Quotes by Friedrich Nietzsche: Selected Thoughts and Lines

''In all institutions where the brisk air of public criticism fails to circulate (as, for example, in scholarly bodies and senates), an innocent corruption grows up, like a mushroom.''

''A good writer possesses not only his own spirit but also the spirit of his friends.''

''That is the most extreme form of nihilism: nothingness (the "meaningless") eternally!''

''One should only question gods where none but gods can reply.''

''The consequences of our actions grab us by the scruff of our necks, quite indifferent to our claim that we have "gotten better" in the meantime.''

''I presume that you are compassionate: to be without pity means to be sick in body and spirit. But one should have spirit in abundance, so as to be permitted to be compassionate! For your pity is detrimental to you and to everyone.''

''"All truth is simple."MIs that not doubly a lie?''

''Man is more sensitive to the contempt that others feel towards him than to the contempt that he feels towards himself.''

''Active, successful natures act, not according to the maxim, "know thyself," but as if prompted by the commandment: will a self, and so become a self.''

''Whoever has witnessed another's ideal becomes his inexorable judge and as it were his evil conscience.''

''Evaluation is creation: hear it, you creators! Evaluating is itself the most valuable treasure of all that we value. It is only through evaluation that value exists: and without evaluation the nut of existence would be hollow. Hear it, you creators!''

''Generally speaking, the greater a woman's beauty, the greater her modesty.''

''The one seeks a midwife to deliver his thoughts, the other, someone to assist: thus a good conversation comes into being.''

''One who is publicly honest about himself ends up by priding himself somewhat on this honesty: for he knows only too well why he is honest—for the same reasons another person prefers illusion and dissimulation.''

''Modern marriage has lost its meaning—consequently it is being abolished.''

''The purpose of punishment is to improve those who do the punishing—that is the final recourse of those who support punishment.''

''And nobody lies as much as the indignant do.''

''"To the equal, equally, and to the unequal, unequally"Mthus justice advises. And as a result, the unequal are never equalized.''

''Strong currents drag many stones and bushes along with them, strong intellects many dense and muddled minds.''

''Because men really respect only that which was founded of old and has developed slowly, he who wants to live on after his death must take care not only of his posterity but even more of his past.''

''Many are obstinate with regard to the pathway once they have set upon it, few with regard to the goal.''

''Unresolved dissonances between the characters and dispositions of the parents continue to reverberate in the nature of the child and make up the history of its inner sufferings.''

''When one does away with oneself, one does the most estimable thing possible: in doing so, one almost earns the right to live.''

''In the end we love our desire and not what it is that we desire.''

''Whoever despises himself nonetheless respects himself as one who despises.''

''The hour when you say, "What does my justice matter? I do not see that I am embers and coals. But the just are embers and coals!"''

''Every relationship that does not raise us up pulls us down, and vice versa; this is why men usually sink down somewhat when they take wives while women are usually somewhat raised up. Overly spiritual men require marriage every bit as much as they resist it as bitter medicine.''

''Spirit is the life that itself cuts into life: with its own torment it increases its own knowledge. Did you already know that?''

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

''Follow in the footsteps of your fathers' virtue! How could you hope to climb high unless your fathers' will climbs with you?''

''It is only those who know how to feel that "this is not good" who devise improvements.''

''It is terrible to die of thirst on the ocean. Do you have to salt your truth so heavily that it no longer—quenches thirst?''

''Usually he has no thoughts—but as an exception to this rule sometimes nasty thoughts occur to him.''

''The golden age, when rambunctious spirits were regarded as the source of evil.''

''The small force that it takes to launch a boat into the stream should not be confused with the force of the stream that carries it along: but this confusion appears in nearly all biographies.''

''Why does man not see things? He always gets in the way: he conceals things.''

''I too have been in the underworld, as was Odysseus, and I will often be there again; not only sheep have I sacrificed so as to be able to speak with a few dead souls, but neither have I spared my own blood as well.''

''I speak and the child plays: who can be more serious than we are?''

''All good things were at one time bad things; every original sin has developed into an original virtue.''

''People who comprehend a thing in all its depth seldom remain true to it forever. For they have brought its very depth to light: and there is always so much nastiness to see there.''

''When the gratitude that many owe to one discards all modesty, then there is fame.''

''How can anyone become a thinker unless he spends at least a third of every day away from passions, people, and books?''

''I teach the No to all that makes weak—that exhausts. I teach the Yes to all that strengthens, that stores up strength, that pride.''

''The best way to give assistance to those who are deeply embarrassed and to calm them down is to praise them decisively.''

''You must be born for your physician, otherwise you are bound to perish because of your physician.''

''We must be cruel as well as compassionate: let us guard against becoming poorer than nature is!''

''If a man wishes to become a hero, then the serpent must first become a dragon: otherwise he lacks his proper enemy.''

''What do I care about the purring of one who cannot love, like the cat?''

''"What must I do to become blessed?" That I do not know, but I say to you: "Be blessed and then do whatever you please."''

''Once we have found ourselves, we must understand how from time to time to lose—and then to find—ourselves once again: assuming, that is, that we are thinkers. For a thinker it is a drawback to be bound to a single person all the time.''

''For men are not equal: thus speaks justice. And what I want, they are not permitted to want!''

''I fear animals regard man as a creature of their own kind which has in a highly dangerous fashion lost its healthy animal reason—as the mad animal, as the laughing animal, as the weeping animal, as the unhappy animal.''

''Many a peacock hides his peacock tail from all eyes—and calls it his pride.''

''Do not be deceived! The busiest people harbor the greatest weariness, their restlessness is weakness—they no longer have the capacity for waiting and idleness.''

''Only strong personalities can endure history, the weak ones are extinguished by it.''

''Everything is the same, nothing is worthwhile, the world is senseless, knowledge strangles.''

''We are in the greatest danger of being run over when we have just gotten out of the way of a carriage.''

''He who sees little always sees a little less; he who hears badly always hears a little more.''

''Egoism is the law of perspective as it applies to feelings, according to which what is closest to us appears to be large and weighty, while size and weight decrease with our distance from things.''

''Respectability offends my taste.''

''Some people appear to be more meager in talent than they are, just because the tasks they set themselves are always too great.''

''Nothing is beautiful, except man alone: all aesthetics rests upon this naïveté, which is its first truth. Let us immediately add the second: nothing is ugly except the degenerating man—and with this the realm of aesthetic judgment is circumscribed.''

''The will to power can express itself only against resistances; it seeks that which resists it—this is the native tendency of the amoeba when it extends its pseudopodia and gropes around.''

''If a woman does possess masculine virtues, we want to run away from her; and if she does not possess masculine virtues, then she runs away.''

''This crown to crown the laughing man, this rose-wreath crown: I myself have set this crown upon my head, I myself have pronounced my laughter holy.''

''In praise there is more obtrusiveness than in blame.''

''"Universal pity"Mwould be harshness and tyranny toward you, my dear neighbor.''

''The perfect woman perpetrates literature as she perpetrates a small sin: as an experiment, in passing, glancing around to see whether anybody notices—and to make sure that somebody notices.''

''So long as we possess our own why regarding life, we can put up with almost any how.—Human beings do not seek happiness—only the Englishman does.''

''Whoever deliberately attempts to insure confidentiality with another person is usually in doubt as to whether he inspires that person's confidence in him. One who is sure that he inspires confidence attaches little importance to confidentiality.''

''In compassionate men, severity is a virtue.''

''The danger in happiness.—"Now everything turns out for the best for me, now I love every destiny:—who feels like being my destiny?"''

''The most welcome joke to me is the one that takes the place of a heavy, not altogether innocuous thought, at once a cautionary hint of the finger and a flash of the eye.''

''Association with other people corrupts our character Mespecially when we have none.''

''The sage as astronomer.—As long as you still experience the stars as something "above you," you still lack viewpoint of knowledge.''

''What is great in man is that he is a bridge and not a goal: what there is to love in man is that he is a going-over and a going-under.''

''Asceticism is the right way of thinking for those who have to extirpate their sensual drives because they are ravening beasts of prey. But only for those!''

''Vanity is the fear of appearing original: it is thus a lack of pride, but not necessarily a lack of originality.''

''The greatest almsgiver is cowardice.''

''Posthumous men—myself, for example—are not as well understood as timely ones, but we are listened to better. More precisely: we are never understood—hence our authority.''

''Whoever no longer finds greatness in God no longer finds it anywhere—he must either deny it or create it.''

''But eternal liveliness is what counts: what does "eternal life" matter, or life at all?''

''At one time or another, almost every politician needs an honest man so badly that, like a ravenous wolf, he breaks into a sheep-fold: not to devour the ram he has stolen, however, but rather to conceal himself behind its wooly back.''

''Impoliteness is frequently the sign of an awkward modesty that loses its head when surprised and hopes to conceal this with rudeness.''

''For some natures, changing their opinions is just as much a requirement of cleanliness as changing their clothes: for others, however, it is merely a requirement of vanity.''

''Science offends the modesty of all real women. It makes them feel as though it were an attempt to peek under their skin—or, worse yet, under their dress and ornamentation!''

''Whoever has character also has his typical experience, which returns over and over again.''

''But what are man's truths in the end?—They are man's irrefutable errors.''

''All those who dwell in the depths find their happiness in being like flying fish for once and playing on the uppermost crests of the waves. What they value most in things is that they have a surface, their "epidermality"Msit venia verbo.''

''We cannot even reproduce our thoughts entirely in words.''

''Someone who thinks a lot is not suited to being a party member: in no time, he thinks his way right through the party.''

''We fear our neighbor's hostile mood because we are afraid that this mood will lead him to penetrate our secrets.''

''"I have done it," says my memory. "I cannot have done it," says my pride, refusing to budge. In the end—my memory yields.''

''What does your conscience say?—"You must become who it is that you are."''

''Most writers write badly because they tell us not only their thoughts but also the thinking of their thoughts.''

''For the purpose of knowledge, one must know how to use that inner current that draws us to a thing, and then the one that, after a time, draws us away from it.''

''Those with very loud voices in their throats are nearly incapable of thinking subtle thoughts.''

''The good displeases us when we are not up to it.''

''Man ... always remains attached to the past: however far and fast he runs, the chain runs with him.''

''Through music the passions enjoy themselves.''

''A martyr's disciples suffer more than the martyr.''

''Perhaps no one as yet has been truthful enough about what "truthfulness" is.''

''What makes us heroic?—Confronting simultaneously our supreme suffering and our supreme hope.''

''And so let my proposition be understood and pondered: history can be borne only by strong personalities, weak ones are utterly extinguished by it.''

''Just as bones, tissues, intestines, and blood vessels are enclosed in a skin that makes it possible to bear the sight of a human being, so the agitations and passions of the soul are wrapped up in vanity: it is the soul's skin.''

