“A small company is more welcome to me than a bad one: but they must come and go at the right time. So does it accord with good sleep.”

“The advantage of a bad memory is that one enjoys several times the same good things for the first time.”

“One must shed the bad taste of wanting to agree with many. "Good" is no longer good when one's neighbor mouths it. And how should there be a "common good"! The term contradicts itself: whatever can be common always has little value. In the end it must be as it is and always has been: great things remain for the great, abysses for the profound, nuances and shudders for the refined, and, in brief, all that is rare for the rare.”

“For others do I wait...for higher ones, stronger ones, more triumphant ones, merrier ones, for such as are built squarely in body and soul: laughing lions must come.”

“A hearty meal is easier to digest than one that is too small.”

“The Olympian vice.--In defiance of that philosopher who as true Englishman tried to give any thinking person's laughter a bad reputation ('Laughter is a nasty infirmity of human nature that any thinking person will endeavour to overcome'---Hobbes), I would actually go as far as to rank philosophers according to the level of their laughter---right up to the ones who are capable of golden laughter. And assuming that gods, too, are able to philosophize, as various of my conclusions force me to believe, then I do not doubt when they do so, they know how to laugh in a new and superhuman fashion---and at the expense of everything serious! Gods like to jeer: it seems that even at religious observances they cannot keep from laughing.”

“To find everything profound - that is an inconvenient trait. It makes one strain one's eyes all the time, and in the end one finds more than one might have wished.”