Do we after all seek rest, peace, and pleasure in our inquiries? No, only truth - even if it be the most abhorrent and ugly.

...there once was a star on which clever animals invented knowledge... One might invent such a fable and still not have illustrated sufficiently how wretched, how shadowy and flighty, how aimless and arbitrary, the human intellect appears in nature.

We have scarcely begun to reflect on the physiology of the criminal.

What did we do when we unchained this earth from its sun? Are we not straying through an infinite nothing? God is dead. God remains dead. And we have killed him.

And Zarathustra spoke thus to the people: "I teach you the overman. Man is something that shall be overcome. What have you done to overcome him?"

"Zarathustra has changed, Zarathustra has become a child, Zarathustra is an awakened one; what do you now want among the sleepers? You lived in your solitude as in the sea, and the sea carried you. Alas, would you now climb ashore? Alas, would you again drag your own body?"

A joke is the epigram on the death of a feeling.

If all alms were given only from pity, all beggars would have starved long ago.

To my goal I will go - on my own way; over those who hesitate and lag behind I shall leap. Thus let my going be their going under.

Human existence is uncanny and still without meaning: a jester can become man's fatality. I will teach men the meaning of their existence - the overman, the lightning out of the dark cloud of man.

No shepherd and one herd! Everybody wants the same, everybody is the same: whoever feels different goes voluntarily into a madhouse.

I say unto you: one must still have chaos in oneself to be able to give birth to a dancing star. I say unto you: you still have chaos in yourselves.

What is great in man is that he is a bridge and not an end: what can be loved in man is that he is an overture and a going under.

Man is a rope, tied between beast and overman - a rope over an abyss.

How did reason come into the world? As is fitting, in an irrational manner, by accident.

Alongside the bad conscience, all science has grown so far. Break, break, you lovers of knowledge, the old tablets!

To be true - only a few are able!

About you, the virtuous, my beauty laughed today. And thus its voice came to me: "They still want to be paid."

You preachers of equality, the tyrannomania of impotence clamors thus out of you for equality: your most secret ambitions to be tyrants thus shroud themselves in words of virtue.

Great indebtedness does not make men grateful, but vengeful; and if a little charity is not forgotten, it turns into a gnawing worm.