''Men subsequently put whatever is newly learned or experienced to use as a plowshare, perhaps even as a weapon: but women immediately include it among their ornaments.''

''We would not let ourselves be burned at the stake for our opinions: we are not that certain of them. But perhaps we would do so in order to be allowed to possess and to change them.''

''They will call you the annihilators of morals: but you are simply the inventors of yourselves.''

''What is the seal of liberation?—No longer to be ashamed in our own presence.''

''But thus I counsel you, my friends: mistrust everyone in whom the impulse to punish is strong!''

''The advantage of having a bad memory is that you can enjoy the same good things for the first time several times.''

''In our own presence, we all pretend to be simpler than we are: thus we take a break from our fellow human beings.''

''A vocation makes us unthinking; that is its greatest blessing. For it is a bulwark behind which we are permitted to withdraw when commonplace doubts and cares assail us.''

''There are slavish souls who carry their appreciation for favors done them so far that they strangle themselves with the rope of gratitude.''

''Unconditional love also includes—the ardent desire to be abused: at that point it is a defiance directed against itself, and out of its devotion the very wish for self-annihilation finally arises: "Drown in this sea!"''

''The most vulnerable and yet most invincible thing is human vanity: indeed, its strength increases when it is wounded, and can ultimately grow to gigantic proportions.''

''So long as you are praised think only that you are not yet on your own path but on that of another.''

''In affability there is no hatred of men, but for that very reason there is all too much contempt for men.''

''Cows sometimes wear an expression resembling wonderment arrested on its way to becoming a question. In the eye of superior intelligence, on the other hand, lies the nil admirari spread out like the monotony of a cloudless sky.''

''Our vanity wishes precisely what we do best to be regarded as what is most difficult to us. On the origin of many a morality.''

''Fathers and sons show much more consideration towards one another than mothers and daughters do.''

''On the tree, Future, we build our nest; and in our solitude eagles shall bring us nourishment in their beaks!''

''Talking about ourselves a lot can also be a means to concealing ourselves.''

''Women and egoistic artists entertain a feeling towards science that is something composed of envy and sentimentality.''

''What is life? A continuous praise and blame.''

''You have overcome yourself: but why do you show yourself to me only as the one overcome? I want to see the victor: cast roses into the abyss and say, "Here is my thanks to the monster, because it didn't know how to swallow me!"''

''How did reason enter the world? As is fitting, in an irrational way, accidentally. We will have to guess at it, like a riddle.''

''Higher than "thou shalt" stands "I will" (the heroes), and higher than "I will" stands "I am" (the Greek gods).''

''Your rank is way down below his when you seek to establish the exceptions and he seeks to establish the rule.''

''The increase in wisdom can be measured precisely by the decrease in bile.''

''One is proud to worship when he cannot be an idol.''

''To learn from our enemies is the best pathway to loving them: for it makes us grateful to them.''

''These people abstain, it is true: but the bitch Sensuality glares enviously out of all they do.''

''"Evil men have no songs."MHow is it then that the Russians have songs?''

''A soul that knows it is loved but does not love in return betrays its dregs:Mwhat is at the bottom comes up.''

''The woman and the genius do not work. Up to now, woman has been mankind's supreme luxury. In all those moments when we do our best, we do not work. Work is merely a means to these moments.''

''And what was too nasty to feed a dog—that is precisely what you threw down before your god. Did he perhaps die of what you fed him?''

''The child is innocence and forgetting, a new beginning, a game, a wheel rolling on its own, a prime movement, a sacred Yes.''

''In what does the objective measure of value lie? In the quantum of enhanced and organized power alone, in accordance with what occurs in all occurrence, a will to increase.''

''Probability but no truth, facility but no freedom—it is owing to these two fruits that the tree of knowledge cannot be confused with the tree of life.''

''It was mankind that hung on the cross for two thousand years: and a terrible god practiced his cruelty and called it "love."''

''The sensible author writes for no other posterity than his own—that is, for his age—so as to be able even then to take pleasure in himself.''

''The snake that cannot shed its skin perishes. Likewise those spirits who are prevented from changing their opinions; they cease to be spirits.''

''The hour when you say, "What does my happiness matter? It is poverty and filth, and a wretched complacency. Yet my happiness should justify existence itself!"''

''Nobody dies of fatal truths these days: there are too many antidotes.''

''The visionary denies the truth to himself, the liar only to others.''

''All "it was" is a fragment, a riddle, a horrible accident—until the creative will declares: "But thus I willed it!"MUntil the creative will declares: "But thus I will it! Thus shall I will it!"''

''Whoever writes in blood and aphorisms wants not to be learned but to be learned by heart.''

''A noble soul is not the one that can manage the highest flights but the one that rises very little and falls very little but always dwells in a free, resplendent atmosphere and altitude.''

''Children from humble families must be taught how to command just as other children must be taught how to obey.''

''The strongest knowledge (that of the complete non-freedom of the human will) is nonetheless the poorest in results: for it always has the strongest opponent, human vanity.''

''We must take precautions against being prematurely honed sharp—since at the same time we are being prematurely honed thin.''

''Joy wants the eternity of all things, wants deep, wants deep eternity.''

''Insects do not sting out of malice but because they also want to live: likewise our critics—they want our blood, not our pain.''

''It is obvious that all sense has gone out of modern marriage: which is, however, no objection to marriage but to modernity.''

''I could dispense with nothing when I created the superman. His seed still carries all your evil and falsehood, your lies and your ignorance.''

''A letter is an unannounced visit, and the postman is the intermediary of impolite surprises. Every week we ought to have one hour for receiving letters, and then go and take a bath.''

''No man lies so boldly as the man who is indignant.''

''The machine is impersonal, it takes the pride away from a piece of work, the individual merits and defects that go along with all work that is not done by a machine—which is to say, its little bit of humanity.''

''Everything good is the transmutation of something evil: every god has a devil for a father.''

''"State," I call it, where they all drink poison, the good and the wicked; "state," where they all lose themselves, the good and the wicked; "state," where they all call their slow suicide—"life."''

''This world is the will to power—and nothing else! And you yourselves are also this will to power—and nothing else!''

''Time, space, and causality are only metaphors of knowledge, with which we explain things to ourselves.''

''One can also be undignified and flattering toward a virtue.''

''The inclination to self-depreciation, to freely accepting being robbed, being duped, and being swindled, could be the modesty of a god among men.''

''The mouth may lie, alright, but the face it makes nonetheless tells the truth.''

''We have paid for nothing more dearly than for the little bit of human reason and the sense of freedom that currently constitutes our pride.''

''Some rule out of a lust for ruling; others, so as not to be ruled:Mto these it is merely the lesser of two evils.''

''Even today a crude sort of persecution is all that is required to create an honorable name for any sect, no matter how indifferent in itself.''

''Among twelve apostles there must always be one who is as hard as stone, so that the new church may be built upon him.''

''Sensuality often accelerates the growth of love so much that its roots remain weak and are easily pulled up.''

''A man who possesses genius is insufferable unless he also possesses at least two other things: gratitude and cleanliness.''

''The higher its type, the more rarely a thing succeeds.''

''Once and for all, there are many things I choose not to know.—Wisdom sets limits even to knowledge.''

''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.''

''From passions grow opinions; intellectual laziness lets these harden into convictions.''

''The criminal is quite frequently not equal to his deed: he belittles and slanders it.''

''When a woman has scholarly inclinations there is usually something wrong with her sexually. Infertility predisposes one to a certain masculinity of taste, for the male is—permit me to say so—"the infertile animal."''

''Either we have no dreams or we have interesting ones.—We need to learn to be awake in the same way:—either not at all or in an interesting way.''

''Whether we immoralists do any harm to virtue?—Just as little as anarchists do to princes. It is only because they have been shot at that they once again sit securely on their thrones. Moral: we must shoot at morals.''

''Behind all their personal vanity, women themselves always have an impersonal contempt—for "woman."''

''Out of life's school of war.—What does not destroy me, makes me stronger.''

''Nothing can be done about it: every master has but a single pupil—and he will not stay loyal to him—for he is also destined to become a master.''

''Writers ought to be regarded as wrongdoers who deserve to be acquitted or pardoned only in the rarest cases: that would be a way to keep books from getting out of hand.''

''Clever people are never credited with their follies: what a deprivation of human rights!''

''The lack of closeness among friends is a fault that cannot be reprimanded without becoming incurable.''

''It is the privilege of greatness to give great enjoyment with trifling gifts.''

''Verily, I have often laughed at the weaklings who thought themselves good because they had no claws.''

''A people is a detour of nature to get to six or seven great men.—Yes, and then to get around them.''

''A vocation is the backbone of life.''

''We criticize a thinker more acutely when he advances a proposition that is disagreeable to us; and yet it would be more reasonable to do so when his proposition is agreeable to us.''

''Whoever feels predestined to see and not to believe will find all believers too noisy and pushy: he guards against them.''

''In the last analysis, even the best man is evil: in the last analysis, even the best woman is bad.''

''And you tell me, friends, that there is no disputing taste and tasting? But all life is a dispute over taste and tasting!''

''About sacrifice and the offering of sacrifices, sacrificial animals think quite differently from those who look on: but they have never been allowed to have their say.''

''The will to life? In its place I always found only the will to power.''

''Industriousness and conscientiousness are often at odds, because industriousness wants to pick the still sour fruit from the tree, while conscientiousness lets it hang there too long, until it falls and bruises.''

''In being wildly natural we recover best from being unnatural, from being spiritual.''

''To predict the behavior of ordinary people in advance, you only have to assume that they will always try to escape a disagreeable situation with the smallest possible expenditure of intelligence.''

''The will to incessant creation is vulgar, betraying jealousy, envy, and ambition. Assuming that you are something, there is really nothing that you need to do—and yet you do a great deal. Above the "productive" man there is still a higher type.''

''Before we go seeking man we will have to have found the lantern.—Will it have to be the Cynic's lantern?''

''What is happiness?—The feeling that power is growing, that a resistance is being overcome.''

''When you have a lot to put into them, the day has a hundred pockets.''

''Whoever does not know how to put his will into things at least puts a meaning into them: that is to say, he believes that there is a will in them already (principle of "faith").''

''An artist chooses his subjects: that is the way he praises.''

''Verily, a polluted stream is man. One must actually be a sea to take in a polluted stream without becoming impure. Behold, I teach you the superman: he is the this sea, in him can your great contempt go under.''

''That is an artist as I would have an artist be, modest in his needs: he really wants only two things, his bread and his art—panem et Circen.''

''As an artist, a man has no home in Europe save in Paris.''

''The bite of conscience, like a dog biting a stone, is a stupidity.''

''The shortest route is not the most direct one, but rather the one where the most favorable winds swell our sails:Mthat is the lesson that seafarers teach. Not to abide by this lesson is to be obstinate: here, firmness of character is tainted with stupidity.''

