Man is very well defended against himself... The actual fortress is inaccessible, even invisible to him, unless his friends and enemies play the traitor and conduct him in by a secret path.

Immortal is the moment when I engendered the recurrence. For the sake of this moment I bear the recurrence.

The aphorism, the apothegm, in which I am the first among the Germans to be a master, are the forms of “eternity”; it is my ambition to say in ten sentences what everyone else says in a book — what everyone else does not say in a book.

Against war it may be said that it makes the victor stupid and the vanquished revengeful.

In all institutions from which the cold wind of open criticism is excluded, an innocent corruption begins to grow like a mushroom - for example, in senates and learned societies

One lives for the day, one lives very fast, one lives very irresponsibly: precisely this is called "freedom."

Not their love of humanity, but the impotence of their love, prevents the Christians of today - burning us.