Friedrich Nietzsche

“Love is blind; friendship closes its eyes.”

“And a people - or, for that matter, a human being - only has value to the extent that it is able to put the stamp of the eternal on its experiences; for in doing so it sheds, one might say, its worldliness and reveals its unconscious, inner conviction that time is relative and that the true meaning oflife is metaphysical.”

“Poets are shameless with their experiences: they exploit them.”

“Nothing has been purchased more dearly than the little bit of reason and sense of freedom which now constitutes our pride.”

“The best weapon against an enemy is another enemy.”

“Sleeping is no mean art: for its sake one must stay awake all day.”

“The doer alone learneth.”

“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.”

“Art is the proper task of life. ”

“We talk so abstractly about poetry because all of us are usually bad poets.”

“The best author will be the one who is ashamed to become a writer.”

“The higher we soar the smaller we appear to those who cannot fly.”

“The eternal child. - We think that play and fairy tales belong to childhood:”

“For art to exist, for any sort of aesthetic activity to exist, a certain physiological precondition is indispensable: intoxication.”

“The future influences the present just as much as the past.”

“The Press. -- If we consider how even to-day all great political transactions glide upon the stage secretly and stealthily; how they are hidden by unimportant events, and seem small when close at hand; how they only show their far-reaching effect, and leave the soil still quaking, long after they have taken place; -- what significance can we attach to the Press in its present position, with its daily expenditure of lung-power in order to bawl, to deafen, to excite, to terrify? Is it anything more than an everlasting false alarm, which tries to lead our ears and our wits into a false direction?”

“Whoever thought that he had understood something of me had merely construed something out of me, after his own image.”

“My conception of freedom. - The value of a thing sometimes lies not in what one attains with it, but in what one pays for it - what it costs us. I give an example. Liberal institutions immediately cease to be liberal as soon as they are attained: subsequently there is nothing more thoroughly harmful to freedom than liberal institutions. One knows, indeed, what they bring about: they undermine the will to power, they are the levelling of mountain and valley exalted to a moral principle, they make small, cowardly and smug - it is the herd animal which triumphs with them every time.”

“When marrying, ask yourself this question: Do you believe that you will be able to converse well with this person into your old age? Everything else in marriage is transitory.”

“When one gives up the Christian faith, one pulls the right to Christian morality out from under one's feet... Christianity is a system, a whole view of things thought out together. By breaking one main concept out of it, the faith in God, one breaks the whole: nothing necessary remains in one's hands. Christianity presupposes that man does not know, cannot know, what is good for him, what evil: he believes in God, who alone knows it... it has truth only if God is the truth — it stands and falls with faith in God.”

“Stupid as a man, say the women: cowardly as a woman, say the men. Stupidity in a woman is unwomanly.”

“The essence of all beautiful art, all great art, is gratitude.”

“Not necessity, not desire - no, the love of power is the demon of men. Let them have everything - health, food, a place to live, entertainment - they are and remain unhappy and low-spirited: for the demon waits and waits and will be satisfied.”

“He who would learn to fly one day must first learn to walk and run and climb and dance; one cannot fly into flying. ”

“There is always some madness in love. But there is also always some reason in madness.”

“The man of knowledge must be able not only to love his enemies but also to hate his friends.”

“Without music, life would be a mistake.”

“Rejoicing in our joy, not suffering over our suffering, makes someone a friend.”

“Perhaps I know best why it is man alone who laughs; he alone suffers so deeply that he had to invent laughter.”

“He who laughs best today, will also laughs last.”

“All sciences are now under the obligation to prepare the ground for the future task of the philosopher, which is to solve the problem of value, to determine the true hierarchy of values.”

“Here the ways of men part: if you wish to strive for peace of soul and pleasure, then believe; if you wish to be a devotee of truth, then inquire.”

“There are no facts, only interpretations.”

“I now myself live, in every detail, striving for wisdom, while I formerly merely worshipped and idolized the wise.”

“So far no one had had enough courage and intelligence to reveal me to my dear Germans. My problems are new, my psychological horizon frighteningly comprehensive, my language bold and clear; there may well be no books written in German which are richer in ideas and more independent than mine.”

“A subject for a great poet would be God's boredom after the seventh day of creation.”

“Everything the State says is a lie, and everything it has it has stolen.”

“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’.”

“There cannot be a God because if there were one, I could not believe that I was not He.”

“I have somehow something like "influence" … In the Anti-Semitic Correspondence … my name is mentioned in almost every issue. Zarathustra … has charmed the anti-Semites; there is a special anti-Semitic interpretation of it that made me laugh very much.”

“Mathematics would certainly have not come into existence if one had known from the beginning that there was in nature no exactly straight line, no actual circle, no absolute magnitude.”

“Although the most acute judges of the witches and even the witches themselves, were convinced of the guilt of witchery, the guilt nevertheless was non-existent. It is thus with all guilt.”

“The modern scientific counterpart to belief in God is the belief in the universe as an organism: this disgusts me. This is to make what is quite rare and extremely derivative, the organic, which we perceive only on the surface of the earth, into something essential, universal, and eternal! This is still an anthropomorphizing of nature!”

“Is Wagner a human being at all? Is he not rather a disease? He contaminates everything he touches - he has made music sick.”

“May I really say it! All truths are bloody truths to me—take a look at my previous writings.”

“Not one of these nobly equipped young men has escaped the restless, exhausting, confusing, debilitating crisis of education. ... He feels that he cannot guide himself, cannot help himself—and then he dives hopelessly into the world of everyday life and daily routine, he is immersed in the most trivial activity possible, and his limbs grow weak and weary.”

