Some men have sighed over the abduction of their wives, but many more have sighed because no one wanted to abduct theirs.

Whoever has overthrown an existing law of custom has always first been accounted a bad man: but when, as did happen, the law could not afterwards be reinstated and this fact was accepted, the predicate gradually changed; - history treats almost exclusively of these bad men who subsequently became good men!

All philosophers make the common mistake of taking contemporary man as their starting point and of trying, through an analysis of him, to[21] reach a conclusion. "Man" involuntarily presents himself to them as an aeterna veritas as a passive element in every hurly-burly, as a fixed standard of things. Yet everything uttered by the philosopher on the subject of man is, in the last resort, nothing more than a piece of testimony concerning man during a very limited period of time.

Mastery has been achieved when one neither makes a mistake nor hesitates in the performance.

Today a man of knowledge might well feel as though he were God transformed into an animal.

You may lie with your mouth, but with the mouth you make as you do so you none the less tell the truth.

The inclination to self-depreciation, to freely accepting being robbed, being duped, and being swindled, could be the modesty of a god among men.