Women are constituted in such a way that all truth (regarding men, love, children, society, the purpose of life) disgusts them, and in such a way that they try to revenge themselves on anyone who opens their eyes.
When death brings at last the desired forgetfulness, it abolishes life and being together, and sets the seal on the knowledge that "being" is merely a continual "has been," a thing that lives by denying and destroying and contradicting itself.
What is the greatest thing ye can experience? It is the hour of great contempt. The hour in which even your happiness becometh loathsome unto you, and so also your reason and virtue.
We grow hostile to many an artist or writer, not because we finally come to see he has deceived us, but because he thought no subtler means were required to ensnare us.
Heroism--that is the disposition of a man who aspires to a goal compared to which he himself is wholly insignificant. Heroism is the good will to self-destruction.
Contentment preserves one from catching cold. Has a woman who knew that she was well dressed ever caught a cold? No, not even when she had scarcely a rag on her back.
A noble soul is not the one that can manage the highest flights but the one that rises very little and falls very little but always dwells in a free, resplendent atmosphere and altitude.
The soul must have its chosen sewers to carry away its ordure. This function is performed by persons, relationships, professions, the fatherland, the world, or finally, for the really arrogant - I mean our modern pessimists - by the Good God himself.
[Heraclitus] did not require humans or their sort of knowledge, since everything into which one may inquire he despises [as being] in contrast [to his own] inward-turning wisdom. [To him] all learning from others is a sign of nonwisdom, because the wise man focuses his vision on his own intelligence.