“Philosophy leaps ahead on tiny toeholds; hope and intuition lend wings to its feet. Calculating reason lumbers heavily behind, looking for better footholds, for reason too wants to reach that alluring goal which its divine comrade has long since reached.”

“The quest for philosophical beginnings is idle, for everywhere in all beginnings we find only the crude, the unformed, the empty and the ugly. What matters in all things is the higher levels.”

“A man as he ought to be: that sounds to us as insipid as "a tree as it ought to be."”

“There is nothing to life that has value, except the degree of power—assuming that life itself is the will to power.”

“We cannot help but see Socrates as the turning-point, the vortex of world history.”

“Art is the supreme task and the truly metaphysical activity in this life.”

“Geometry was invented that we might expeditiously avoid, by drawing Lines, the Tediousness of Computation.”

“I have not been able to discover the cause of those properties of gravity from phenomena, and I frame no hypotheses; for whatever is not deduced from the phenomena is to be called a hypothesis, and hypotheses, whether metaphysical or physical, whether of occult qualities or mechanical, have no place in experimental philosophy.”

“Experience never errs; it is only your judgments that err by promising themselves effects such as are not caused by your experiments.”

“There is a fundamental difference between religion, which is based on authority and science, which is based on observation and reason. Science will win, because it works.”

“My goal is simple. It is a complete understanding of the universe, why it is as it is and why it exists at all.”

“See now the power of truth; the same experiment which at first glance seemed to show one thing, when more carefully examined, assures us of the contrary.”