Shared joys make a friend, not shared sufferings.

Truth is a mobile army of metaphors, metonyms, anthropomorphisms, in short a sum of human relations which have been subjected to poetic and rhetorical intensification, translation and decoration […]; truths are illusions of which we have forgotten that they are illusions, metaphors which have become worn by frequent use and have lost all sensuous vigour […]. Yet we still do not know where the drive to truth comes from, for so far we have only heard about the obligation to be truthful which society imposes in order to exist" from, "On Truth and Lying in a Non-Moral Sense".

What does it matter whether I am shown to be right! I am right too much!--And he who laughs best today will also laugh last.

The most welcome joke to me is the one that takes the place of a heavy, not altogether innocuous thought, at once a cautionary hint of the finger and a flash of the eye.

The love of one sole being is a barbarism; for it will be employed to the detriment of all the rest. So too the love of God.

Great intellects are skeptical.

A thought, even a possibility, can shatter and transform us.