I love those who do not know how to live, except by going under, for they are those who cross over.

What then is truth? A movable host of metaphors, metonymies, and anthropomorphisms: in short, a sum of human relations which have been poetically and rhetorically intensified, transferred, and embellished, and which, after long usage, seem to a people to be fixed, canonical, and binding. Truths are illusions which we have forgotten are illusions — they are metaphors that have become worn out and have been drained of sensuous force.

Most people are far too much occupied with themselves to be malicious.

The growth of wisdom may be gauged exactly by the diminution of ill-temper.

Towards gnats and fleas we should show no pity. We would do right to hang petty thieves, petty calumniators, and slanderers.

Men use a new lesson or experience later on as a ploughshare or perhaps also as a weapon; women at once make it into an ornament.

Our shortcomings are the eyes with which we see the ideal.