"love as a passion—it is our European specialty—must absolutely be of noble origin; as is well known, its invention is due to the Provencal poet-cavaliers, those brilliant, ingenious men of the "gai saber,"to whom Europe owes so much, and almost owes itself."
"The maturity of man—that means, to have reacquired the seriousness that one had as a child at play"
"Their [philosophers] thinking is, in fact, far less a discovery than a re-recognizing, a remembering, a return and a home-coming to a far-off, ancient common-household of the soul, out of which those ideas formerly grew: philosophizing is so far a kind of atavism of the highest order."
"Every philosophy is a foreground philosophy — that is a hermit's judgment: "There is something arbitrary in his stopping here to look back and look around, in his not digging deeper here but laying his spade aside; there is also something suspicious about it."Every philosophy also conceals a philosophy; every opinion is also a hideout, every word also a mask."
"Madness is something rare in individuals — but in groups, parties, peoples, and ages, it is the rule."
"To recognize untruth as a condition of life--that certainly means resisting accustomed value feelings in a dangerous way; and a philosophy that risks this would by that token alone place itself beyond good and evil."