“Praise is more intrusive than blame.”

- Beyond Good and Evil

“Being ashamed of our immorality: that is one step on the ladder that leads to being also ashamed of our morality.”

- Beyond Good and Evil

“If a person has character, he also has his typical experience that happens again and again.”

- Beyond Good and Evil

“Some peacocks hide their peacock’s tail from every eye - and call that pride.”

- Beyond Good and Evil

“As long as you still feel the stars as something ‘above you’, you have not yet acquired the gaze of a man of deep understanding.”

- Beyond Good and Evil

“‘My judgement is my judgement: no one else has a right to it so easily’, as a philosopher of the future might say. We have to rid ourselves of the bad taste of wanting to agree with many others. ‘Good’ is no longer good if our neighbour takes the word into his mouth. So how could there possibly be ‘common goods’! The term contradicts itself: anything that is common never has much value.”

- Beyond Good and Evil

“In the end, if you want to know something, you must do everything yourself, which means that there is much to do!”

- Beyond Good and Evil

“Here the ways of men part: if you wish to strive for peace of soul and pleasure, then believe; if you wish to be a devotee of truth, then inquire.”

- Letters and Notebooks

“Every virtue has a tendency towards stupidity, every stupidity towards virtue: ‘Stupid to the point of sainthood’, they say in Russia - we must ultimately take care not to become saints and bores out of honesty! Isn’t life a hundred times too short to live it - in a state of boredom? You’d really have to believe in life everlasting in order to...”

- Beyond Good and Evil

“Isn’t a moralist the opposite of a Puritan, in that he is a thinker who takes morality to be questionable, worthy of a question mark, in short, a problem? Mightn’t moralising - be immoral?”

- Beyond Good and Evil

"People are always angry at anyone who chooses very individual standards for his life; because of the extraordinary treatment which that man grants to himself, they feel degraded, like ordinary beings."

- Human, All Too Human

"If one notices how some individuals know how to treat their experiences (their insignificant everyday experiences) so that these become a plot of ground that bears fruit three times a year; while others (and how many of them!) are driven through the waves of the most exciting turns of fate, of the most varied currents of their time or nation, and yet always stay lightly on the surface, like cork: then one is finally tempted to divide mankind into a minority (minimality) of those people who know how to make much out of little and a majority of those who know how to make a little out of much; indeed, one meets those perverse wizards who, instead of creating the world out of nothing, create nothing out of the world."

- Human, All Too Human

“He is utterly without envy, but there is no merit in that, for he wants to conquer a country that nobody has possessed and scarcely anyone has even seen.”

- The Gay Science

“The attitude of those who seek knowledge is considered dishonorable while the petrification of opinions is accorded a monopoly on honor!”

- The Gay Science

“Although the shrewdest judges of the witches and even the witches themselves were convinced of the guilt of witchery, this guilt nevertheless did not exist. This applies to all guilt.”

- The Gay Science

“Where are your greatest dangers?— In pity.”

- The Gay Science

“In the great majority, the intellect is a clumsy, gloomy, creaking machine that is difficult to start. They call it “taking the matter seriously” when they want to work with this machine and think well. How burdensome they must find good thinking!”

- The Gay Science

“One day we reach our goal, and now point with pride to the long travels we undertook to reach it. In fact, we were not even aware of traveling. But we got so far because we fancied at every point that we were at home.”

- The Gay Science

“I love brief habits and consider them an inestimable means for getting to know many things and states, down to the bottom of their sweetness and bitternesses.”

- The Gay Science

“In the conversations of social life, three-quarters of all questions are asked, three-quarters of all answers given, in order to cause just a little pain to the other party; that is why many people have such a thirst for social life: it makes them aware of their strength.”

- Human, All Too Human

“A thinker needs no applause and clapping of hands, if only he is assured of his own hand-clapping”

- The Gay Science