Pardon me, my friends, I have ventured to paint my happiness on the wall.

A thinker sees his own actions as experiments and questions as attempts to find out something. Success and failure are for him answers above all.

The reasons and purposes for habits are always lies that are added only after some people begin to attack these habits and to ask for reasons and purposes. At this point the conservatives of all ages are thoroughly dishonest: they add lies.

We are, all of us, growing volcanoes that approach the hour of their eruption; but how near or distant that is, nobody knows not even God.

One has attained to mastery when one neither goes wrong nor hesitates in the performance.

Woe to the thinker who is not the gardener but only the soil of the plants that grow in him!

For those who need consolation no means of consolation is so effective as the assertion that in their case no consolation is possible: it implies so great a degree of distinction that they at once hold up their heads again.

It is not enough to prove something, one has also to seduce or elevate people to it. That is why the man of knowledge should learn how to speak his wisdom: and often in such a way that it sounds like folly!

He who lives as children live who does not struggle for his bread and does not believe that his actions possess any ultimate significance remains childlike.

He who is punished is never he who performed the deed. He is always the scapegoat.