Friedrich Nietzsche

“Ages of happiness. - An age of happiness is quite impossible, because men want only to desire it but not to have it, and every individual who experiences good times learns to downright pray for misery and disquietude. The destiny of man is designed for happy moments - every life has them - but not for happy ages. Nonetheless they will remain fixed in the imagination of man as 'the other side of the hill' because they have been inherited from ages past: for the concepts of the age of happiness was no doubt acquired in primeval times from that condition of which, after violent exertion in hunting and warfare, man gives himself up to repose, stretches his limbs and hears the pinions of sleep rustling about him. It is a false conclusion if, in accordance with that ancient familiar experience, man imagines that, after whole ages of toil and deprivation, he can then partake of that condition of happiness correspondingly enhanced and protracted.”

“It is not conflict of opinions that has made history so violent but conflict of belief in opinions, that is to say conflict of convictions.”

“Truth as Circe. - Error has transformed animals into men; is truth perhaps capable of changing man back into an animal?”

“Memory says, 'I did that.' Pride replies, 'I could not have done that.' Eventually, memory yields.”

“Love, too, has to be learned.”

“In the end we are always rewarded for our good will, our patience, fair-mindedness, and gentleness with what is strange.”

“Twofold misjudgement. - The misfortune suffered by clear-minded and easily understood writers is that they are taken for shallow and thus little effort is expended on reading them: and the good fortune that attends the obscure is that the reader toils at them and ascribes to them the pleasure he has in fact gained from his own zeal.”

“I am no man, I am dynamite.”

“Language as putative science. - The significance of language for the evolution of culture lies in this, that mankind set up in language a separate world beside the other world, a place it took to be so firmly set that, standing upon it, it could lift the rest of the world off its hinges and make itself master of it. To the extent that man has for long ages believed in the concepts and names of things as in aeternae veritates he has appropriated to himself that pride by which he raised himself above the animal: he really thought that in language he possessed knowledge of the world. The sculptor of language was not so modest as to believe that he was only giving things designations, he conceived rather that with words he was expressing supreame knowledge of things; language is, in fact, the first stage of occupation with science. Here, too, it is the belief that the truth has been found out of which the mightiest sources of energy have flowed. A great deal later - only now - it dawns on men that in their belief in language they have propagated a tremendous error. Happily, it is too late for the evolution of reason, which depends on this belief, to be put back. - Logic too depends on presuppositions with which nothing in the real world corresponds, for example on the presupposition that there are identical things, that the same thing is identical at different points of time: but this science came into existence through the opposite belief (that such conditions do obtain in the real world). It is the same with mathematics, which would certainly not have come into existence if one had known from the beginning that there was in nature no exactly straight line, no real circle, no absolute magnitude.”

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

“When thou goest to woman, take thy whip.”

“أحمق من لا يزال يتعثر فى الأحجار والبشر”

“the lie is a condition of life.”

“Of what is great one must either be silent or speak with greatness. With greatness--that means cynically and with innocence.”

“Besides this I place another equally obvious confirmation of my view that opera is based on the same principles as our Alexandrian culture. Opera is the birth of the theoretical man, the critical layman, not of the artist: one of the most surprising facts in the history of all the arts. It was the demand of throughly unmusical hearers that before everything else the words must be understood, so that according to them a rebirth of music is to be expected only when some mode of singing has been discovered in which textword lords it over counterpoint like master over servant: For the words, it is argued, are as much nobler than the accompanying harmonic system as the soul is nobler than the body.”

“Glaubt es mir - das Geheimnis, um die größte Fruchtbarkeit und den größten Genuß vom Dasein einzuernten, heisst: gefährlich leben. ”

“The danger in happiness - "Now everything is turning out right for me; from now on I'll love every turn of fate - Who wants to be my fate?”

“Have you ever said Yes to a single joy? O my friends, then you have said Yes too to all woe. All things are entangled, ensnared, enamored; if ever you wanted one thing twice, if ever you said, "You please me, happiness! Abide, moment!" then you wanted all back. All anew, all eternally, all entangled, ensnared, enamored--oh then you loved the world. Eternal ones, love it eternally and evermore; and to woe too, you say: go, but return! For all joy wants--eternity.”

“All great things must first wear terrifying and monstrous masks in order to inscribe themselves on the hearts of humanity.”

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

“Ein Buch, das man liebt, darf man nicht leihen, sondern muss es besitzen.”

