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

Deception, flattering, lying, deluding, talking behind the back, putting up a false front, living in borrowed splendor, wearing a mask, hiding behind convention, playing a role for others and for oneself -- in short, a continuous fluttering around the solitary flame of vanity -- is so much the rule and the law among men that there is almost nothing which is less comprehensible than how an honest and pure drive for truth could have arisen among them.

A joke is an epigram on the death of a feeling.

He who cannot obey himself will be commanded. That is the nature of living creatures.

To call a thing good not a day longer than it appears to us good, and above all not a day earlier - that is the only way to keep joy pure.

Forgetting: that is a divine capacity. And whoever aspires to the heights and wants to fly must cast off much that is heavy and make himself light--I call it a divine capacity for lightness.

In order for once to get a glimpse of our European morality from a distance, in order to compare it with other earlier or future moralities, one must do as the traveller who wants to know the height of the towers of a city: he leaves the city.