In pain there is as much wisdom as in pleasure: like the latter it is one of the best self preservatives of a species.

You call yourself free? I want to hear your ruling thought and not that you have escaped a yoke. Are you such a one as was permitted to escape a yoke? There are some who threw away their ultimate worth when they threw away their servitude. Free from what? What is that to Zarathustra! But your eyes should announce to me brightly: free for what?

Every habit makes our hand more witty and our wit less handy.

He who despises himself esteems himself as a self-despiser.

one does not only wish to be understood when one writes; one wishes just as surely not to be understood.

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

...If I continued to harbour any hope for music it lay in the expectation that a musician might come who was sufficiently bold, subtle, malicious, southerly, superhealthy to confront that music and in an immortal fashion take revenge on it.