“The pride connected with knowing and sensing lies like a blinding fog over the eyes and senses of men, thus deceiving them concerning the value of existence. For this pride contains within itself the most flattering estimation of the value of knowing. Deception is the most general effect of such pride, but even its most particular effects contain within themselves something of the same deceitful character.”

“An artist has no home in Europe except in Paris.”

“What does man actually know about himself? Is he, indeed, ever able to perceive himself completely, as if laid out in a lighted display case? Does nature not conceal most things from him — even concerning his own body — in order to confine and lock him within a proud, deceptive consciousness, aloof from the coils of the bowels, the rapid flow of the blood stream, and the intricate quivering of the fibers! She threw away the key.”

“Are designations congruent with things? Is language the adequate expression of all realities? It is only by means of forgetfulness that man can ever reach the point of fancying himself to possess a "truth" of the grade just indicated. If he will not be satisfied with truth in the form of tautology, that is to say, if he will not be content with empty husks, then he will always exchange truths for illusions.”

“We believe that we know something about the things themselves when we speak of trees, colors, snow, and flowers; and yet we possess nothing but metaphors for things — metaphors which correspond in no way to the original entities.”

“We obtain the concept, as we do the form, by overlooking what is individual and actual; whereas nature is acquainted with no forms and no concepts, and likewise with no species, but only with an X which remains inaccessible and undefinable for us.”

“No one dies of fatal truths nowadays: there are too many antidotes.”

“The venerability, reliability, and utility of truth is something which a person demonstrates for himself from the contrast with the liar, whom no one trusts and everyone excludes. As a "rational" being, he now places his behavior under the control of abstractions. He will no longer tolerate being carried away by sudden impressions, by intuitions.”

“One may certainly admire man as a mighty genius of construction, who succeeds in piling an infinitely complicated dome of concepts upon an unstable foundation, and, as it were, on running water. Of course, in order to be supported by such a foundation, his construction must be like one constructed of spiders' webs: delicate enough to be carried along by the waves, strong enough not to be blown apart by every wind.”

“As a genius of construction man raises himself far above the bee in the following way: whereas the bee builds with wax that he gathers from nature, man builds with the far more delicate conceptual material which he first has to manufacture from himself.”

“We have seen how it is originally language which works on the construction of concepts, a labor taken over in later ages by science. Just as the bee simultaneously constructs cells and fills them with honey, so science works unceasingly on this great columbarium of concepts, the graveyard of perceptions.”

“Arrogance on the part of the meritorious is even more offensive to us than the arrogance of those without merit: for merit itself is offensive.”

“Because of the way that myth takes it for granted that miracles are always happening, the waking life of a mythically inspired people — the ancient Greeks, for instance — more closely resembles a dream than it does the waking world of a scientifically disenchanted thinker.”

“I do not know what meaning classical studies could have for our time if they were not untimely—that is to say, acting counter to our time and thereby acting on our time and, let us hope, for the benefit of a time to come.”

“Perhaps no philosopher is more correct than the cynic. The happiness of the animal, that thorough cynic, is the living proof of cynicism.”

“Woman was God's second mistake.”

“The man who does not wish to belong to the mass needs only to cease taking himself easily; let him follow his conscience, which calls to him: “Be your self! All you are now doing, thinking, desiring, is not you yourself.””

“I will make an attempt to attain freedom, the youthful soul says to itself; and is it to be hindered in this by the fact that two nations happen to hate and fight one another, or that two continents are separated by an ocean, or that all around it a religion is taught with did not yet exist a couple of thousand years ago. All that is not you, it says to itself.”

“Where there have been powerful governments, societies, religions, public opinions, in short wherever there has been tyranny, there the solitary philosopher has been hated; for philosophy offers an asylum to a man into which no tyranny can force it way, the inward cave, the labyrinth of the heart.”

“These people who have fled inward for their freedom also have to live outwardly, become visible, let themselves be seen; they are united with mankind through countless ties of blood, residence, education, fatherland, chance, the importunity of others; they are likewise presupposed to harbour countless opinions simply because these are the ruling opinions of the time; every gesture which is not clearly a denial counts as agreement.”

“Without music, life would be a mistake.”

“All that exists that can be denied deserves to be denied; and being truthful means: to believe in an existence that can in no way be denied and which is itself true and without falsehood.”

“A woman may very well form a friendship with a man, but for this to endure, it must be assisted by a little physical antipathy.”

“The objective of all human arrangements is through distracting one’s thoughts to cease to be aware of life.”

“What if a demon crept after thee into thy loneliest loneliness some day or night, and said to thee: "This life, as thou livest it at present, and hast lived it, thou must live it once more, and also innumerable times; and there will be nothing new in it, but every pain and every joy and every thought and every sigh, and all the unspeakably small and great in thy life must come to thee again, and all in the same series and sequence—and similarly this spider and this moonlight among the trees, and similarly this moment, and I myself. The eternal sand-glass of existence will ever be turned once more, and thou with it, thou speck of dust!"—Wouldst thou not throw thyself down and gnash thy teeth, and curse the demon that so spake? Or hast thou once experienced a tremendous moment in which thou wouldst answer him: "Thou art a God, and never did I hear anything so divine!" If that thought acquired power over thee as thou art, it would transform thee, and perhaps crush thee; the question with regard to all and everything: "Dost thou want this once more, and also for innumerable times?" would lie as the heaviest burden upon thy activity! Or, how wouldst thou have to become favourably inclined to thyself and to life, so as to long for nothing more ardently than for this last eternal sanctioning and sealing?”

