One will rarely err if extreme actions be ascribed to vanity, ordinary actions to habit, and mean actions to fear.

Anyone who has declared someone else to be an idiot, a bad apple, is annoyed when it turns out in the end that he isn't.

It is only great pain--that slow, sustained pain that takes its time, in which we are, as it were, burned with smoldering green firewood--that forces us philosophers to sink to our ultimate profundity and to do away with all the trust, everything good-natured, veil-imposing, mild and middling, on which we may have previously based our humanity. I doubt that such a pain makes us 'better'--but I know that it makes us deeper.

You have not yet suffered enough! For you suffer only from yourselves, you have not yet suffered from man.

And he who must be a creator in good and evil: verily, he must be an annihilator first and demolish values.

There are highly gifted spirits who are always infertile simply because, owing to a weakness in temperament, they are too impatient to wait out their pregnancy to term.

The belief in authority is the source of conscience; which is therefore not the voice of God in the heart of man, but the voice of some men in man.