"You must be ready to burn yourself in your own flame: how could you become new, if you had not first become ashes?"

- Thus Spoke Zarathustra

“We were friends and have become estranged. But this was right, and we do not want to conceal and obscure it from ourselves as if we had reason to feel ashamed. We are two ships each of which has its goal and course; our paths may cross and we may celebrate a feast together, as we did—and then the good ships rested so quietly in one harbour and one sunshine that it may have looked as if they had reached their goal and as if they had one goal. But then the almighty force of our tasks drove us apart again into different seas and sunny zones, and perhaps we shall never see each other again; perhaps we shall meet again but fail to recognise each other: our exposure to different seas and suns has changed us.”

- The Gay Science

“Love exposes the great and hidden qualities in the lover - what is rare and exceptional about him: to that extent it easily conceals what is ordinary.”

- Beyond Good and Evil

“A law-book never recites the utility, the grounds, the casuistical antecedents of a law: for if it did so it would lose the imperative tone, the “thou shall,” on which obedience is based.”

- The Antichrist

"The most perfidious way of harming a cause consists of defending it deliberately with faulty arguments."

- The Gay Science

“State is the name of the coldest of all cold monsters. Coldly it lies; and this lie slips from its mouth: 'I, the state, am the people’.”

- Thus Spoke Zarathustra

“You shall become the person you are.”

- The Gay Science

"People are always angry at anyone who chooses very individual standards for his life; because of the extraordinary treatment which that man grants to himself, they feel degraded, like ordinary beings."

- Human, All Too Human

“Insofar as the individual is seeking happiness, one ought not to tender him any prescriptions as to the path to happiness: for individual happiness springs from one's own unknown laws, and prescriptions from without can only obstruct and hinder it. - The prescriptions called 'moral' are in truth directed against individuals and are in no way aimed at promoting their happiness.”

- Daybreak

“The reproaches of conscience are weak even in the most conscientious people compared to the feeling: “This or that is against the morals of your society.” A cold look or a sneer on the face of those among whom and for whom one has been educated is feared even by the strongest. What is it that they are really afraid of? Growing solitude! This is the argument that rebuts even the best arguments for a person or cause. —Thus the herd instinct speaks up in us.”

- The Gay Science