Human beings have a physical need to tell themselves when at work: “Let’s have done with it now,” and it's having constantly to go on thinking in the face of this need when philosophizing that makes this work so strenuous.

If a false thought is so much as expressed boldly and clearly, a great deal has already been gained.

Nothing is more important than the formation of fictional concepts, which teach us at last to understand our own.

I would really like to slow down the speed of reading with continual punctuation marks. For I would like to be read slowly. (As I myself read.)

Ambition is the death of thought.

Never stay up on the barren heights of cleverness, but come down into the green valleys of silliness.

It's only by thinking even more crazily than philosophers do that you can solve their problems.

Schiller writes in a letter [to Goethe, 17 December 1795] of a ‘poetic mood’. I think I know what he means, I think I am familiar with it myself. It is the mood of receptivity to nature and one in which one's thoughts seem as vivid as nature itself.

Is it just I who cannot found a school, or can a philosopher never do so?

Animals come when their names are called. Just like human beings.