People who, out of an inborn moderation, leave every glass standing only half-emptied refuse to admit that everything in the world has its sediments and dregs.

I awoke you from your sleep because I saw that you were having a nightmare. And now you are cross and say to me: "What are we supposed to do now? Everything is still night!" You ingrates! You should go to sleep again and dream better.

And you tell me, friends, that there is no disputing taste and tasting? But all life is a dispute over taste and tasting!

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

What we call truths are just those errors that we cannot give up.

Without the errors involved in the assumptions of ethics, man would have remained an animal. Thus has he taken himself as something higher and imposed rigid laws upon himself.

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.