Can an ass be tragic? To perish under a burden one can neither bear nor throw off? The case of the philosopher.

Rather perish than hate and fear, and twice rather perish than make oneself hated and feared -- this must some day become the highest maxim for every single commonwealth.

At times, our strengths propel us so far forward we can no longer endure our weaknesses and perish from them.

In the course of history, men come to see that iron necessity is neither iron nor necessary.

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.

My conception of freedom. — The value of a thing sometimes does not lie in that which one attains by it, but in what one pays for it — what it costs us. Liberal institutions cease to be liberal as soon as they are attained: later on, there are no worse and no more thorough injurers of freedom than liberal institutions.