“Haste is universal because everyone is in flight from himself.”

“Life is, after all, not a product of morality.”

“Our destiny exercises its influence over us even when, as yet, we have not learned its nature: it is our future that lays down the law of our today.”

“One must have a good memory to be able to keep the promises one makes.”

“One will rarely err if extreme actions be ascribed to vanity, ordinary actions to habit, and mean actions to fear.”

“When virtue has slept, she will get up more refreshed.”

“To those human beings who are of any concern to me I wish suffering, desolation, sickness, ill-treatment, indignities—I wish that they should not remain unfamiliar with profound self-contempt, the torture of self-mistrust, the wretchedness of the vanquished: I have no pity for them, because I wish them the only thing that can prove today whether one is worth anything or not—that one endures.”

“Every tradition grows ever more venerable — the more remote its origin, the more confused that origin is. The reverence due to it increases from generation to generation. The tradition finally becomes holy and inspires awe.”

“All truly great thoughts are conceived by walking.”

“Thoughts in a poem. The poet presents his thoughts festively, on the carriage of rhythm: usually because they could not walk.”

“Where there is happiness, there is found pleasure in nonsense. The transformation of experience into its opposite, of the suitable into the unsuitable, the obligatory into the optional (but in such a manner that this process produces no injury and is only imagined in jest), is a pleasure; ...”

“Main deficiency of active people. Active men are usually lacking in higher activity--I mean individual activity. They are active as officials, businessmen, scholars, that is, as generic beings, but not as quite particular, single and unique men. In this respect they are lazy.”

“We often contradict an opinion for no other reason than that we do not like the tone in which it is expressed.”

“Unpleasant, even dangerous, qualities can be found in every nation and every individual: it is cruel to demand that the Jew be an exception. In him, these qualities may even be dangerous and revolting to an unusual degree; and perhaps the young stock-exchange Jew is altogether the most disgusting invention of mankind.”

“We love life, not because we are used to living but because we are used to loving.”

“The demand to be loved is the greatest of all arrogant presumptions.”

“He who thinks a great deal is not suited to be a party man: he thinks his way through the party and out the other side too soon.”

“Socialism itself can hope to exist only for brief periods here and there, and then only through the exercise of the extremest terrorism. For this reason it is secretly preparing itself for rule through fear and is driving the word 'justice' into the heads of the half-educated masses like a nail so as to rob them of their reason... and to create in them a good conscience for the evil game they are to play.”

“The advantage of a bad memory is that one can enjoy the same good things for the first time several times.”

“It is not when truth is dirty, but when it is shallow, that the lover of knowledge is reluctant to step into its waters.”

“No one talks more passionately about his rights than he who in the depths of his soul doubts whether he has any. By enlisting passion on his side he wants to stifle his reason and its doubts: thus he will acquire a good conscience and with it success among his fellow men.”

“If you have hitherto believed that life was one of the highest value and now see yourselves disappointed, do you at once have to reduce it to the lowest possible price?”

“The worst readers are those who behave like plundering troops: they take away a few things they can use, dirty and confound the remainder, and revile the whole.”

“A witticism is an epigram on the death of a feeling.”

“Forgetting our intentions is the most frequent of all acts of stupidity.”

“A Path to Equality. - A few hours of mountain climbing turn a rascal and a saint into two pretty similar creatures. Fatigue is the shortest way to Equality and Fraternity--and, in the end, Liberty will surrender to Sleep.”

“It says nothing against the ripeness of a spirit that it has a few worms.”

“He who has a why to live can bear almost any how.”

“What is great in man is that he is a bridge and not a goal.”

“With all great deceivers there is a noteworthy occurrence to which they owe their power. In the actual act of deception... they are overcome by belief in themselves. It is this which then speaks so miraculously and compellingly to those who surround them.”

“Being silent is something one completely unlearns if, like him, one has been for so long a solitary mole - - -”

“Who is the most moral man? First, he who obeys the law most frequently, who … is continually inventive in creating opportunities for obeying the law. Then, he who obeys it even in the most difficult cases. The most moral man is he who sacrifices the most to custom. … Self-overcoming is demanded, not on account of any useful consequences it may have for the individual, but so that hegemony of custom and tradition shall be made evident.”

“Whoever has overthrown an existing law of custom has hitherto always first been accounted a bad man: but when, as did happen, the law could not afterwards be reinstated and this fact was accepted, the predicate gradually changed: - history treats almost exclusively of these bad men who subsequently became good men!”

“Whatever is done for love always occurs beyond good and evil.”

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

“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.”

“We know that the destruction of an ideal does not necessarily produce a truth, but only one more piece of ignorance; it is the extension of our ‘empty space,’ an increase in our ‘waste.”

“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!”

“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.”

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

“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.”

“The greatest danger that always hovered over humanity, and still hovers over it, is the eruption of madness— which means the eruption of arbitrariness in feeling, seeing, and hearing, the enjoyment of the mind's lack of discipline, the joy in human unreason.”

“People who live in an age of corruption are witty and slanderous; they know that there are other kinds of murder than by dagger or assault; they also know that whatever is well said is believed...”

“What are man's truths ultimately? Merely his irrefutable errors.”

“Fear is the mother of morality.”

“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.”

“Nothing is needed more than truth, and in relation to it everything else has only second-rate value."”

“When a hundred men stand together, each of them loses his mind and gets another one.”

“Even the most beautiful scenery is no longer assured of our love after we have lived in it for three months, and some distant coast attracts our avarice: possessions are generally diminished by possession…”

“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.”

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

“But let us not forget this either: it is enough to create new names and estimations and probabilities in order to create in the long run new "things."”