''All parties attempt to represent important things that have developed outside themselves as unimportant, and where they fail in this they assail those things all the more bitterly the more admirable they are.''

''Anyone who has ever constructed a "new heaven" has discovered the power to do it nowhere but in his own hell.''

''I can still stand on life's narrowest footing: but who would I be were I to show you this art. Would you like to see a ropedancer?''

''When a man reaches his maturity in understanding and in years, the feeling comes over him that his father was wrong to beget him.''

''The irrationality of a thing is no argument against its existence, rather a condition of it.''

''Where neither love nor hatred plays a part, a woman plays indifferently.''

''The thought is merely a sign, as the word is merely a sign for the thought.''

''The public easily confuses him who fishes in troubled waters with him who draws up water from the depths.''

''It was modesty that invented the word "philosopher" in Greece and left the magnificent overweening presumption in calling oneself wise to the actors of the spirit—the modesty of such monsters of pride and sovereignty as Pythagoras, as Plato.''

''One begins to mistrust very clever people when they get embarrassed.''

''All truth is crooked, time itself is a circle.''

''When stepped on, the worm curls up. That is a clever thing to do. Thus it reduces its chances of being stepped on again. In the language of morality: humility.''

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

''People press toward the light not in order to see better but in order to shine better.—We are happy to regard the one before whom we shine as light.''

''It is doubtful whether anyone who has travelled widely has found anywhere in the world regions more ugly than in the human face.''

''The view that honesty is something, and even a virtue, belongs, it is true, to those private opinions which are forbidden in this age of public opinions.''

''It is not in how one soul approaches another but in how it withdraws that I know its affinity and solidarity with the other.''

''The moral earth, too, is round! The moral earth, too, has its antipodes! The antipodes, too, have their right to exist! There is still another world to be discovered—and more than one! Set sail, you philosophers!''

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

''With one more talent one frequently stands with greater instability than with one less, as a table stands better on three legs than on four.''

''In dealings with scholars and artists we are apt to miscalculate in opposite directions: behind a remarkable scholar we sometimes, and not infrequently, find a mediocre man, and behind a mediocre artist, fairly often—a very remarkable man.''

''It is not when it is dangerous to tell the truth that its advocates are hardest to find, but when it is boring.''

''Lust and self-mutilation are closely related impulses. There are also self-mutilators among knowers: they do not want to be creators under any circumstances.''

''What is the ape to man? A laughing-stock or a painful embarrassment. And just that shall man be for the superman: a laughing-stock or a painful embarrassment.''

''One is twice as willing to jump in after a person who has fallen into the water when there are people present who do not dare to do so.''

''For the longest time, marriage has had a guilty conscience about itself. Should we believe it?—Yes, we should believe it.''

''He who seeks intelligence lacks intelligence.''

''The relatives of a suicide hold it against him that out of consideration for their reputation he did not remain alive.''

''Marriage was contrived for ordinary people, for people who are capable of neither great love nor great friendship, which is to say, for most people—but also for those exceptionally rare ones who are capable of love as well as of friendship.''

''There are people who are so presumptuous that they know no other way to praise a greatness that they publicly admire than by representing it as a preliminary stage and bridge leading to themselves.''

''The desire to annoy no one, to harm no one, can equally well be the sign of a just as of an anxious disposition.''

''A book full of brilliance imparts some of it even to its opponents.''

''You will never get the crowd to shout "Hosanna!" until you ride into town on an ass.''

''Whoever thinks a lot—which is to say, "objectively"Mreadily forgets his own experiences, but not the thoughts that they have brought about.''

''Where the past is venerated the clean and those who clean things up should be kept out. Piety is never happy without a little dust, dirt, and rubbish.''

''The best friend will probably get the best spouse, because a good marriage is based on the talent for friendship.''

''When our brain feels too weak to deal with our opponent's objections, our heart answers by casting suspicion on their underlying motives.''

''What we do in our dreams we also do when we are awake: we invent and make up the person we are dealing with—and immediately forget that we have done it.''

''Whoever knows he is deep tries to be clear, but whoever wants to seem deep to the crowd tries to be obscure. For the crowd supposes that anything it cannot see to the bottom must be deep: it is so timid and goes so unwillingly into the water.''

''To redeem man's past and to remodel all "it was" until the will says: "But thus I willed it! Thus shall I will it!"Mthis I called redemption, and this alone I taught them to call redemption.''

''The apprentice and the master love the master in different ways.''

''The enjoyment that all morality has given us to now and that it continues to give us—and so, what has kept it going up to now—lies in everyone's right, without lengthy investigation, to praise and blame. And who could endure life without praising and blaming!''

''A woman's pity, which is talkative, carries the sick person's bed to the public marketplace.''

''There are highly gifted spirits who are always infertile simply because, owing to a weakness in temperament, they are too impatient to wait out their pregnancy to term.''

''There are horrible people who, instead of solving a problem, tangle it up and make it harder to solve for anyone who wants to deal with it. Whoever does not know how to hit the nail on the head should be asked not to hit it at all.''

''The object of convalescence ought to be to turn our attention to life: at other times, simply to our tasks!''

''A reader is doubly guilty of bad manners against an author when he praises his second book at the expense of his first (or vice versa) and then expects the author to be grateful for what he has done.''

''To our strongest impulse, to the tyrant in us, not only our reason but also our conscience yields.''

''People who give us their full confidence believe that they have thereby earned a right to ours. This is a fallacy; one does not acquire rights through gifts.''

''He who bestows something great receives no gratitude; for in accepting it the recipient has already been weighed down too much.''

''Nothing is true, everything is permitted.''

''Women are supposed to be deep—why? Because one can never get to the bottom with them. Women are not even shallow.''

''How do you expect to learn to dance when you have not even learned to walk! And above the dancer is still the flyer and his bliss.''

''What is bad?—Everything that arises from weakness.''

''Whoever has provoked men to rage against him has always gained a party in his favor, too.''

''There is a hatred of lies and dissimulation that is rooted in a sensitive principle of honor, and there is another such hatred that is rooted in cowardice, inasmuch as lies are forbidden by a divine commandment. Too cowardly to lie....''

''Against boredom even the gods struggle in vain.''

''We evaluate the services that anyone renders to us according to the value he puts on them, not according to the value they have for us.''

''"Where the tree of knowledge stands, there is always paradise": thus speak the oldest and the youngest serpents.''

''The more abstract the truth you wish to teach, the more you need to seduce the senses to it.''

''You must await your thirst and allow it to become complete: otherwise you will never discover your spring, which can never be anyone else's!''

''Whom do you call bad?—Those who always want to induce shame.''

''The desire to create continually is vulgar and betrays jealousy, envy, ambition. If one is something one really does not need to make anything—and one nonetheless does very much. There exists above the "productive" man a yet higher species.''

''Whoever denies that he possesses vanity generally possesses it in so brutal a form that he instinctively shuts his eyes in its presence, so as not to have to look down upon himself.''

''It is neither the best nor the worst things in a book that defy translation.''

''Fanatics are picturesque, mankind would rather see gestures than listen to reasons.''

''The gilded sheath of pity sometimes covers the dagger of envy.''

''"Play," the useless, as the ideal of one who is overloaded with strength, as "childlike." The "childlikeness" of god, pais paizon.''

''The perfect female is a higher type of human being than the perfect male: and also something much more rare.—Zoological science provides the means to support this proposition.''

''Science rushes headlong, without selectivity, without "taste," at whatever is knowable, in the blind desire to know all at any cost.''

''One or the other is necessary: either a light disposition by nature or a disposition lightened by knowledge and art.''

''All the names of good and evil are parables: they do not declare, but only hint. Whoever among you seeks knowledge of them is a fool!''

''And he who must be a creator in good and evil: verily, he must be an annihilator first and demolish values.''

''What does it matter whether I am shown to be right! I am right too much!—And he who laughs best today will also laugh last.''

''As much as possible, and this as quickly as possible: that is what the great mental and emotional illness craves that is variously called "present" or "culture," but that is actually a symptom of consumption.''

''We do not hate as long as we still attach a lesser value, but only when we attach an equal or a greater value.''

''The hour when you say, "What does my pity matter? Is not pity the cross on which he who loves man is nailed? But my pity is no crucifixion."''

''Many writers are neither spirit nor wine, but rather spirits- of-wine: they can catch fire, and then they give off heat.''

''A person is far more likely to appear to have sound character because he persistently follows his temperament than because he persistently follows his principles.''

''A real man wants two things: danger and play. Therefore he wants woman as the most dangerous plaything.''

''New ways I go, a new speech comes to me; weary I grow, like all creators, of the old tongues. My spirit no longer wants to walk on worn soles.''

''Are you one who looks on? Or one who lends a hand?—Or one who looks away, steps aside? ... Third question of conscience.''

''When art dresses in worn-out material it is most easily recognized as art.''

''All idealists imagine that the causes they serve are fundamentally better than any other causes in the world, and they refuse to believe that if their cause is to flourish at all it requires precisely the same foul-smelling manure that is necessary to all other human undertakings.''

''The one conclusive argument that has at all times discouraged people from drinking a poison is not that it kills but rather that it tastes bad.''

''Love and hatred are not blind, but are blinded by the fire they bear within themselves.''

''Instinct.—When our house burns down, we even forget our lunch.—Yes, but we go back to it later in the ashes.''

''Disillusionment speaks.—"I listened for an echo and heard nothing but praise."''

''Every great love brings with it the cruel idea of killing the object of its love so that it may be removed once and for all from the wicked game of change: for love dreads change even more than annihilation.''

''If we train our conscience, it kisses us as it bites.''

''We should not talk about our friends: otherwise we will talk away the feeling of friendship.''

''The quality of a marriage is proven by its ability to tolerate an occasional "exception."''

''I feel all those human beings to be pernicious who can no longer oppose what they love: they thereby ruin the best things and people.''

''You may have enemies whom you hate, but not enemies whom you despise. You must take pride in your enemy: then your enemy's successes will be your successes as well.''

''The good—have always been the beginning of the end.''

''You gave him an opportunity to display greatness of character, and he let it slip away. For that he will never forgive you.''

''Just as a waterfall grows slower and more lightly suspended as it plunges down, so the great man of action tends to act with greater calmness than his tempestuous desires prior to the deed would lead one to expect.''

''Although the most incisive judges of the witches and even the witches themselves were convinced of the guilt of witchcraft, this guilt nevertheless did not exist. Thus it is with all guilt.''

''Through the certain prospect of death, a precious, sweet- smelling drop of levity might be mixed into every life—but now you strange pharmacist-souls have turned it into a foul-tasting drop of poison through which all life is made repulsive.''

''That whatever a man says, promises, or resolves in passion he must stick to later on when he is cold and sober—this demand is among the heaviest burdens that weigh on humankind.''

''Some are made modest by great praise, others insolent.''

''One will seldom go wrong in attributing extreme actions to vanity, moderate ones to habit, and petty ones to fear.''

