Not he is great who can alter matter, but he who can alter my state of mind.

The discipline of suffering, of great suffering- do you not know that only this discipline has created all enhancements of man so far? That tension of the soul in unhappiness which cultivates its strength, its shudders face to face with great ruin, its inventiveness and courage in enduring, preserving, interpreting, and exploiting suffering, and whatever has been granted to it of profundity, secret, mask, spirit, cunning, greatness- was it not granted to it through suffering, through the discipline of great suffering?

We criticize a thinker more acutely when he advances a proposition that is disagreeable to us; and yet it would be more reasonableto do so when his proposition is agreeable to us.

You may lie with your mouth, but with the mouth you make as you do so you none the less tell the truth.

The future influences the present just as much as the past.

What I understand by "philosopher": a terrible explosive in the presence of which everything is in danger.

If you look long enough into the void, the void begins to look back through you.