“Without art we would be nothing but foreground and live entirely in the spell of that perspective which makes what is closest at hand and most vulgar appear as if it were vast, and reality itself.”

“Art is the proper task of life.”

“Good prose is written only face to face with poetry.”

“We have art in order not to die of the truth.”

“Art furnishes us with eyes and hands and above all the good conscience to be able to turn ourselves into such a phenomenon.”

“love as a passion—it is our European specialty—must absolutely be of noble origin; as is well known, its invention is due to the Provencal poet-cavaliers, those brilliant, ingenious men of the "gai saber," to whom Europe owes so much, and almost owes itself.”

“To what extent can truth endure incorporation? That is the question; that is the experiment.”

“Deeds need time, even after they are done, in order to be seen or heard.”

“Morality is herd instinct in the individual.”

“Mystical explanations are considered deep; the truth is, they are not even shallow.”

“What is now decisive against Christianity is our taste, no longer our reasons.”

“To find everything profound — that is an inconvenient trait. It makes one strain one's eyes all the time, and in the end one finds more than one might have wished.”

“'Evil men have no songs.' How is it that the Russians have songs?”

“We are always in our own company.”

“There are people who want to make men's lives more difficult for no other reason than the chance it provides them afterwards to offer their prescription for alleviating life; their Christianity, for instance.”

“Thoughts are the shadows of our feelings — always darker, emptier, simpler.”

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

“We have no dreams at all or interesting ones. We should learn to be awake the same way — not at all or in an interesting manner.”

“Not necessity, not desire - no, the love of power is the demon of men. Let them have everything - health, food, a place to live, entertainment - they are and remain unhappy and low-spirited: for the demon waits and waits and will be satisfied.”

“New Domestic Animals. I want to have my lion and my eagle about me, that I may always have hints and premonitions concerning the amount of my strength or weakness. Must I look down on them today, and be afraid of them? And will the hour come once more when they will look up to me, and tremble?”

“What is the seal of liberation? — No longer being ashamed in front of oneself.”

“He who would learn to fly one day must first learn to stand and walk and run and climb and dance; one cannot fly into flying.”

“There is something laughable about the sight of authors who enjoy the rustling folds of long and involved sentences: they are trying to cover up their feet.”

“Everything good, fine or great they do is first of all an argument against the skeptic inside them.”

“Perhaps man will rise ever higher as soon as he ceases to flow out into a god.”

“We want to be poets of our life — first of all in the smallest most everyday matters.”

“Do you believe then that the sciences would have arisen and grown up if the sorcerers, alchemists, astrologers and witches had not been their forerunners; those who, with their promisings and foreshadowings, had first to create a thirst, a hunger, and a taste for hidden and forbidden powers?”

“Whatever has value in our world now does not have value in itself, according to its nature — nature is always value-less, but has been given value at some time, as a present — and it was we who gave and bestowed it.”

“Who can attain to anything great if he does not feel in himself the force and will to inflict great pain? The ability to suffer is a small matter: in that line, weak women and even slaves often attain masterliness. But not to perish from internal distress and doubt when one inflicts great suffering and hears the cry of it — that is great, that belongs to greatness.”

“Could one count such dilettantes and old spinsters as that mawkish apostle of virginity, Mainländer, as a genuine German? In the last analysis he probably was a Jew (all Jews become mawkish when they moralize).”

“Perhaps I know best why it is man alone who laughs; he alone suffers so deeply that he had to invent laughter.”

“I would not know what the spirit of a philosopher might wish more to be than a good dancer.”

“We "conserve" nothing; neither do we want to return to any past periods; we are not by any means "liberal"; we do not work for "progress"; we do not need to plug up our ears against the sirens who in the market place sing of the future: their song about "equal rights," "a free society," "no more masters and no servants" has no allure for us.”

“Preparatory Men. — I welcome all signs that a more virile, warlike age is about to begin, which will restore honor to courage above all! For this age shall prepare the way for one yet higher, and it shall gather the strength that this higher age will require some day — the age that will carry heroism into the search for knowledge and that will wage wars for the sake of ideas and their consequences.”

“Whatever is done for love always occurs beyond good and evil.”

“There still shines the most important nuance by virtue of which the noble felt themselves to be men of a higher rank. They designate themselves simply by their superiority in power (as "the powerful," "the masters," "the commanders") or by the most clearly visible signs of this superiority, for example, as "the rich," "the possessors" (this is the meaning of 'Arya,' and of corresponding words in Iranian and Slavic).”

“Just as in the second part of a verse bad poets seek a thought to fit their rhyme, so in the second half of their lives people tend to become more anxious about finding actions, positions, relationships that fit those of their earlier lives, so that everything harmonizes quite well on the surface: but their lives are no longer ruled by a strong thought, and instead, in its place, comes the intention of finding a rhyme.”

“As is well known, the priests are the most evil enemies — but why? Because they are the most impotent. It is because of their impotence that in them hatred grows to monstrous and uncanny proportions, to the most spiritual and poisonous kind of hatred. The truly great haters in the world history have always been priests; likewise the most ingenious haters: other kinds of spirit hardly come into consideration when compared with the spirit of priestly vengefulness.”

“The essence of all beautiful art, all great art, is gratitude.”

“While every noble morality develops from a triumphant affirmation of itself, slave morality from the outset says No to what is "outside," what is "different," what is "not itself"; and this No is its creative deed.”

“To ask strength not to express itself as strength, not to be a will to dominate, a will to subjugate, a will to become master, a thirst for enemies and obstacles and triumphant celebrations, is just as absurd as to ask weakness to express itself as strength.”