''Not infrequently, we encounter copies of important human beings; and here, too, as in the case of paintings, most people prefer the copies to the originals.''

''The condition that gives birth to a rule is not the same as the condition to which the rule gives birth.''

''Whoever commits to paper what he suffers becomes a melancholy author: but he becomes a serious author when he tells us what he suffered and why he now reposes in joy.''

''Assuming that rapture is nature's play with man, the Dionysian artist's creative activity is the play with rapture.''

''One who is always deeply involved in what he is doing is above all embarrassment.''

''Someone said: "There are two people to whom I have never given a lot of thought: that bears witness to my love for them."''

''Lying very still and thinking very little is the most inexpensive medicine for all the sicknesses of the soul, and when administered with good intentions it grows more and more pleasant with each passing hour.''

''Horrible experiences lead us to wonder whether the person who experiences them might not be something horrible.''

''One who speaks a foreign language just a little takes more pleasure in it than one who speaks it well. Enjoyment belongs to those who know things halfway.''

''The humanity of famous intellectuals lies in being wrong with gracious courtesy when dealing with those who are not famous.''

''Whoever gives advice to the sick gains a sense of superiority over them, no matter whether his advice is accepted or rejected. That is why sick people who are sensitive and proud hate their advisors even more than their illnesses.''

''There is a right according to which we may deprive a human being of his life but none according to which we may deprive him of his death: to do so is mere cruelty.''

''The scaffolding must be removed once the house is built.''

''What good is a book that does not even transport us beyond all books?''

''Whoever wants to set a good example must add a grain of foolishness to his virtue: then others can imitate and yet at the same time surpass the one they imitate—which human beings love to do.''

''We either praise or blame according to whether the one or the other provides the greater opportunity to let our power of judgment shine.''

''Existence really is an imperfect tense that never becomes a present.''

''Martyrs have harmed the truth.... Even today it only takes the crudest sort of persecution to give an otherwise inherently indifferent sectarianism an honorable name.''

''This mother needs happy, reputable children, and that one needs unhappy ones: otherwise she cannot show her kindness as a mother.''

''Men who think deeply appear to be comedians in their dealings with others because they always have to feign superficiality in order to be understood.''

''The dyed-in-the-wool teacher takes everything seriously only with respect to his students—himself included.''

''Morality—the idiosyncrasy of decadents, with the ulterior motive of revenging themselves on life—successfully.''

''Honest towards ourselves and towards anyone else who is our friend; brave towards the enemy; magnanimous towards the defeated; polite—always: this is how the four cardinal virtues want us to act.''

''In every ascetic morality man prays to one part of himself as God, and to do so he finds it necessary to demonize the remaining part.''

''Every man is a creative cause of what happens, a primum mobile with an original movement.''

''"This—is now my way: where is yours?" Thus I answered those who asked me "the way." For the way—does not exist!''

''The weak and misbegotten shall perish: first principle of our brotherly love. And they shall be given every assistance.''

''Are you genuine? Or just an actor? A representative? Or what it is that is represented?—In the end, you might merely be someone mimicking an actor ... Second question of conscience.''

''Woman learns how to hate to the same extent as she unlearns—how to charm.''

''And so do you suppose it must be a piece-work because it has been given to you (and could only be given to you) in pieces?''

''This is the crux of the moral pessimists: if they really wanted to promote their neighbor's redemption, then they would have to resolve themselves to spoiling existence for him, and thus to being his misfortune; out of pity, they would have to—become evil!''

''Someone said: "I have been prejudiced against myself from my earliest childhood: hence I find some truth in all blame and some stupidity in all praise. I generally estimate praise too poorly and blame too highly."''

''Art depends upon the inexactitude of sight.''

''Could it be that wisdom appears on earth as a raven, drawn by the faint smell of carrion?''

''Heroism—that is the disposition of a man who aspires to a goal compared to which he himself is wholly insignificant. Heroism is the good will to self-destruction.''

''"I do not like him."MWhy?—"I am no match for him."MHas a person ever answered in this way?''

''"Our 'neighbor' is not our neighbor, but our neighbor's neighbor"Mthus thinks every people.''

''I have learned to walk: since then, I have indulged myself in running. I have learned to fly: since then, I do not want anybody pushing me to get me going.''

''I assess the power of a will by how much resistance, pain, torture it endures and knows how to turn to its advantage.''

''Good writers have two things in common: they would rather be understood than admired, and they do not write for hairsplitting and hypercritical readers.''

''Heavy, heavy-hearted people grow lighter and rise occasionally to their surface through precisely that which makes others heavier, through hatred and love.''

''For the most part, punishment makes men harder and colder; it concentrates; it sharpens the sense of estrangement; it strengthens the power of resistance.''

''Now I am light, now I fly, now I see myself beneath myself, now a god dances through me.''

''Our drives are reducible to the will to power. The will to power is the ultimate fact at which we arrive.''

''With deep men, as with deep wells, it takes a long time for anything that falls into them to hit bottom. Onlookers, who almost never wait long enough, readily suppose that such men are callous and unresponsive—or even boring.''

''When one thinks profusely and cleverly, not only his face but his body too takes on a clever appearance.''

''Through excessive exertion they put together some free time, and afterwards have no idea what to do with it except to count the hours until they've passed.''

''The "kingdom of heaven" is a condition of the heart—not something that comes "above the earth" or "after death."''

''Antithesis is the narrow gateway through which error most prefers to worm its way towards truth.''

''Sometimes in conversation the sound of our own voice distracts us and misleads us into making assertions that in no way express our true opinions.''

''We should conserve evil just as we should conserve the forests. It is true that by thinning and clearing the forests the earth grew warmer.''

''"Obedience" and "law"Mthat is what one hears in all moral sentiments. But "caprice" and "freedom" might yet be the last sound that morality makes in the end.''

''The chastest words I have ever heard: "Dans le véritable amour c'est l'âme, qui enveloppe le corps."''

''We are all afraid of the truth.''

''You have made your way from worm to man, and much in you is still worm. Once you were apes, and even now man is still more ape than any ape.''

''Such a man as instinctively feeds on pure ambrosia and leaves alone the indigestible in things.''

''The so-called paradoxes of an author, to which a reader takes exception, often exist not in the author's book at all, but rather in the reader's head.''

''A philosophical mythology lies concealed in language, which breaks out again at every moment, no matter how cautious we may be.''

''Who, for the sake of his good reputation, has never once—sacrificed himself?''

''This is one of the stout-hearted old warriors: he is angry with civilization because he supposes that its aim is to make all good things—honors, treasures, beautiful women—accessible even to cowards.''

''One who has given up any hope of winning a fight or has clearly lost it wants his style in fighting to be admired all the more.''

''Nobody thanks a witty man for politeness when he accommodates himself to a society in which it is not polite to display wit.''

''Many people wait all their lives for an opportunity to be good in their way.''

''The will to overcome an emotion is ultimately nothing but the will of another—or of several other—emotions.''

''The most general deficiency in our sort of culture and education is gradually dawning on me: no one learns, no one strives towards, no one teaches—enduring loneliness.''

''Not every end is a goal. The end of a melody is not its goal: but nonetheless, had the melody not reached its end it would not have reached its goal either. A parable.''

''The most spiritual human beings, assuming they are the most courageous, also experience the most painful tragedies by far: but for just this reason they honor life, because it pits its greatest opposition against them.''

''When horror is associated with what is harmful, evil results, when disgust does, badness.''

''The mother of excess is not joy but joylessness.''

''Among austere men intimacy involves shame—and is something precious.''

''There is always a certain noise in applause: even in the applause we give ourselves.''

''That the world is a divine game and beyond good and evil:Min this the Vedanta philosophy and Heraclitus are my predecessors.''

''"All the gods are dead: now we want the superman to live"Mon that great noon, let this be our last will.''

''What an age experiences as evil is usually an untimely reverberation echoing what was previously experienced as good—the atavism of an older ideal.''

''Learn to laugh at yourselves as one must laugh!''

''The wittiest authors evoke a barely perceptible smile.''

''Mastery has been achieved when one neither makes a mistake nor hesitates in the performance.''

''Most people are much too preoccupied with themselves to be malicious.''

''You highest men whom I have ever seen! This is my suspicion about you and my secret laughter: I guess that you would call my superman—a devil!''

''Never to read another book that was born and baptized (with ink) at the same time.''

''What? You seek something? You wish to multiply yourself tenfold, a hundredfold? You seek followers?—Seek zeros!''

''One who is unassuming in dealing with people exhibits his arrogance all the more strongly in dealing with things (city, state, society, age, mankind). That is his revenge.''

''He who will one day teach men to fly will have displaced all boundary stones; the boundary stones themselves will fly up into the air to him, and he will rebaptize the earth—as "the weightless."''

''He who fights against monsters should see to it that he does not become a monster in the process. And when you stare persistently into an abyss, the abyss also stares into you.''

''Nothing in life possesses value except the degree of power—assuming that life itself is the will to power.''

''Everything in the world displeases me: but, above all, my displeasure in everything displeases me.''

''From whatever you wish to know and measure you must take your leave, at least for a time. Only when you have left the town can you see how high its towers rise above the houses.''

''We no longer love our knowledge enough once we have passed it on.''

''Those with certain temperaments find no way to endure themselves except by striving towards going under.''

''All the sciences are now under an obligation to prepare for the future task of philosopher, which is to solve the problem of value, to determine the rank order of values.''

''There are various eyes. Even the Sphinx has eyes: and as a result there are various "truths," and as a result there is no truth.''

''To one who is accustomed to thinking a lot, every new thought that he hears or reads about immediately appears as a link in a chain.''

''Scholarship has the same relationship to wisdom as righteousness has to holiness: it is cold and dry, it is loveless and knows no deep feelings of inadequacy or longing.''

''When his book opens its mouth, the author must shut his.''

''Truth is the kind of error without which a certain species of life could not live. The value for life is ultimately decisive.''

''A book should long for pen, ink, and writing-table: but usually it is pen, ink, and writing-table that long for a book. That is why books are so negligible nowadays.''

''As soon as we climb higher than those who had at one time admired us, we appear to them as though we have sunken and fallen down: for, in any event, they had at one time supposed that they were with us (even if it were through us) on the heights.''

''Mankind is a rope tied between beast and superman—a rope over an abyss.''

''Sometimes in our relationship to another human being the proper balance of friendship is restored when we put a few grains of impropriety onto our own side of the scale.''

''For as long as they praise you, never forget that it is not yet your own path that you walk, but another person's.''

''Those are my enemies: they want to overthrow and to construct nothing themselves. They say: "All that is worthless"—and want to create no value themselves.''

''Towards gnats and fleas we should show no pity. We would do right to hang petty thieves, petty calumniators, and slanderers.''

