What we do in dreams we also do when we are awake: we invent and fabricate the person with whom we associate - and immediately forget we have done so.

In affability there is no hatred of men, but for that very reason there is all too much contempt for men.

Mathematics would certainly have not come into existence if one had known from the beginning that there was in nature no exactly straight line, no actual circle, no absolute magnitude.

The noble man honours in himself the powerful one, him also who has power over himself, who knows how to speak and how to keep silence, who takes pleasure in subjecting himself to severity and hardness, and has reverence for all that is severe and hard.

Truth is the kind of error without which a certain species of life could not live. The value for life is ultimately decisive.

There is more wisdom in your body than in your best wisdom. And who then knows why your body needs precisely your best wisdom?

As is well known, the priests are the most evil enemies—but why? Because they are the most impotent. It is because of their impotence that in them hatred grows to monstrous and uncanny proportions, to the most spiritual and poisonous kind of hatred. The truly great haters in world history have always been priests; likewise the most ingenious haters: other kinds of spirit hardly come into consideration when compared with the spirit of priestly vengefulness.