However closely people are attached to one another, their mutual horizon nonetheless includes all four compass directions, and nowand again they notice it.

Man is a rope, tied between beast and overman — a rope over an abyss.

We must repay goodness and wickedness: but why exactly to the person who has done us a good or a wicked turn?

He who thinks a great deal is not suited to be a party man: he thinks his way through the party and out the other side too soon.

To live alone one must be a beast or a god, says Aristotle. Leaving out the third case: one must be both - a philosopher.

Deception, flattering, lying, deluding, talking behind the back, putting up a false front, living in borrowed splendor, wearing a mask, hiding behind convention, playing a role for others and for oneself -- in short, a continuous fluttering around the solitary flame of vanity -- is so much the rule and the law among men that there is almost nothing which is less comprehensible than how an honest and pure drive for truth could have arisen among them.

I am a law only for my kind, I am no law for all.