We hear only those questions for which we are in a position to find answers.
The abdomen is the reason why man does not readily take himself to be a god.
In the last analysis, even the best man is evil: in the last analysis, even the best woman is bad.
Egoism is the very essence of a noble soul.
Idleness is the parent of psychology.
Words are but symbols for the relations of things to one another and to us; nowhere do they touch upon absolute truth.
This is the hardest of all: to close the open hand out of love, and keep modest as a giver.
A subject for a great poet would be god's boredom after the seventh day of creation.
The press, the machine, the railway, the telegraph are premises whose thousand-year conclusion no one has yet dared to draw.
Not when truth is dirty, but when it is shallow, does the enlightened man dislike to wade into its waters.
Convictions are more dangerous foes of truth than lies.
Admiration for a quality or an art can be so strong that it deters us from striving to possess it.
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.
It is not when truth is dirty, but when it is shallow, that the lover of knowledge is reluctant to step into its waters.
After coming into contact with a religious man I always feel I must wash my hands.
Words are but symbols for the relations of things to one another and to us; nowhere do they touch upon absolute truth.
All sciences are now under the obligation to prepare the ground for the future task of the philosopher, which is to solve the problem of value, to determine the true hierarchy of values.
For art to exist, for any sort of aesthetic activity to exist, a certain physiological precondition is indispensable: intoxication.
Mystical explanations are thought to be deep; the truth is that they are not even shallow.
Success has always been a great liar.
What really raises one's indignation against suffering is not suffering intrinsically, but the senselessness of suffering.
Behind all their personal vanity, women themselves always have an impersonal contempt for woman.
Fear is the mother of morality.
The future influences the present just as much as the past.
I assess the power of a will by how much resistance, pain, torture it endures and knows how to turn to its advantage.
Necessity is not an established fact, but an interpretation.
I would believe only in a god that knows how to dance.
When one has finished building one's house, one suddenly realizes that in the process one has learned something that one really needed to know in the worst way - before one began.
In large states public education will always be mediocre, for the same reason that in large kitchens the cooking is usually bad.
All truly great thoughts are conceived by walking.