I am alone again and I want to be so; alone with the pure sky and open sea.

What makes us heroic?--Confronting simultaneously our supreme suffering and our supreme hope.

Only as an aesthetic product can the world be justified to all eternity.

Watch them clamber, these swift monkeys! They clamber over one another and thus drag one another into the mud and the depth. They all want to get to the throne: that is their madness — as if happiness sat on the throne. Often, mud sits on the throne — and often the throne also on mud. Mad they all appear to me, clambering monkeys and overardent. Foul smells their idol, the cold monster: foul, they smell to me altogether, these idolators.

A book calls for pen, ink, and a writing desk; today the rule is that pen, ink, and a writing desk call for a book.

Every church is a stone on the grave of a god-man: it does not want him to rise up again under any circumstances.

I am almost equal to a shadow.