“What can everyone do? Praise and blame. This is human virtue, this is human madness.”

“Ah, ye brethren, that God whom I created was human work and human madness, like all the Gods!”

“The Great Man... is colder, harder, less hesitating, and without fear of 'opinion'; he lacks the virtues that accompany respect and 'respectability,' and altogether everything that is the 'virtue of the herd.' If he cannot lead, he goes alone... He knows he is incommunicable: he finds it tasteless to be familiar... When not speaking to himself, he wears a mask. There is a solitude within him that is inaccessible to praise or blame.”

“Yet tell me, my brothers: if a goal for humanity is still lacking, is there not still lacking--humanity itself?”

“What is the greatest thing you can experience? It is the hour of your greatest contempt. The hour in which even your happiness becomes loathsome to you, and so also your reason and virtue.”

“At the moment when anyone begins to take philosophy seriously, all the world believes the opposite.”—Human, All Too Human, “Assorted Opinions and Maxims,”

“So long as the priest, that denier, calumniator and poisoner of life by profession, still counts as a higher kind of human being, there can be no answer to the question: what is truth? One has already stood truth on its head when the conscious advocate of denial and nothingness counts as the representative of ‘truth”