and anthropomorphisms: in short, a sum of human relations which have been poetically and rhetorically intensified, transferred, and embellished, and which, after long usage, seem to a people to be fixed, canonical, and binding. Truths are illusions which we have forgotten are illusions — they are metaphors that have become worn out and have been drained of sensuous force.

No one is such a liar as the indignant man.

And as long as you are in any way ashamed before yourself, you do not yet belong with us.

It is only because man believes himself to be free, not because he is free, that he experiences remorse and pricks of conscience.

The surest sign that two people no longer speak the same language is that both say ironic things to one another but that neither senses the irony.

Art is not merely an imitation of the reality of nature, but in truth a metaphysical supplement to the reality of nature, placed alongside thereof for its conquest.