''Yet for all that, there is nothing in me of a founder of a religion—religions are affairs of the rabble; I find it necessary to wash my hands after I have come into contact with religious people.''

''Even truthfulness is but one means to knowledge, a ladder—but not the ladder.''

''One has observed life poorly, if one has not also witnessed the hand that mercifully—kills.''

''In a seriously intended intellectual emancipation a person's mute passions and cravings also hope to find their advantage.''

''Do you want to have an easy life? Then always stay with the herd and lose yourself in the herd.''

''As soon as we exceed average human goodness by even a single step, our actions arouse suspicion. Virtue stands steadily "in the middle."''

''Brave people may be persuaded to an action by representing it as being more dangerous than it really is.''

''Pharisaism is not a degeneration in a good man: a large portion of it is rather the condition of all being-good.''

''Not with wrath do we kill, but with laughter. Come, let us kill the spirit of gravity!''

''You lovers of knowledge! So what have you done out of your love of knowledge up to now? Have you already stolen and murdered so as to know how a thief and a murderer feels?''

''How nicely the bitch Sensuality knows how to beg for a piece of the spirit, when a piece of flesh is denied her.''

''There is an innocence in lying which is the sign of good faith in a cause.''

''Of all evil I deem you capable: therefore I want the good from you.''

''Whoever regards human beings as a herd and flees them as swiftly as he can will no doubt be overtaken by them and impaled on their horns.''

''But beggars should be utterly abolished! Verily, it is annoying to give to them and it is annoying not to give to them.''

''The poet conveys his thoughts in festive solemnity on the carriage of rhythm: usually because they are unable to walk on their own feet.''

''To get into just those situations where sham virtues will not suffice, but rather where, as with the ropedancer on his rope, one either falls or stands—or gets down.''

''I know no other way to associate with great tasks than as play: as a sign of greatness, this is an essential presupposition.''

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

''Thus do I want man and woman to be: the one fit to wage war and the other fit to give birth, but both fit to dance with head and feet.''

''Everyone who enjoys supposes that the tree was concerned with the fruit, but it was really concerned with the seed.—In this lies the difference between all those who create and those who enjoy.''

''Love brings to light the lofty and hidden characteristics of the lover—what is rare and exceptional in him: to that extent it can easily be deceptive with respect to what is normal in him.''

''And if you are not a bird, then beware of coming to rest above an abyss.''

''Anyone who has declared someone else to be an idiot, a bad apple, is annoyed when it turns out in the end that he isn't.''

''Good deeds shun the light as anxiously as evil deeds: the latter fear that disclosure will bring on pain (as punishment), while the former fear that disclosure will take away pleasure (that pure pleasure, that pleasure per se, which immediately ceases once the vanity's satisfaction is added).''

''I teach you the superman. Man is something to be overcome. What have you done to overcome him?''

''The great advantage in noble parentage is that enables one to endure poverty more easily.''

''Altered opinions do not alter a man's character (or do so very little); but they do illuminate particular aspects of the constellation of his personality which had previously remained obscure and unrecognizable under another constellation of opinions.''

''Fathers have a lot to do to make up for having sons.''

''He who rejoices even at the stake triumphs not over pain but over the absence of pain where he had anticipated feeling it. A parable.''

''The way to transmute your iron duty into gold in everyone's eyes is this: always deliver more than you promise.''

''We place no particular value upon the possession of a virtue until we detect its complete absence in our adversary.''

''A friend whose hopes we cannot satisfy is a friend we would rather have as an enemy.''

''What is genius?—To will both a lofty goal and the means to achieving it.''

''Just as soon as we notice that someone has to force himself to pay attention when dealing and talking with us, we have a valid demonstration that he does not love us or that he does not love us anymore.''

''There is not enough love and goodness in the world to permit giving any of it away to imaginary beings.''

''A few hours' mountain climbing turns a rogue and a saint into two roughly equal creatures. Weariness is the shortest path to equality and fraternity—and liberty is finally added by sleep.''

''Death is close enough at hand so we do not need to be afraid of life.''

''When we stand the truth on its head we generally fail to notice that our head is not standing where it should be standing either.''

''A great man's followers are accustomed to blinding themselves so they can sing his praises better.''

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

''He who strays from the customary becomes a sacrifice to the extraordinary; he who keeps to the customary becomes its slave. He is condemned to perish in either case.''

''We often contradict an opinion when it is actually only the tone with which it was put forward that is uncongenial to us.''

''Let us guard against saying that death is opposed to life. The living is merely a species of the dead, and a very rare species.''

''There they stand, the small ones, like grass and weeds and scrub—innocent in their wretched insignificance. And now I make my furtive way through them and trample down as few as I can—but in doing so disgust consumes my heart.''

''The bad gains respect through imitation, the good loses it—especially in art.''

''Among women.—"The truth? Oh, you don't really know what 'the truth' is! Isn't it an assault on all our pudeurs?"''

''Every word is a prejudice.''

''Many people, especially women, never experience boredom because they have never learned to work properly.''

''The great epochs of our lives occur when we gain the courage to rechristen what is evil in us as what is best.''

''Not that you lied to me but that I no longer believe you—that is what has shaken me.''

''The philosopher caught in the nets of language.''

''Oh, what does science not conceal today! How much, at any rate, is it meant to conceal!''

''Heaping glowing coals on another person's head is usually misunderstood and comes to nothing because the other person knows just as well that he is in the right and has also given some thought on his own part to heaping coals.''

''Someone who does not write books, who thinks a lot, and who lives in unsatisfying society will usually be a good letter- writer.''

''There would be no sunshine in society if the born flatterers, I mean the so-called amiable people, did not bring it in with them.''

''The exuberant fertility of the universal will.''

''When somebody dies we usually need reasons for consolation, not so much to alleviate our pain as to excuse ourselves for so readily feeling consoled.''

''Willing sets you free: that is the true doctrine of will and freedom—thus Zarathustra instructs you.''

''The idealist is incorrigible: if he is expelled from his heaven, he makes an ideal out of hell.''

''The truthful man ends up realizing that he always lies.''

''Many deeds are done so as to forget another deed: there are also opiate activities. I exist so that another will be forgotten.''

''What do you regard as most humane?—To spare someone shame.''

''Assuming that we have trained our imagination to denounce the past, we will not suffer much from unfulfilled wishes.''

''War has always been the great wisdom of all those spirits who have grown too inward, too deep; its healing power lies even in the wound.''

''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.''

''Everyone who has ever built anywhere a "new heaven" first found the power thereto in his own hell.''

''We enjoy being out in nature so much because it has no opinion about us.''

''There is a rollicking kindness that looks like malice.''

''Only with the ultimate knowledge of all things will man have come to know himself. For things are but the boundaries of man.''

''There will be but few people who, when at a loss for topics of conversation, will not reveal the more secret affairs of their friends.''

''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.''

''With sturdy shoulders, space stands opposing all its weight to nothingness. Where space is, there is being.''

''Error has made animals into men; is truth in a position to make men into animals again?''

''Animals know nothing of themselves, and they also know nothing of the world.''

''For it is only as an aesthetic phenomenon that existence and the world are eternally justified.''

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

''What? A great man? I always see only the actor, aping his own ideal.''

''We pay dearly for immortality: we die for it more than once during our lifetimes.''

''What is done out of love always takes place beyond good and evil.''

''Chastity is a virtue in some, but in many it is almost a vice. To be sure, they abstain, but the bitch "sensuality" glances enviously out of everything they do.''

''Go up close to your friend, but do not go over to him! We should also respect the enemy in our friend.''

''The people we have employed in an undertaking that has turned out badly should be doubly rewarded.''

''Out of a brotherly love we occasionally embrace this or that somebody (because we cannot embrace everybody): but we must never let our somebody know it.''

''The newspaper reader says: this party is destroying itself through such mistakes. My higher politics says: a party that makes such mistakes is finished—it has lost its instinctive sureness.''

''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.''

''Never yet has there been a superman. I have seen them both naked, the greatest and the smallest men:—and they are still all- too-similar to one another. Verily, even the greatest I found to be—all-too-human.''

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

''We must understand how to hide in darkness in order to escape the gnat-swarms of utterly annoying admirers.''

''Great indebtedness does not lead to thankfulness, but rather to vengefulness; and when a small favor is not forgotten it turns into a gnawing worm.''

''One is most duplicitous toward one's god: he is not allowed to sin.''

''We forget our guilt when we have confessed it to another, but the other does not usually forget it.''

''You want to win him over to your side? Then pretend to be embarrassed in his presence.''

''Love forgives the lover even his lust.''

''Pity in a man of knowledge seems almost laughable, like sensitive hands on a cyclops.''

''"He is so polite!"MYes, he is always prepared with a biscuit for Cerberus and is so timid that he assumes everyone is Cerberus, even you and me—that is his "politeness."''

''At the ground of all these noble races, the beast of prey, the splendid, blond beast, lustfully roving in search of spoils and victory, cannot be mistaken.''

''When anyone apologizes to us he has to do it very expertly: otherwise we might easily come to see ourselves as the guilty party and experience unpleasant feelings.''

''We seldom break a leg as long as we are climbing wearily upwards in our lives, instead we do it when we start going easy on ourselves and choosing the comfortable paths.''

''The degree and nature of a man's sexuality extends to the uppermost pinnacle of his spirit.''

''It is inhuman to bless where one is cursed.''

''Look not into the sun! Even the moon is too bright for your nocturnal eyes!''

''You lack the courage to be consumed in flames and to become ashes: so you will never become new, and never young again!''

''Men are cowards when it comes to the "eternally feminine": and the little women know it.''

''Enjoying praise is in some people merely a civility of the heart—and just the opposite of a vanity of the spirit.''

''All rejection and negation indicates a deficiency in fertility: fundamentally, if only we were good plowland we would allow nothing to go unused, and in every thing, event, and person we would welcome manure, rain, or sunshine.''

''Through searching out origins, one becomes a crab. The historian looks backwards, and finally he also believes backwards.''

''It is the most sensual men who need to flee women and torment their bodies.''

''All signs of superhuman nature appear in man as illness or insanity.''

''Where I found the living, there I found the will to power; even in the will of servants I found the will to be master.''

''All good things were previously wicked things; every original sin has become an original virtue.''

''Whoever has looked deeply into the world might well guess what wisdom lies in the superficiality of men.''

''Many a man fails to become a thinker for the sole reason that his memory is too good.''

''A little health now and again is the ailing person's best remedy.''

''What can everyone do?—Praise and blame. This is human virtue, this is human madness.''

''Mothers easily become jealous of their sons' friends when they are particularly successful. As a rule a mother loves herself in her son more than she does the son himself.''

''Envy and jealousy are the private parts of the human soul. Perhaps the comparison can be extended.''

''The vanity of others offends our taste only when it offends our vanity.''

''Phlegmatic natures can be inspired to enthusiasm only by being made into fanatics.''