“Without cruelty there is no festival: thus the longest and most ancient part of human history teaches — and in punishment there is so much that is festive!”

“That every will must consider every other will its equal — would be a principle hostile to life, an agent of the dissolution and destruction of man, an attempt to assassinate the future of man, a sign of weariness, a secret path to nothingness.”

“It is possible to imagine a society flushed with such a sense of power that it could afford to let its offenders go unpunished.”

“A pair of powerful spectacles has sometimes sufficed to cure a person in love.”

“The broad effects which can be obtained by punishment in man and beast are the increase of fear, the sharpening of the sense of cunning, the mastery of the desires; so it is that punishment tames man, but does not make him "better."”

“All instincts that do not discharge themselves outwardly turn inward — this is what I call the internalization of man: thus it was that man first developed what was later called his "soul."”

“The advent of the Christian God, as the maximum god attained so far, was therefore accompanied by the maximum feeling of guilty indebtedness on earth.”

“The Thought of Death. It gives me a melancholy happiness to live in the midst of this confusion of streets, of necessities, of voices: how much enjoyment, impatience and desire, how much thirsty life and drunkenness of life comes to light here every moment! And yet it will soon be so still for all these shouting, lively, life- loving people! How everyone's shadow, his gloomy travelling companion stands behind him! It is always as in the last moment before the departure of an emigrant- ship: people have more than ever to say to one another, the hour presses, the ocean with its lonely silence waits impatiently behind all the noise-so greedy, so certain of its prey! And all, all, suppose that the past has been nothing, or a small matter, that the near future is everything: hence this haste, this crying, this self-deafening and self-overreaching! Everyone wants to be foremost in this future-and yet death and the stillness of death are the only things certain and common to all in this future! How strange that this sole thing that is certain and common to all, exercises almost no influence on men, and that they are the furthest from regarding themselves as the brotherhood of death! It makes me happy to see that men do not want to think at all of the idea of death! I would fain do something to make the idea of life to us to be more than friends in the sense of that sublime possibility. And so we will believe in our even a hundred times more worthy of their attention.”

“What then is truth? A mobile army of metaphors, metonyms, and anthropomorphisms—in short, a sum of human relations which have been enhanced, transposed, and embellished poetically and rhetorically, and which after long use seem firm, canonical, and obligatory to a people: truths are illusions about which one has forgotten that this is what they are; metaphors which are worn out and without sensuous power; coins which have lost their pictures and now matter only as metal, no longer as coins.”

“Whoever is completely and wholly an artist is to all eternity separated from the "real," the actual; on the other hand, one can understand how he may sometimes weary to the point of desperation of the eternal "unreality" and falsity of his innermost existence- and that then he may well attempt what ia most forbidden him, to lay hold of actuality, for once actually to be.”

“That which Heraclitus avoided, however, is still the same at that which we shun today: the noise and democratic chatter of the Ephesians, their politics, their latest news of the “Empire,” … their market business of “today”—for we philosophers need to be spared one thing above all: everything to do with “today.” We reverence what is still, cold, noble, distant, past, and in general everything in the face of which the soul does not have to defend itself and wrap itself up.”

“The great epochs of our life are the occasions when we gain the courage to rebaptize our evil qualities as our best qualities.”

“Every one who has ever built anywhere a "new heaven" first found the power thereto in his own hell.”

“To live is to suffer, to survive is to find some meaning in the suffering.”

“The sick are the greatest danger for the healthy; it is not from the strongest that harm comes to the strong, but from the weakest.”

“Without music, life would be a mistake.”

“A strong and well-constituted man digests his experiences (deeds and misdeeds all included) just as he digests his meats, even when he has some tough morsels to swallow.”

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

“Regarding life, the wisest men of all ages have judged alike: it is worthless.”

“It is impossible to suffer without making someone pay for it; every complaint already contains revenge.”

“O, what nowadays does science not conceal! How much, at least, it is meant to conceal!”

“All things are subject to interpretation whichever interpretation prevails at a given time is a function of power and not truth.”

“One must still have chaos in oneself to be able to give birth to a dancing star.”

“To live alone one must be an animal or a god - says Aristotle. There is yet a third case: one must be both - a philosopher.”

“We often refuse to accept an idea merely because the tone of voice in which it has been expressed is unsympathetic to us.”

“Women are considered profound. Why? Because we never fathom their depths. But women aren't even shallow.”

“The essence of all beautiful art, all great art, is gratitude.”

“It is not a lack of love, but a lack of friendship that makes unhappy marriages.”

“The future influences the present just as much as the past.”

“Freedom is the will to be responsible for ourselves. It is to preserve the distance which separates us from other men. To grow more indifferent to hardship, to severity, to privation, and even to life itself.”

“It is disgraceful for a philosopher to say: the good and the beautiful are one; if he adds 'also the true', one ought to beat him. Truth is ugly. We possess art lest we perish of the truth.”

“All truly great thoughts are conceived by walking.”

“Two great European narcotics, alcohol and Christianity.”

“We should consider every day lost on which we have not danced at least once. And we should call every truth false which was not accompanied by at least one laugh.”

“Man believes that the world itself is filled with beauty — he forgets that it is he who has created it. He alone has bestowed beauty upon the world — alas! only a very human, an all too human, beauty.”

“When you look into an abyss, the abyss also looks into you.”

“A subject for a great poet would be God's boredom after the seventh day of creation.”

“It is my ambition to say in ten sentences what everyone else says in a whole book — what everyone else does not say in a whole book.”

“Perhaps I know best why it is man alone who laughs; he alone suffers so deeply that he had to invent laughter.”

