One should not wrongly reify 'cause' and 'effect,' as the natural scientists do (and whoever, like them, now 'naturalizes' in his thinking), according to the prevailing mechanical doltishness which makes the cause press and push until it 'effects' its end; one should use 'cause' and 'effect' only as pure concepts, that is to say, as conventional fictions for the purpose of designation and communication-not for explanation.

A physician who treated me as a nervous case for a while said in the end "No! It is not a matter of your nerves; it is I who am nervous".

Disobedience- that is the nobility of slaves.

A nation is a detour of nature to arrive at five or six great men- yes, and then to get around them.

Live dangerously. Build your cities on the slopes of Vesuvius.

One should not understand this compulsion to construct concepts, species, forms, purposes, laws ('a world of identical cases') as if they enabled us to fix the real world; but as a compulsion to arrange a world for ourselves in which our existence is made possible:-we thereby create a world which is calculable, simplified, comprehensible, etc., for us.

Man is something to be surpassed.