“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

“What? You admire the categorical imperative within you? This “firmness” of your so-called moral judgment? This “unconditional” feeling that “here everyone must judge as I do”? Rather admire your selfishness at this point. And the blindness, pettiness, and frugality of your selfishness. For it is selfish to experience one’s own judgment as a universal law; and this selfishness is blind, petty, and frugal because it betrays that you have not yet discovered yourself nor created for yourself an ideal of your own.”

- The Gay Science

“If someone obstinately and for a long time wants to appear something it is in the end hard for him to be anything else.”

- Human, All Too Human

“What makes one heroic?— Going out to meet at the same time one’s highest suffering and one’s highest hope.”

- The Gay Science

“Whom do I hate most among the rabble of today? The socialist rabble, the chandala apostles, who undermine the instinct, the pleasure, the worker’s sense of satisfaction with his small existence–who make him envious, who teach him revenge.”

- The Antichrist

“As one contemplates or looks back upon any action at all, it is and remains impenetrable; that our opinions about “good” and “noble” and “great” can never be proved true by our actions because every action is unknowable; that our opinions, valuations, and tables of what is good certainly belong among the most powerful levers in the involved mechanism of our actions, but that in any particular case the law of their mechanism is indemonstrable.”

- The Gay Science

“The great and small struggle always revolves around superiority, around growth and expansion, around power—in accordance with the will to power which is the will of life.”

- The Gay Science

“A firm reputation used to be extremely useful; and wherever society is still dominated by the herd instinct it is still most expedient for everyone to pretend that his character and occupation are unchangeable, even if at bottom they are not. “One can depend on him, he remains the same”: in all extremities of society this is the sort of praise that means the most.”

- The Gay Science