“The doctrine of equality! … But there is no more venomous poison in existence: for it appears to be preached by justice itself, when it is actually the end of justice … "Equality to the equal; inequality to the unequal" — that would be true justice speaking: and its corollary, "never make the unequal equal".”

“You have your way. I have my way. As for the right way, the correct way, and the only way, it does not exist.”

“When one gives up Christian belief one thereby deprives oneself of the right to Christian morality. For the latter is absolutely not self-evident: one must make this point clear again and again, in spite of English shallowpates.”

“This is what is hardest: to close the open hand because one loves.”

“We have already gone beyond whatever we have words for. In all talk there is a grain of contempt.”

“Many are stubborn in pursuit of the path they have chosen, few in pursuit of the goal.”

“Freedom means that the manly instincts which delight in war and victory dominate over other instincts, for example, over those of "pleasure." The human being who has become free — and how much more the spirit who has become free — spits on the contemptible type of well-being dreamed of by shopkeepers, Christians, cows, females, Englishmen, and other democrats. The free man is a warrior. —”

“There cannot be a God because if there were one, I could not believe that I was not He.”

“First principle: one must need to be strong — otherwise one will never become strong. — Those large hothouses [Treibhäuser] for the strong, for the strongest kind of human being that has ever been, the aristocratic commonwealths of the type of Rome or Venice, understood freedom exactly in the sense in which I understand the word freedom: as something one has and does not have, something one wants, something one conquers ...”

“On the mountains of truth you can never climb in vain: either you will reach a point higher up today, or you will be training your powers so that you will be able to climb higher tomorrow.”

“Our institutions are no good any more: on that there is universal agreement. However, it is not their fault but ours. Once we have lost all the instincts out of which institutions grow, we lose institutions altogether because we are no longer good for them.”

“Whatever is done for love always occurs beyond good and evil.”

“What is good? All that heightens the feeling of power in man, the will to power, power itself. What is bad? All that is born of weakness. What is happiness? The feeling that power is growing, that resistance is overcome.”

“Blessed are the forgetful: for they get the better even of their blunders.”

“In large states public education will always be mediocre, for the same reason that in large kitchens the cooking is usually bad.”

“The great epochs of our life are the occasions when we gain the courage to rebaptize our evil qualities as our best qualities.”

“In Christianity neither morality nor religion come into contact with reality at any point.”

“It is always consoling to think of suicide: in that way one gets through many a bad night.”

“Hope, in its stronger forms, is a great deal more powerful stimulans to life than any sort of realized joy can ever be. Man must be sustained in suffering by a hope so high that no conflict with actuality can dash it—so high, indeed, that no fulfilment can satisfy it: a hope reaching out beyond this world.”

“Insanity in individuals is something rare - but in groups, parties, nations and epochs, it is the rule.”

“Love is a state in which a man sees things most decidedly as they are not.”

“Once spirit was God, then it became man, and now it is even becoming mob.”

“...to the priestly class — decadence is no more than a means to an end. Men of this sort have a vital interest in making mankind sick, and in confusing the values of "good" and "bad," "true" and "false" in a manner that is not only dangerous to life, but also slanders it.”

“The surest way to corrupt a youth is to instruct him to hold in higher esteem those who think alike than those who think differently.”

“The 'Kingdom of Heaven' is a condition of the heart — not something that comes 'upon the earth' or 'after death'.”

“That which does not kill us makes us stronger.”

“The 'kingdom of God' is not something one waits for; it has no yesterday or tomorrow, it does not come 'in a thousand years' — it is an experience within a heart; it is everywhere, it is nowhere...”

“He who has a why to live can bear almost any how.”

“The very word "Christianity" is a misunderstanding — in truth, there was only one Christian, and he died on the cross.”

“He who would learn to fly one day must first learn to stand and walk and run and climb and dance; one cannot fly into flying.”

“The whole disaster was only made possible by the fact that there already existed in the world a similar megalomania, allied to this one in race, to wit, the Jewish.”

“God is dead. God remains dead. And we have killed him. Yet his shadow still looms. How shall we comfort ourselves, the murderers of all murderers? What was holiest and mightiest of all that the world has yet owned has bled to death under our knives; who will wipe this blood off us? What water is there for us to clean ourselves?”

“What follows, then? That one had better put on gloves before reading the New Testament. The presence of so much filth makes it very advisable. One would as little choose early Christians for companions as Polish Jews: not that one need seek out an objection to them — neither has a pleasant smell.”

“The best weapon against an enemy is another enemy.”

“The God that Paul invented for himself, a God who "reduced to absurdity" "the wisdom of this world" (especially the two great enemies of superstition, philology and medicine), is in truth only an indication of Paul's resolute determination to accomplish that very thing himself: to give one's own will the name of God, Torah — that is essentially Jewish.”

“We love life, not because we are used to living but because we are used to loving.”

“God created woman. And boredom did indeed cease from that moment — but many other things ceased as well! Woman was God's second mistake.”

“A pair of powerful spectacles has sometimes sufficed to cure a person in love.”

“That faith makes blessed under certain circumstances, that blessedness does not make of a fixed idea a true idea, that faith moves no mountains but puts mountains where there are none: a quick walk through a madhouse enlightens one sufficiently about this.”

“Rejoicing in our joy, not suffering over our suffering, makes someone a friend.”

“God is dead. God remains dead. And we have killed him. Yet his shadow still looms. How shall we comfort ourselves, the murderers of all murderers? What was holiest and mightiest of all that the world has yet owned has bled to death under our knives; who will wipe this blood off us? What water is there for us to clean ourselves?”