''Rash actions are seldom committed in isolation. With the first rash action we always do too much. So we usually go on to commit a second one—and then we do too little.''

''The moment Germany rises as a great power, France gains a new importance as a cultural power.''

''Whoever aims publicly at great things and at length perceives secretly that he is too weak to achieve them, has usually also insufficient strength to renounce his aims publicly, and then inevitably becomes a hypocrite.''

''The abdomen is the reason why man does not readily take himself to be a god.''

''The saddest thing the thinker can say to the artist is this: "So, could you not watch with me one hour?"''

''It is obvious that rationality has been utterly lost in modern marriage: which is no objection to marriage, however, but rather to modernity.''

''For art to exist, for any sort of aesthetic activity or perception to exist, a certain physiological precondition is indispensable: rapture.''

''Under peaceful conditions, the warlike man attacks himself.''

''The grand style follows suit with all great passion. It disdains to please, it forgets to persuade. It commands. It wills.''

''It is the stillest words that bring on the storm. Thoughts that come on doves' feet guide the world.''

''My philosophy is inverted Platonism: the further a thing is from true being, the purer, the lovelier, the better it is. Living in illusion as a goal!''

''We count the courtesies accorded us by unpopular people as offenses.''

''I would only believe in a god who knew how to dance.''

''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."''

''Comparing man and woman on the whole, one may say: woman would not possess a genius for ornamentation if she did not also possess an instinct for the secondary role.''

''He who humbles himself wants to be exalted.''

''Whoever possesses abundant joy must be a good man: but he is probably not the cleverest man, although he achieves exactly what it is that the cleverest man strives with all his cleverness to achieve.''

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

''There is nothing we like to communicate to others as much as the seal of secrecy—together with what lies under it.''

''Among the wealthy, generosity is often merely a kind of shyness.''

''The attorneys defending a criminal are rarely artists enough to turn the beautiful ghastliness of his deed to his advantage.''

''I admire the courage and wisdom of Socrates in everything he did, said—and did not say.''

''Not the intensity, but the durability of lofty feelings makes lofty men.''

''In morality, man treats himself not as individuum but as dividuum.''

''Shackled heart, free spirit.—Whoever binds his heart tightly and imprisons it may indulge his spirit in many liberties: I have already said that once. But no one believes me unless he already knows.''

''Knowing things halfway is a greater success than knowing things completely: it takes things to be simpler than they really are and so makes its opinions more easily understandable and persuasive.''

''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.''

''Whatever is gold does not glitter. A gentle radiance belongs to the noblest metal.''

''The pine tree seems to listen, the fir tree seems to wait, and neither with impatience:Mthey give no thought to the little people below them whose impatience and curiosity eat them up alive.''

''If you are too weak to give yourselves your own law, then a tyrant shall lay his yoke upon you and say: "Obey! Clench your teeth and obey!" And all good and evil shall be drowned in obedience to him.''

''All good things are strong inducements to life, even that good book written to attack life.''

''Pity is extolled as the virtue of prostitutes.''

''He who attains his ideal, thereby also transcends it''

''In every form of womanly love something of motherly love also comes to light.''

''Poets treat their experiences shamelessly: they exploit them.''

''Having a talent is not enough: one must also have your permission to have it—right, my friends?''

''Everything good is instinct—and, as a result, easy, necessary, free.''

''At the very moment when someone is beginning to take philosophy seriously, the whole world believes the opposite.''

''At bottom, man mirrors himself in things; he considers everything beautiful that reflects his own image: the judgment "beautiful" is the vanity of his species.''

''"Good and evil are God's prejudices"Msaid the serpent.''

''Illness is a clumsy attempt to arrive at health: we must come to nature's aid with intellect.''

''In order to be somebody you have to hold even your shadow in high regard.''

''Sometimes we remain true to a cause simply because its opponents are unfailingly tasteless.''

''Were anyone nowadays to venture to say, "Whoever is not for me is against me," he would immediately have everyone against him. MThis sentiment does credit to our times.''

''The first opinion that occurs to us when we are suddenly asked about something is usually not our own but only the current one pertaining to our class, position, or parentage; our own opinions seldom swim on the surface.''

''A matter that becomes clear ceases to concern us.—What was that god thinking who counseled, "Know thyself!" Did he perhaps mean, "Cease to concern yourself! Become objective!"—And Socrates?—And "scientific men"?''

''As refined fare serves a hungry man as well as and no better than coarser food, the more pretentious artist will not dream of inviting the hungry man to his meal.''

''In everything one thing is impossible: rationality.''

''A man who whinnies with noisy laughter, surpasses all the animals in vulgarity.''

''In war personal revenge maintains its silence.''

''The "will to truth"Mas the impotence of the will to create.''

''It is only when we have ceased to be the followers of our followers that we comprehend how meaningless followers are.''

''Whoever thinks about it more deeply knows that he is always in the wrong, whatever his actions and judgments may be.''

''People are not ashamed to think about dirty things, but they are ashamed when they imagine that others believe them capable of having these dirty thoughts.''

''Whoever turns away from us might not offend us in doing so perhaps, but he certainly offends our followers.''

''About what we neither know nor feel precisely while awake—whether we have a good or a bad conscience toward a certain person—our dreams instruct us fully and unambiguously.''

''What is the vanity of the vainest man compared with the vanity which the most modest person possesses when, in connection with nature and the world, he experiences himself as "man"!''

''Our crime against criminals is that we treat them as villains.''

''To become artist (creator), saint (lover), and philosopher (knower) in a single person:Mmy practical goal!''

''The higher we rise up, the smaller we appear to those who are unable to fly.''

''Whoever does not have a good father should procure one.''

''Idleness is the beginning of all psychology. What? Could it be that psychology is—a vice?''

''The press, the machine, the railroad, the telegraph are premises whose conclusion once a thousand years have passed no one has dared to draw as yet.''

''You utilitarians, you too love everything useful only as a vehicle of your inclinations—you too really find the noise of its wheels intolerable?''

''In his lonely solitude, the solitary man feeds upon himself; in the thronging multitude, the many feed upon him. Now choose.''

''When we dream about those who are long since forgotten or dead, it is a sign that we have undergone a radical transformation and that the ground on which we live has been completely dug up: then the dead rise up, and our antiquity becomes modernity.''

''What then in the last resort are the truths of mankind?—They are the irrefutable errors of mankind.''

''But extreme positions are not succeeded by moderate ones but rather by equally extreme, but inverted, positions.''

''Every living body continuously eliminates feces, it rejects what is not serviceable to the assimilating organism: what man despises, what arouses his disgust, what he calls evil, are excrements.''

''The most dangerous physicians are those born actors who imitate born physicians with a perfectly deceptive guile.''

''The people we keep standing in the anteroom of our favor either start fermenting or turn sour.''

''We have to learn how to come out of unclean situations cleaner than we were, and even how to wash ourselves with dirty water when we need to.''

''What is it that you love in others?—My hopes.''

''At the root of all these noble races, the beast of prey, the splendid blond beast prowling greedily in search of spoils and victory, cannot be mistaken.''

''Women want to serve, and this is where their happiness lies: but the free spirit does not want to be served, and this is where his happiness lies.''

''So cold, so icy that one burns one's fingers on him! Every hand that touches him pulls away in fright!—And for that very reason, some take him to be glowing hot.''

''A refined soul is distressed to know that someone owes it thanks; a crude soul, to know that it owes someone thanks.''

''Scholars who become politicians are usually assigned the comic role of having to be the good conscience of state policy.''

''Life is fountain of joy; but where the rabble also gather to drink, all wells are poisoned.''

''Do whatever you will, but first be such as are able to will.''

''However closely people are attached to one another, their mutual horizon nonetheless includes all four compass directions, and now and again they notice it.''

''Wit is the epitaph of an emotion.''

''Our vanity is hardest to wound precisely when our pride has just been wounded.''

''Women are constituted in such a way that all truth (regarding men, love, children, society, the purpose of life) disgusts them, and in such a way that they try to revenge themselves on anyone who opens their eyes.''

''Give me today, for once, the worst throw of your dice, destiny. Today I transmute everything into gold.''

''Seducing one's neighbor to a good opinion and then afterwards believing devoutly in this neighbor's opinion—who can match women in this clever ploy?''

''Thinking about suicide is a potent consolation: it helps us to get through many a bad night.''

''We hear only those questions for which we are in a position to find answers.''

''Men seldom persevere in a vocation unless they believe or can convince themselves that it is fundamentally more important than any other calling. Women are the same with their lovers.''

''Man is no longer an artist, he has become a work of art.''

''For woman, man is a means: the end is always the child.''

''We should part from life as Odysseus parted from Nausicaa—blessing it rather than in love with it.''

''You say it is the good cause that hallows even war? I say unto you: it is the good war that hallows any cause.''

''I want to know whether you are a person devoted to creating or to exchanging in some respect or other: as a creator you belong to the free, as an exchanger you are their slave and instrument.''

''Every word has its fragrance: there is a harmony and a disharmony of fragrances, and hence of words.''

''Thus the will to power strives towards oppositions, towards displeasure. There is a will to suffering at the foundation of all organic life (contrary to "happiness" as "goal").''

''Is not wounded vanity the mother of all tragedies?''

''My humanity is incessant self-overcoming.''

''And so while dreams are the individual man's play with reality, the sculptor's art is (in a broader sense) the play with dreams.''

''When virtue has slept it will arise the more refreshed.''

''Madness is a rare thing in individuals—but in groups, parties, peoples, and ages it is the rule.''

''"Reason" causes us to falsify the testimony of the senses. To the extent that the senses show becoming, passing away, and change, they do not lie.''

''The worst readers are those who behave like plundering soldiers: they take away a few things they can use, soil and jumble what remains, and slander the whole.''

''What the philosopher is seeking is not truth, but rather the metamorphosis of the world into man.''

''With our principles we seek to rule our habits with an iron hand, or to justify, honor, scold, or conceal them:Mtwo men with identical principles are likely to be seeking fundamentally different things with them.''

''You say that I should be your teacher! See to it that I am your pinion and not your brake.''

''When I contemplated purpose I also contemplated chance and foolishness.''

''Finding everything deep—that is an inconvenient trait: it causes a person constantly to strain his eyes and eventually to find out more than he might have wished.''

''We attack not only to hurt someone, to defeat him, but perhaps also simply to become conscious of our own strength.''

''What we do is never understood but always merely praised or blamed.''

''Those people have no real interest in a science who only begin to get excited about it when they themselves have made discoveries in it.''

''That life is really so tragic would least of all explain the origin of an art form—assuming that art is not merely imitation of the reality of nature but rather a metaphysical supplement of the reality of nature, placed beside it for its overcoming.''

''In song and dance man expresses himself as a member of a higher community: he has forgotten how to walk and speak and is on the way toward flying up into the air, dancing.''

