Against boredom the gods themselves fight in vain.

Wherever I found a living creature, there I found the will to power.

One should adpot only those situations in which one is in no need of sham virtues, but rather, like the tight-rope dancer on his tight rope, in which one must either fall or stand--or escape.

It is I, the ungodly Zarathustra, who says:Who is more ungodly than I, that I may rejoice in his teaching?

Men submit from habit to everything that seeks power.

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.

The most unendurable thing, to be sure, the really terrible thing, would be a life without habits, a life which continually required improvisation.