“Was aus Liebe getan wird, geschieht immer jenseits von Gut und Böse. (What is done out of love always takes place beyond good and evil.)”

“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.”

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

“Sensuality often hastens the "Growth of Love" so much that the roots remain weak and are easily torn up.”

“It is not enough that you understand in what ignorance man and beast live; you must also have and acquire the will to ignorance. You need to grasp that without this kind of ignorance life itself would be impossible, that it is a condition under which alone the living thing can preserve itself and prosper: a great, firm dome of ignorance must encompass you.”

“Insight: all evaluation is made from a definite perspective: that of the preservation of the individual, a community, a race, a state, a church, a faith, a culture.--- Because we forget that valuation is always from a perspective, a single individual contains within him a vast confusion of contradictory valuations and consequently of contradictory drives. This is the expression of the diseased condition in man, in contrast to the animals in which all existing instincts answer to quite definite tasks. This contradictory creature has in his nature, however, a great method of acquiring knowledge: he feels many pros and cons, he raises himself to justice---to comprehension beyond esteeming things good and evil. The wisest man would be the one richest in contradictions, who has, as it were, antennae for all types of men---as well as his great moments of grand harmony---a rare accident even in us! A sort of planetary motion---”

“The wisest man would be the one richest in contradictions, who has, as it were, antennae for all types of men---as well as his great moments of grand harmony---a rare accident even in us! A sort of planetary motion---”

“Knowledge kills action; action requires the veils of illusion.”

“Der Gewissensbiss ist, wie der Biss des Hundes gegen einen Stein, eine Dummheit.”

“All I need is a sheet of paperand something to write with, and thenI can turn the world upside down.”

“The belly is the reason why man does not mistake himself for a god.”

“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.”

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

“There are no beautiful surfaces without a terrible depth.”

“There are terrible people who, instead of solving a problem, bungle it and make it more difficult for all who come after. Whoever can't hit the nail on the head should, please, not hit at all.”

“At bottom every man knows well enough that he is a unique being, only once on this earth; and by no extraordinary chance will such a marvelously picturesque piece of diversity in unity as he is, ever be put together a second time.”

“Siempre hay algo de locura en el amor; pero también siempre hay algo de razón en la locura.”

“thou great star! what would be thy happiness if thou hadst not those for whom thou shinest!”

“Truths are illlusions which we have forgotten are illusions.”

“So lernte ich bei Zeiten schweigen, so wie, dass man reden lernen müsse, um recht zu schweigen: dass ein Mensch mit Hintergründen Vordergründe nötig habe, sei es für Andere, sei es für sich selber: denn die Vordergründe sind einem nötig, um von sich selber sich zu erholen, und um es Anderen möglich zu machen, mit uns zu leben.”

“Man's maturity: to have regained the seriousness that he had as a child at play.”

“Forgetfulness is not just a vis inertiae, as superficial people believe, but is rather an active ability to suppress, positive in the strongest sense of the word, to which we owe the fact that what we simply live through, experience, take in, no more enters our consciousness during digestion (one could call it spiritual ingestion) than does the thousand-fold process which takes place with our physical consumption of food, our so-called ingestion. To shut the doors and windows of consciousness for a while; not to be bothered by the noise and battle which our underworld of serviceable organs work with and against each other;a little peace, a little tabula rasa of consciousness to make room for something new, above all for the nobler functions and functionaries, for ruling, predicting, predetermining (our organism runs along oligarchic lines, you see) - that, as I said, is the benefit of active forgetfulness, like a doorkeeper or guardian of mental order, rest and etiquette: from which can immediately see how there could be no happiness, cheerfulness, hope, pride, immediacy, without forgetfulness.”

“one does not only wish to be understood when one writes; one wishes just as surely not to be understood.”

“Every talent must unfold itself in fighting.”

“Why go on clinging to this clod of earth, this way of life, why pay heed to what your neighbour says? It is so parochial to bind oneself to views which are no longer binding even a couple of hundred miles away. Orient and Occident are chalk-lines drawn before us to fool our timidity. I will make an attempt to attain freedom, the youthful soul says to itself; and is it to be hindered in this by the fact that two nations happen to hate and fight one another, or that two continents are separated by an ocean, or that all around it a religion is taught which, nevertheless, did not exist a few thousand years ago. All that is not you, it says to itself.”

“He who despises himself esteems himself as a self-despiser.”

“There is not enough religion in the world to destroy the world’s religions.”

“No one can draw more out of things, books included, than he already knows. A man has no ears for that to which experience has given him no access.”

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