''What a person is begins to betray itself when his talent weakens—when he stops showing what he can do. Talent, too, is ornamentation, and ornamentation, too, is a hiding place.''

''There is no pre-established harmony between the advancement of truth and the well-being of mankind.''

''The surest sign that two people no longer speak the same language is that both say ironic things to one another but that neither senses the irony.''

''He who is usually self-sufficient becomes exceptionally vain and keenly alive to fame and praise when he is physically ill. The more he loses himself the more he has to endeavor to regain his position by means of the opinion of others.''

''Along the journey we commonly forget its goal. Almost every vocation is chosen and entered upon as a means to a purpose but is ultimately continued as a final purpose in itself. Forgetting our objectives is the most frequent stupidity in which we indulge ourselves.''

''Our salvation lies not in knowing, but in creating!''

''Not when truth is dirty, but when it is shallow, does the enlightened man dislike to wade into its waters.''

''Sometimes all you need to do to win clever people over to a principle is to present it in the form of a shocking paradox.''

''We belong to an age whose culture is in danger of perishing through the means to culture.''

''Thoughts are the shadows of our feelings—always darker, emptier, simpler than they are.''

''Women are quite capable of entering into a friendship with a man, but to keep it going—that takes a little physical antipathy as well.''

''In the mountains of truth you will never climb in vain: either you will already get further up today or you will exercise your strength so that you can climb higher tomorrow.''

''A friend should be a master at guessing and keeping still: you must not want to see everything.''

''Everything about woman is a riddle, and everything about woman has a single solution: that is, pregnancy.''

''The grand style arises when beauty wins a victory over the monstrous.''

''Nihilism: any aim is lacking, any answer to the question "why" is lacking. What does nihilism mean?—that the supreme values devaluate themselves.''

''One should steal only where one cannot rob.''

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

''There are instances when we are like horses, we psychologists, and grow restless: we see our own shadow wavering up and down before us. A psychologist must look away from himself in order to see anything at all.''

''Art is not merely an imitation of the reality of nature, but in truth a metaphysical supplement to the reality of nature, placed alongside thereof for its conquest.''

''What verse is for the poet, dialectical thinking is for the philosopher. He grasps for it in order to get hold of his own enchantment, in order to perpetuate it.''

''Moral sensibilities are nowadays at such cross-purposes that to one man a morality is proved by its utility, while to another its utility refutes it.''

''The Greeks, with their truly healthy culture, have once and for all justified philosophy simply by having engaged in it, and having engaged in it more fully than any other people.''

''Protest, evasion, merry distrust, and a delight in mockery are symptoms of health: everything unconditional belongs in pathology.''

''The spiritual activity of millennia is deposited in language.''

''One often contradicts an opinion when what is uncongenial is really the tone in which it was conveyed.''

''The hour when you say, "What does my virtue matter? It has not yet made me rage. How tired I am of my good and my evil! All that is poverty and filth, and a wretched complacency!"''

''There are no moral phenomena at all, but only a moral interpretation of phenomena.''

''Words are but symbols for the relations of things to one another and to us; nowhere do they touch upon absolute truth.''

''The sick are parasites on society. In a certain state it is indecent to go on living. To continue vegetating in cowardly dependence on physicians and machinations once the meaning of life, the right to life, has been lost ought to occasion a deep contempt within society.''

''When we cannot stand certain people, we try to have suspicions about them.''

''Men inadvertently comport themselves with nobility when they have grown accustomed to wanting nothing from others and always giving to them.''

''On every parable you ride to every truth.''

''When we have a great goal we are superior even to justice, not merely to our deeds and our judges.''

''What do you believe in?—In this, that the weights of all things must be determined anew.''

''Where does one not find that bland degeneration which beer produces in the spirit!''

''The aphorism, the apothegm, in which I am the first among the Germans to be a master, are the forms of "eternity"; it is my ambition to say in ten sentences what everyone else says in a book—what everyone else does not say in a book.''

''Early in the morning, when day breaks, when all is fresh, in the dawn of one's strength—to read a book at such a time is simply depraved!''

''Here is a hero who did nothing but shake the tree as soon as the fruit was ripe. Does this seem to be too small a thing to you? Then take a good look at the tree he shook.''

''One who does not know how to discover the pathway to his ideal lives more frivolously and impudently than the man without an ideal.''

''If alms were only given out of pity, all the beggars would have starved to death.''

''Convictions are more dangerous enemies of truth than lies.''

''People who, out of an inborn moderation, leave every glass standing only half-emptied refuse to admit that everything in the world has its sediments and dregs.''

''Let us think this thought in its most terrible form: existence as it is, without meaning or aim, and yet recurring inevitably, without a finale in nothingness—"eternal recurrence."''

''Why is it that wellnesses are not as contagious as illnesses—generally speaking, but also especially regarding taste? Or are there epidemics of health?''

''In every party there is one person who, through his dotingly credulous enunciation of party principles, incites the other members to defection.''

''And how politely the bitch "sensuality" knows how to beg for a piece of spirit when she is refused a piece of flesh!''

''You shall love peace as a means to new wars—and the short peace more than the long one.''

''Yes, life is a woman!''

''Oh, how much is today hidden by science! Oh, how much it is expected to hide!''

''"Dark times" is what they call it in Norway when the sun remains below the horizon all day long: the temperature falls slowly but surely at such times.—A nice metaphor for all those thinkers for whom the sun of mankind's future has temporarily disappeared.''

''We take a fancy to something: and scarcely have we thoroughly taken a fancy to it when that tyrant in us calls out: "Give me that in sacrifice"—and we give it.''

''It is good to express a thing twice right at the outset and so to give it a right foot and also a left one. Truth can surely stand on one leg, but with two it will be able to walk and get around.''

''To be forced to refuse a gift merely because it was not offered in the right way embitters us toward the giver.''

''The disgust with dirt can be so great that it keeps us from cleaning ourselves—from "justifying" ourselves.''

''This thinker needs no one to refute him: he manages to do that himself.''

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

''It is not to everyone's taste that truth should be pronounced pleasant. But at least let no one believe that error becomes truth when it is pronounced unpleasant.''

''Extreme positions are not succeeded by moderate ones, but by contrary extreme positions.''

''There is more reason in your body than in your best wisdom.''

''Childhood and youth are ends in themselves, not stages.''

''What? You have chosen virtue and the uplifted bosom, and yet you leer at the advantages of the unscrupulous? But virtue involves renouncing "advantages" ... (to be nailed on an anti- Semite's door).''

''We feign pity when we want to demonstrate our ascendancy over feelings of hostility: but usually in vain. Whenever we notice this, there is an accompanying surge in those hostile sensations.''

''The most dangerous follower is the one whose defection would destroy the whole party: hence, the best follower.''

''Pain makes hens and poets cackle.''

''The unselective knowledge drive resembles the indiscriminate sexual drive—signs of vulgarity!''

''Annoyance is a physical malady that is in no way cured just because the annoying situation that causes it is eliminated.''

''The great wars of the present age are the effects of the study of history.''

''Marriages that made out of love (so-called "love-matches") have error as their father and misery (necessity) as their mother.''

''To become wise you have to want to experience certain experiences, and so to run into their open jaws. This is very dangerous, to be sure; many a "wise man" has been eaten up in doing so.''

''Distrust everyone in whom the impulse to punish is powerful!''

''The ascetic makes a necessity out of virtue.''

''Acknowledge your will and speak to us all, "This alone is what I will to be!" Hang your own penal code up above you: we want to be its enforcers!''

''I mistrust all systematizers and avoid them. The will to a system is a lack of integrity.''

''We mention nature and forget ourselves in it: we ourselves are nature, quand même—. As a result, nature is something entirely different from what comes to mind when we invoke its name.''

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

''Belief in the truth commences with the doubting of all those "truths" we once believed.''

''A good seat on a horse steals away your opponent's courage and your onlooker's heart—what reason is there to attack? Sit like one who has conquered?''

''The English are a nation of consummate cant.''

''The flame is not as bright to itself as it is to those it illuminates: so too the sage.''

''A small garden, figs, a little cheese, and, along with this, three or four good friends—such was luxury to Epicurus.''

''Great things demand that we either remain silent about them or speak in a great manner: in a great manner, that is—cynically and with innocence.''

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

''You say, "It is dark." And in truth, I did place a cloud before your sun. But do you not see how the edges of the cloud are already glowing and turning light.''

''How good bad music and bad reasons sound when we are marching into battle against an enemy.''

''Never to talk about ourselves is a very noble piece of hypocrisy.''

''The one who is punished is no longer the one who did the deed. He is always the scapegoat.''

''"Marriage": this I call the will that moves two to create the one which is more than those who created it.''

''A real fox calls sour not only those grapes that he cannot reach but also those that he has reached and taken away from others.''

''One sticks to an opinion because he prides himself on having come to it on his own, and another because he has taken great pains to learn it and is proud to have grasped it: and so both do so out of vanity.''

''Whatever we think about and question a lot becomes questionable.''

''Illusions are certainly expensive amusements: but the destruction of illusions is even more expensive—when looked upon as an amusement, which to many people is what it undeniably is.''

''The arrogance that accompanies merit offends us even more than the arrogance of people who are lacking in merit: since merit itself offends us.''

''Man ... cannot learn to forget, but hangs on the past: however far or fast he runs, that chain runs with him.''

''Lift up your hearts, my brothers, high, higher! And don't forget about your legs either! Lift up your legs as well, you good dancers, and better yet—stand also on your heads!''

''For both parties, the most disagreeable way of responding to a polemic is to be angry and keep silent: for the aggressor usually takes the silence as a sign of disdain.''

''Do you want to go on together? Or go ahead? Or go it alone? ... You have to know what you want and that you want. Fourth question of conscience.''

''That grand drama in a hundred acts, which is reserved for the next two centuries of Europe—the most terrible, most questionable and perhaps also the most hopeful of all dramas.''

''The enormous expectation having to do with sexual love and the shame involved in this expectation degrades all a woman's perspectives from the start.''

''The charm of knowledge would be small indeed, were it not that there is so much shame to be overcome on the way to it.''

''If married couples did not live together good marriages would be more common.''

''One should still honor the enemy in his friend. Can you go up close to your friend without going over to him?''

''When a man has just been greatly honored and has eaten a little he is the most generous.''

''There is in general good reason to suppose that in several respects the gods could all benefit from instruction by us human beings. We humans are—more humane.''

''Even concubinage has been corrupted:Mby marriage.''

''He who cannot obey himself will be commanded. Such is the nature of all living things.''

''There is an innocence in admiration; it is found in those to whom it has never yet occurred that they, too, might be admired some day.''

''A person must have a good memory to keep the promises he has made. A person must have a strong imagination to be able to have pity. So closely is morality tied to the quality of the intellect.''

''Even the bravest among us rarely possesses the courage for what he really knows.''

