“Three metamorphoses of the spirit have I designated to you: how thespirit became a camel, the camel a lion, and the lion at last a child.”

“Here the spirit becomes a lion who would conquer his freedom and be master…Who is the great dragon whom the spirit will no longer call lord and go? ‘Thou shalt’ is the name of the great dragon.But the spirit of the lion says, ‘I will.”

“What is heavy? so asks the spirit that would bear much, and then kneels down like the camel, and wants to be well laden.”

“But in the loneliest desert happens the second metamorphosis: here the spirit becomes a lion; he will seize his freedom and be master in his own wilderness.”

“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.”

“What therefore is truth? A mobile army of metaphors, metonymies, anthropomorphisms: in short a sum of human relations which became poetically and rhetorically intensified, metamorphosed, adorned, and after long usage seem to a notion fixed, canonic, and binding; truths are illusions of which one has forgotten that they are illusions; worn-out metaphors which have become powerless to affect the senses; coins which have their obverse effaced and now are no longer of account as coins but merely as metal.”

“How much truth does a spirit endure, how much truth does it dare?”