Phlegmatic natures can be inspired to enthusiasm only by being made into fanatics.

An attack on the roots of passion means an attack on the roots of life.

Perhaps I know best why it is man alone who laughs; he alone suffers so deeply that he had to invent laughter.

The significance of language for the evolution of culture lies in this, that mankind set up in language a separate world beside the other world, a place it took to be so firmly set that, standing upon it, it could lift the rest of the world off its hinges and make itself master of it. To the extent that man has for long ages believed in the concepts and names of things as in aeternae veritates he has appropriated to himself that pride by which he raised himself above the animal: he really thought that in language he possessed knowledge of the world.

One must shed the bad taste of wanting to agree with many. "Good" is no longer good when one's neighbor mouths it. And how should there be a "common good"! The term contradicts itself: whatever can be common always has little value. In the end it must be as it is and always has been: great things remain for the great, abysses for the profound, nuances and shudders for the refined, and, in brief, all that is rare for the rare.

Every virtue has its privilege: for example, that of contributing its own little bundle of wood to the funeral pyre of one condemned.

[Heraclitus] concluded that coming-to-be itself could not be anything evil or unjust.