''I have exposed myself and am not ashamed to stand there naked. "Shame" is what we call the monster that attached itself to men when they aspired beyond the animals.''

''A man's maturity: that is to have rediscovered the seriousness he possessed as a child at play.''

''The ordinary man is as courageous and invulnerable as a hero when he does not recognize any danger, when he has no eyes to see it. Conversely, the hero's only vulnerable spot is on his back, and so exactly where he has no eyes.''

''The same emotions in man and woman are nonetheless dissimilar in tempo: consequently, man and woman never cease to misunderstand one another.''

''Every habit makes our hand more witty and our wit less handy.''

''We cannot live without valuing: but we can live without valuing what you value.''

''People who wish to numb our caution in dealing with them by means of flattery are employing a dangerous expedient, like a sleeping draught, which, if it does not put us to sleep, keeps us all the more awake.''

''Only in war are you holy, and when you are robbers and cruel.''

''The child as a monument to the passion of two people; the will to oneness in two.''

''Before the effect one believes in different causes than one does after the effect.''

''The empty, the one, the unmoved, the full, satiation, wanting nothing—that would be my evil: in short, dreamless sleep.''

''In revenge and in love woman is more barbaric than man is.''

''In the consciousness of the truth he has perceived, man now sees everywhere only the awfulness or the absurdity of existence ... and loathing seizes him.''

''It takes physical courage to indulge in wickedness. The "good" are too cowardly to do it.''

''Beware of spitting against the wind!''

''The most spiritual human beings, assuming they are the most courageous, also experience by far the most painful tragedies: but it is precisely for this reason that they honor life, because it brings against them its most formidable weapons.''

''They climb the mountain like beasts, stupid and sweating; it seems that no one bothered to tell them that there are beautiful vistas along the way.''

''Someone who instinctively nourishes himself on ambrosia alone, who leaves behind what is indigestible in things.''

''People who feel insecure in social situations never miss a chance to exhibit their dominance over close, submissive friends, whom they put down publicly, in front of everyone—by teasing, for example.''

''When there is a choice about it, a great sacrifice is preferable to a small sacrifice, because we compensate ourselves for a great one with self-admiration, which is not possible with a small one.''

''Crude men who feel themselves insulted tend to assess the degree of insult as high as possible, and talk about the offense in greatly exaggerated language, only so they can revel to their heart's content in the aroused feelings of hatred and revenge.''

''Admiration for a quality or an art can be so strong that it deters us from striving to possess it.''

''Beware in the presence of cats: they never give, they do not even retaliate—they only reply, and purr in doing so.''

''In art the end does not sanctify the means: but sacred means employed here can sanctify the end.''

''Not to be cowardly when it comes to our own actions! Not to leave them in the lurch!—The sting of conscience is indecent.''

''Inaction, letting be, neither creating nor destroying—that is my evil. And also the knower as one without desire.''

''Objectivity and justice have nothing to do with one another.''

''After coming into contact with a religious man I always feel I must wash my hands.''

''Our sense of the tragic waxes and wanes with our sensuality.''

''I love something: and scarcely do I love it completely when the tyrant in me says: "I want that in sacrifice." This cruelty is in my entrails. Behold! I am evil.''

''One lives for today, one lives on the spur of the moment—one lives most irresponsibly: and it is precisely this that one calls "freedom."''

''Does wisdom perhaps appear on the earth as a raven which is inspired by the smell of carrion?''

''Immortal is the moment when I engendered the recurrence. For the sake of this moment I bear the recurrence.''

''Subordination to morality can be slavish or vain or self- interested or resigned or gloomily enthusiastic or thoughtless or an act of despair, just as subordination to a prince can be: in itself it is nothing moral.''

''The educational system in large countries will always be utterly mediocre, for the same reason that the cooking in large kitchens is mediocre at best.''

''Both classically- and romantically-minded spirits—inasmuch as these two species always exist—occupy themselves with a vision of the future: but the former do so out of a strength of their age, the latter out of its weakness.''

''We must repay goodness and wickedness: but why exactly to the person who has done us a good or a wicked turn?''

''Mystical explanations are thought to be deep; the truth is that they are not even shallow.''

''Some men have sighed over the abduction of their wives, but many more have sighed because no one wanted to abduct theirs.''

''Few serve truth in truth because only few have the pure will to be just, and of those again very few have the strength to be just.''

''Here we also see: what this divinity lacks is not only a sense of shame—and there are also other reasons for conjecturing that in several respects all of the gods could learn from us humans. We humans are—more humane.''

''When we have to change our mind about someone, we hold the inconvenience he has caused us very much against him.''

''The disillusioned one speaks.—I sought great human beings, and I never found anything but the apes of their ideals.''

''We must be physicists in order ... to be creative since so far codes of values and ideals have been constructed in ignorance of physics or even in contradiction to physics.''

''I am afraid that the animals regard man as a creature like themselves which has lost its sound animal wits in a most dangerous way—that they regard him as the deranged animal, as the laughing animal, as the weeping animal, as the unhappy animal.''

''To live alone, one must be either an animal or a god—says Aristotle. Leaving out the third possibility: one must be both—a philosopher.''

''What is the strongest cure?—Victory.''

''We should turn our death into a celebration, even if only out of a malice towards life: towards the woman who wants to leave—us!''

''When power becomes gracious and descends into the visible—such descent I call beauty.''

''There is not enough religion in the world even to destroy religion.''

''Genteel women suppose that those things do not really exist about which it is impossible to talk in polite company.''

''My genius is in my nostrils.''

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

''Laughter means: taking a mischievous delight in someone else's uneasiness, but with a good conscience.''

''Loving and perishing: it's been a rhyme all these eternities. The will to love: that is, also being willing to die.''

''Out of love, women become entirely what it is that they are in the imaginations of the men who love them.''

''No conqueror believes in chance.''

''The earth has become small, and on it hops the last man, who makes everything small. His race can no more be exterminated than the flea can be. The last man lives the longest.''

''In the mountains, the shortest way is from peak to peak: but for that you must have long legs. Aphorisms should be peaks: and those to whom they are addressed, great and lofty.''

''All credibility, all good conscience, all evidence of truth come only from the senses.''

''They were steps for me, and I climbed up over them—to do so I needed to go on past them. But they supposed I wanted to settle down on them.''

''The man of knowledge must not only be able to love his enemies, he must also be able to hate his friends.''

''We can speak very much to the purpose and yet in such a way that the whole world cries out in contradiction: namely, when we are not speaking to the whole world.''

''The drive toward knowledge has a moral origin.''

''The familiarity of those who are superior embitters because it may not be returned.''

''One who dresses in rags that have been washed clean dresses cleanly to be sure, but raggedly nonetheless.''

''The "will to truth"Mthat might be a concealed will to death.''

''The strongest knowledge (that of the total unfreedom of the human will) is nonetheless the poorest in successes: for it always has the strongest opponent, human vanity.''

''Everyone carries within himself an image of womanliness derived from his mother: it is this that determines whether, on the whole, he will revere women, or despise them, or remain generally indifferent to them.''

''Whoever possesses the will to suffering within himself has a different attitude towards cruelty: he does not regard it as inherently harmful and bad.''

''A sure way to irritate people and to put evil thoughts into their heads is to keep them waiting a long time. This makes them immoral.''

''You run ahead?—Do you do it as a shepherd? Or as an exception? A third possibility would be as a runaway ... First question of conscience.''

''"Knowledge for its own sake"Mthat is the last snare that morality sets: here one gets all tangled up in it once again.''

''The hour when you say, "What does my reason matter? Does it crave knowledge as a lion craves its food? It is poverty and filth, and a wretched complacency!"''

''The future is just as much a condition of the present as is the past. "What shall be and must be is the ground of that which is."''

''We talk about taking "pleasure in a thing": but in truth it is pleasure in ourselves, mediated by a thing.''

''Formula of my happiness: a Yes, a No, a straight line, a goal.''

''The more a person indulges himself the less others are willing to indulge him.''

''Whoever lives for the sake of combating an enemy has an interest in the enemy's staying alive.''

''It belongs to the humanity of a master to warn his pupil about himself.''

''The pia fraus offends the taste (the "piety") of the free spirit, who has "the piety of the search for knowledge," even more than the impia fraus. Here his profound lack of understanding for the church, a characteristic of the type "free spirit"Mhis unfreedom.''

''Unexplained, obscure matters are regarded as more important than explained, clear ones.''

''We grow hostile to many an artist or writer, not because we finally come to see he has deceived us, but because he thought no subtler means were required to ensnare us.''

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

''Forgetting: that is a divine capacity. And whoever aspires to the heights and wants to fly must cast off much that is heavy and make himself light—I call it a divine capacity for lightness.''

''Once the decision has been reached, close your ears even to the best counter-argument: a sign of strong character. Thus an occasional will to stupidity.''

''Youth is disagreeable time, for it is neither possible then nor prudent to be productive in any sense whatsoever.''

''We criticize a man or a book most sharply when we sketch out their ideal.''

''Three metamorphoses of the spirit I relate to you: how the spirit becomes a camel; and the camel, a lion; and the lion, finally, a child.''

''The golden fleece of self-sufficiency guards against cudgel- blows but not against pin-pricks.''

''It should have sung, this "new soul"—and not spoken!''

''Even the most honest writer lets slip a word too many when he wants to round off a period.''

''All in all, punishment hardens and renders people more insensible; it concentrates; it increases the feeling of estrangement; it strengthens the power of resistance.''

''Man alone resists the direction of gravitation: he constantly wants to fall—upwards.''

''The finest and healthiest thing about science is, as in the mountains, the brisk air blowing around in it.—The spiritually delicate (such as artists) shun and slander science owing to this air.''

''Do you suppose that sacrifice is the hallmark of moral action?—Just stop to consider whether sacrifice is not involved in every action that is done with deliberation, the worst as well as the best.''

''And as for sickness: are we not almost tempted to ask whether we could get along without it?''

''I say to you: we must still have chaos within us to be able to give birth to a dancing star. I say to you: you still have chaos within you.''

''In our interactions with people, a benevolent hypocrisy is frequently required—acting as though we do not see through the motives of their actions.''

''Contentment even protects against colds. Has any woman who knew herself to be well dressed ever caught a cold?—I am assuming that she was barely dressed.''

''Desire is happiness: satisfaction as happiness is merely the ultimate moment of desire. To be wish and wish alone is happiness, and a new wish over and over again.''

''Poets and writers who are in love with the superlative all want to do more than they can.''

''We do not place especial value on the possession of a virtue until we notice its total absence in our opponent.''

''It is no doubt possible to fly—but first you must know how to dance like an angel.''

''The surest remedy to counteract the male sickness of self- contempt is to be loved by a clever woman.''

''The wheel and the brake have different duties, but also one in common: to hurt one another.''

''Whether in conversation we generally agree or disagree with others is largely a matter of habit: the one tendency makes as much sense as the other.''