“Whom do I hate most among the rabble of today? The socialist rabble, the chandala apostles, who undermine the instinct, the pleasure, the worker’s sense of satisfaction with his small existence–who make him envious, who teach him revenge. The source of wrong is never unequal rights but the claim of “equal” rights.”

“Those who cannot understand how to put their thoughts on ice should not enter into the heat of debate.”

“I call Christianity the one great curse, the one great intrinsic depravity, the one great instinct for revenge for which no expedient is sufficiently poisonous, secret, subterranean, petty — I call it the one immortal blemish of mankind.”

“Character is determined more by the lack of certain experiences than by those one has had.”

“And nothing on earth consumes a man more quickly than the passion of resentment.”

“There is always some madness in love. But there is also always some reason in madness.”

“I know my fate. One day my name will be associated with the memory of something tremendous — a crisis without equal on earth, the most profound collision of conscience, a decision that was conjured up against everything that had been believed, demanded, hallowed so far. I am no man, I am dynamite.”

“The doer alone learneth.”

“The world is poor for him who has never been sick enough for this 'voluptuousness of hell':”

“When marrying, ask yourself this question: Do you believe that you will be able to converse well with this person into your old age? Everything else in marriage is transitory.”

“Germany is a great nation only because its people have so much Polish blood in their veins.”

“Only fool! Only poet!Only fool! Only poet!”

“The demand to be loved is the greatest of all arrogant presumptions.”

“The desert grows: woe to him in whom deserts hide ...”

“Women are considered deep - why? Because one can never discover any bottom to them. Women are not even shallow.”

“Do not forget, man, consumed by lust:you—are the stone, the desert, are death ...”

“Glance into the world just as though time were gone: and everything crooked will become straight to you.”

“Fear is the mother of morality.”

“You sacrifice yourself, your wealth torments you,But no one thanks you any longer …”

“There is no pre-established harmony between the furtherance of truth and the well-being of mankind.”

“To be ashamed of one's immorality: that is a step on the staircase at whose end one is also ashamed of one's morality.”

“Dionysus:I am your labyrinth …”

“Is man one of God's blunders? Or is God one of man's blunders?”

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

“Our treasure lies in the beehive of our knowledge. We are perpetually on the way thither, being by nature winged insects and honey gatherers of the mind.”

“When marrying, ask yourself this question: Do you believe that you will be able to converse well with this person into your old age? Everything else in marriage is transitory.”

“This is the antinomy: Insofar as we believe in morality we pass sentence on existence.”

“Convictions are more dangerous foes of truth than lies.”

“Germany is a great nation only because its people have so much Polish blood in their veins.”

“Hope in reality is the worst of all evils because it prolongs the torments of man.”

“Moralities and religions are the principal means by which one can make whatever one wishes out of man, provided one possesses a superfluity of creative forces and can assert one's will over long periods of time — in the form of legislation and customs.”

“Sing me a new song; the world is transfigured; all the Heavens are rejoicing.”

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

“It is not a lack of love, but a lack of friendship that makes unhappy marriages.”

“No more fiction for us: we calculate; but that we may calculate, we had to make fiction first.”

“We have art in order not to die of the truth.”

“Faith: not wanting to know what is true.”

“The stronger becomes master of the weaker, in so far as the latter cannot assert its degree of independence — here there is no mercy, no forbearance, even less a respect for "laws."”

“Whoever fights monsters should see to it that in the process he does not become a monster. And if you gaze long enough into an abyss, the abyss will gaze back into you.”

“The individual itself as a struggle between parts (for food, space, etc.): its evolution tied to the victory or predominance of individual parts, to an atrophy, a "becoming an organ" of other parts. …\xa0The aristocracy in the body, the majority of the rulers (struggle between cells and tissues). … Slavery and division of labor: the higher type possible only through the subjugation of the lower, so that it becomes a function.”

“Hope in reality is the worst of all evils because it prolongs the torments of man.”

“Morality is: the mediocre are worth more than the exceptions … I abhore Christianity with a deadly hatred.”

“Woman was God's second mistake.”

“The states in which we infuse a transfiguration and a fullness into things and poetize about them until they reflect back our fullness and joy in life...three elements principally: sexuality, intoxication and cruelty — all belonging to the oldest festal joys.”

“One must still have chaos in oneself to be able to give birth to a dancing star.”

“The beautiful exists just as little as the true. In every case it is a question of the conditions of preservation of a certain type of man: thus the herd-man will experience the value feeling of the true in different things than will the overman.”

“Ah, women. They make the highs higher and the lows more frequent.”

“A declaration of war on the masses by higher men is needed! … Everything that makes soft and effeminate, that serves the end of the people or the feminine, works in favor of universal suffrage, i.e. the domination of the inferior men. But we should take reprisal and bring this whole affair to light and the bar of judgment.”

“In individuals, insanity is rare; but in groups, parties, nations and epochs, it is the rule.”

“The rights a man arrogates to himself are related to the duties he imposes on himself, to the tasks to which he feels equal. The great majority of men have no right to existence, but are a misfortune to higher men.”

“Whenever I climb I am followed by a dog called 'Ego'.”

“The homogenizing of European man … requires a justification: it lies in serving a higher sovereign species that stands upon the former which can raise itself to its task only by doing this. Not merely a master race whose sole task is to rule, but a race with its own sphere of life, with an excess of strength … strong enough to have no need of the tyranny of the virtue-imperative.”

“The true man wants two things: danger and play. For that reason he wants woman, as the most dangerous plaything.”

