“One must learn to love oneself with a wholesome and healthy love, so that one can bear to be with oneself and need not roam.”
“The press, the machine, the railway, the telegraph are premises whose thousand-year conclusion no one has yet dared to draw.”
“Early in the morning, at break of day, in all the freshness and dawn of one's strength, to read a book --I call that vicious!”
“He who would learn to fly one day must first learn to stand and walk and run and climb and dance; one cannot fly into flying.”
“If a woman possesses manly virtues one should run away from her; and if she does not possess them she runs away from herself.”
“A woman may very well form a friendship with a man, but for this to endure, it must be assisted by a little physical antipathy.”
“In large states public education will always be mediocre, for the same reason that in large kitchens the cooking is usually bad.”
“The word ''Christianity'' is already a misunderstanding -- in reality there has been only one Christian, and he died on the Cross.”
“Let us beware of saying that death is the opposite of life. The living being is only a species of the dead, and a very rare species.”
“Even today a crude sort of persecution is all that is required to create an honorable name for any sect, no matter how indifferent in itself.”
“A strong and secure man digests his experiences (deeds and misdeeds alike) just as he digests his meat, even when he has some bits to swallow.”
“The doctrine of equality! There exists no more poisonous poison: for it seems to be preached by justice itself, while it is the end of justice.”
“Arrogance on the part of the meritorious is even more offensive to us than the arrogance of those without merit: for merit itself is offensive.”
“When we talk in company we lose our unique tone of voice, and this leads us to make statements which is no way correspond to our real thoughts.”
“For art to exist, for any sort of aesthetic activity or perception to exist, a certain physiological precondition is indispensable: intoxication.”
“Only the most acute and active animals are capable of boredom. -- A theme for a great poet would be God's boredom on the seventh day of creation.”
“And if your friend does evil to you, say to him, ''I forgive you for what you did to me, but how can I forgive you for what you did to yourself?''”
“He who fights with monsters might take care lest he thereby become a monster. And if you gaze for long into an abyss, the abyss gazes also into you.”
“In the consciousness of the truth he has perceived, man now sees everywhere only the awfulness or the absurdity of existence and loathing seizes him.”
“Our treasure lies in the beehive of our knowledge. We are perpetually on the way thither, being by nature winged insects and honey gatherers of the mind.”
“''Reason'' is the cause of our falsification of the evidence of the senses. In so far as the senses show becoming, passing away, change, they do not lie.”
“War has always been the grand sagacity of every spirit which has grown too inward and too profound; its curative power lies even in the wounds one receives.”
“The worst readers are those who behave like plundering troops: they take away a few things they can use, dirty and confound the remainder, and revile the whole.”
“A letter is an unannounced visit, the postman the agent of rude surprises. One ought to reserve an hour a week for receiving letters and afterwards take a bath.”
“There is in general good reason to suppose that in several respects the gods could all benefit from instruction by us human beings. We humans are -- more humane.”
“Art is not merely an imitation of the reality of nature, but in truth a metaphysical supplement to the reality of nature, placed alongside thereof for its conquest.”
“All in all, punishment hardens and renders people more insensible; it concentrates; it increases the feeling of estrangement; it strengthens the power of resistance.”
“The strongest knowledge (that of the total freedom of the human will) is nonetheless the poorest in successes: for it always has the strongest opponent, human vanity.”
“We must be physicists in order to be creative since so far codes of values and ideals have been constructed in ignorance of physics or even in contradiction to physics.”
“What is the vanity of the vainest man compared with the vanity which the most modest possesses when, in the midst of nature and the world, he feels himself to be ''man''!”