“To those human beings who are of any concern to me I wish suffering, desolation, sickness, ill-treatment, indignities — I wish that they should not remain unfamiliar with profound self-contempt, the torture of self-mistrust, the wretchedness of the vanquished: I have no pity for them, because I wish them the only thing that can prove today whether one is worth anything or not — that one endures.”

“We love life, not because we are used to living but because we are used to loving.”

“Faith: not wanting to know what is true.”

“Not necessity, not desire - no, the love of power is the demon of men. Let them have everything - health, food, a place to live, entertainment - they are and remain unhappy and low-spirited: for the demon waits and waits and will be satisfied.”

“There is only nobility of birth, only nobility of blood. When one speaks of "aristocrats of the spirit," reasons are usually not lacking for concealing something. As is well known, it is a favorite term among ambitious Jews. For spirit alone does not make noble. Rather, there must be something to ennoble the spirit. What then is required? Blood.”

“There are no facts, only interpretations.”

“The possibility has been established for the production of...a master race, the future "masters of the earth"...made to endure for millennia — a higher kind of men who...employ democratic Europe as their most pliant and supple instrument for getting hold of the destinies of the earth.”

“In every real man a child is hidden that wants to play.”

“Art raises its head where creeds relax.”

“I tell the story of these philosophers in simplified form: I merely wish to bring out in each system that point which represents a piece of the personality, and which history must preserve as a part of what is irrefutable and indisputable.”

“When one has not had a good father, one must create one.”

“My task is to throw a light on that which we must always love and revere, of which no subsequent knowledge can rob us: man in his greatness.”

“Thoughts are the shadows of our feelings - always darker, emptier and simpler.”

“The only thing of interest in a refuted system is the personal element. It alone is what is forever irrefutable.”

“To forget one's purpose is the commonest form of stupidity.”

“The best author will be the one who is ashamed to become a writer.”

“Whoever wishes to justify [Philosophy] must show … to what ends a healthy culture uses and has used philosophy.”

“The future influences the present just as much as the past.”

“Where could we find an instance of cultural pathology which philosophy restored to health? If philosophy ever manifested itself as helpful, redeeming, or prophylactic, it was in a healthy culture. The sick, it made even sicker.”

“Whoever despises himself nonetheless respects himself as one who despises.”

“The very reason [the Greeks] got so far is that they knew how to pick up the spear and throw it onward from the point where others had left it. Their skill in the art of fruitful learning was admirable. We ought to be learning from our neighbors precisely as the Greeks learned from theirs, not for the sake of learned pedantry but rather using everything we learn as a foothold which will take us up as high, and higher, than our neighbor.”

“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.”

“… the republic of creative minds: each giant calling to his brother through the desolate intervals of time. And undisturbed by the wanton noises of the dwarfs that creep past beneath them, their high spirit-converse continues.”

“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.”

“Science rushes headlong, without selectivity, without “taste,” at whatever is knowable, in the blind desire to know all at any cost. Philosophical thinking, on the other hand, is ever on the scent of those things which are most worth knowing, the great and the important insights.”

“The concept of greatness is changeable, in the realm of morality as well as in that of esthetics. And so philosophy starts by legislating greatness.”

“No matter how strongly a thing may be believed, strength of belief is no criterion of truth.' But what is truth? Perhaps a kind of belief that has become a condition of life?”

“"Grant me, ye gods, but one certainty," runs Parmenides' prayer, "and if it be but a log's breadth on which to lie. on which to ride upon the sea of uncertainty. Take away everything that comes-to-be, everything lush, colorful, blossoming, illusory, everything that charms and is alive. Take all these for yourselves and grant me but the one and only, poor empty certainty.””

“The good generally displeases us when it is beyond our ken.”

“If there is something to pardon in everything, there is also something to condemn.”

“Everyone who enjoys thinks that the principal thing to the tree is the fruit, but in point of fact the principal thing to it is the seed.—Herein lies the difference between them that create and them that enjoy.”

“He that prefers the beautiful to the useful in life will, undoubtedly, like children who prefer sweetmeats to bread, destroy his digestion and acquire a very fretful outlook on the world.”

“The doer alone learneth.”

“On the heights it is warmer than people in the valleys suppose, especially in winter. The thinker recognizes the full import of this simile.”

“The value of many men and books rests solely on their faculty for compelling all to speak out the most hidden and intimate things.”

“It is not a lack of love, but a lack of friendship that makes unhappy marriages.”

“Merchant and pirate were for a long period one and the same person. Even today mercantile morality is really nothing but a refinement of piratical morality.”

“Representatives of truth. The champions of truth are hardest to find, not when it is dangerous to tell it, but rather when it is boring.”

“I teach you the Overman. Man is something which shall be surpassed.”

“Belief means not wanting to know what is true.”

“I do not know what the spirit of a philosopher could more wish to be than a good dancer. For the dance is his ideal, also his fine art, finally also the only kind of piety he knows, his 'divine service.'”

“This workshop where ideals are manufactured--it seems to me it stinks of so many lies”

“There is a certain right by which we many deprive a man of life, but none by which we may deprive him of death; this is mere cruelty.”

“A casual stroll through the lunatic asylum shows that faith does not prove anything.”

“Dancing in all its forms cannot be excluded from the curriculum of all noble education; dancing with the feet, with ideas, with words, and, need I add that one must also be able to dance with the pen?”

“Let us beware of saying that death is the opposite of life. The living being is only a species of the dead, and a very rare species.”

“Amor Fati – “Love Your Fate”, which is in fact your life.”

“How much truth does a spirit endure, how much truth does it dare?”

“Success has always been a great liar.”