Friedrich Nietzsche

“Whoever reaches his ideal transcends it eo ipso.”

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

“Pentru unii singurătatea e refugiu pentru bolnavi, dar pentru alţii singurătatea e refugiu de cei bolnavi.”

“Stând printre oameni te dezveţi de oameni: prea vrea să iasă fiecare la vedere — şi-atunci la ce-ţi mai pot sluji ochii pătrunzători, scurmând în zare? Chiar când cu toţii mă nesocoteau, eu ca nebunul îi cruţam mai mult pe ei decât pe mine: eram obişnuit să fiu cu mine însumi aspru şi-adeseori mă răzbunam pe mine pentru această-ngăduinţă faţă de ei. Pişcat de muşte veninoase şi găurit, asemeni unei pietre, de picăturile de răutate, aşa-mi duceam viaţa printre ei şi căutam să mă conving zicându-mi: «Nevinovat este nimicul de propria-i nimicnicie.»”

“Ich mag eure kalte Gerechtigkeit nicht; und aus dem Auge eurer Richter blickt mir immer der Henker und sein kaltes Eisen. (Ich don't like your cold justice; and from the eyes of your judges seems to always gaze the hangman and his cold iron.)”

“Man vergibt seinem Lehrer schlecht, wenn man immer nur der Schüler bleibt. (One repays a teacher badly if one always remains nothing but a pupil.)”

“Man muss noch Chaos in sich haben, um einen tanzenden Stern gebären zu können. (You must have chaos within you to give birth to a dancing star.)”

“...throw roses into the abyss and say: 'here is my thanks to the monster who didn't succeed in swallowing me alive.”

“E quantos ideais novos são no fundo ainda possíveis! [...] Passar a sua vida entre coisas ternas e absurdas; estranho à realidade; metade artista, metade pássaro e metafísico; sem sim nem não para a realidade, senão para reconhece-la de tempos em tempos, à maneira dos bons dançarinos com as pontas dos pés; sempre afagado por um raio de sol da felicidade; encorajado e vivificado até pela mágoa - pois a mágoa conserva o homem feliz [...] - tudo isso, como é evidente, o ideal de um espírito pesado.”

“Whoever does not believe himself always lies.”

“There is something quite amazing and monstrous about the education of upper-class women. What could be more paradoxical? All the world is agreed that they are to be brought up as ignorant as possible of erotic matters, and that one has to imbue their souls with a profound sense of shame in such matters until the merest suggestion of such things triggers the most extreme impatience and flight. The "honor" of women really comes into play only here: what else would one not forgive them? But here they are supposed to remain ignorant even in their hearts: they are supposed to have neither eyes nor ears, nor words, nor thoughts for this -- their "evil;" and mere knowledge is considered evil. And then to be hurled as by a gruesome lightning bolt, into reality and knowledge, by marriage -- precisely by the man they love and esteem most! To catch love and shame in a contradiction and to be forced to experience at the same time delight, surrender, duty, pity, terror, and who knows what else, in the face of the unexpected neighborliness of god and beast!Thus a psychic knot has been tied that may have no equal. Even the compassionate curiosity of the wisest student of humanity is inadequate for guessing how this or that woman manages to accommodate herself to this solution of the riddle, and to the riddle of a solution, and what dreadful, far-reaching suspicions must stir in her poor, unhinged soul -- and how the ultimate philosophy and skepsis of woman casts anchor at this point!Afterward, the same deep silence as before. Often a silence directed at herself, too. She closes her eyes to herself.Young women try hard to appear superficial and thoughtless. The most refined simulate a kind of impertinence.Women easily experience their husbands as a question mark concerning their honor, and their children as an apology or atonement. They need children and wish for them in a way that is altogether different from that in which a man may wish for children.In sum, one cannot be too kind about women.”

“So I ask my pride that it always go along with my wisdom. And when my wisdom leaves me one day alas - it loves to flyway - let my pride then fly with my folly.”

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

“What do you plan to do in the land of the sleepers? You have been floating in a sea of solitude, and the sea has borne you up. At long last, are you ready for dry land? Are you ready to drag yourself ashore?”

“All beings so far have created something beyond themselves”

“The sum of the inner movements which a man finds easy and as a consequence performs gracefully and with pleasure, one calls his soul; if these inner movements are plainly difficult and an effort for him, he is considered soulless.”

“Moderation sees itself as beautiful; it is unaware that in the eye of the immoderate it appears black and sober and consequently ugly-looking”

“This woman is beautiful and clever: but how much cleverer she would have become if she were not beautiful!”

“When I picture a perfect reader, I always picture a monster of courage and curiosity, also something supple, cunning, cautious, a born adventurer and discoverer”

“Facta! Yes, Facta ficta! - A historian has to do, not with what actually happened, but only with events supposed to have happened: for only the latter have produced an effect. Likewise only with supposed heroes. His theme, so-called world history, is opinions about supposed actions and their supposed motives, which in turn give rise to further opinions and actions, the reality of which is however at once vaporised again and produces an effect only as vapour - a continual generation and pregnancy of phantoms over the impentetrable mist of unfathomable reality. All historians speak of things which have never existed except in imagination.”

“Knowing one's 'individuality'. - We are too prone to forget that in the eyes of people who are seeing us for the first time we are something quite different from what we consider ourselves to be: usually we are nothing more than a single individual trait which leaps to the eye and determines the whole impression that we make.”

“God is dead.”

“He who considers more deeply knows that, whatever his acts and judgements may be, he is always wrong.”

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

“Of all evil I deem you capable: Therefore I want good from you. Verily, I have often laughed at the weaklings who thought themselves good because they had no claws.”

“For that I must descend into the depths, as you do in the evening when you go below the sea and bring light also to the underworld, you superabundant star!”

“I call Christianity the one great curse, the one great intrinsic depravity, the one great instinct of revenge, for which no means are venomous enough, or secret, subterranean and small enough – I call it the one immortal blemish upon the human race.”

“In a real man there is a child hidden: it wants to play. Up then, you women, and discover the child in man!”

“Thus says the fool: "Association with men spoils the character, especially when one has none.”

“I learned to walk; since then I have let myself run. I learned to fly; since then I do not need pushing in order to move from a spot.”

“Truth is a mobile army of metaphors, metonyms, anthropomorphisms, in short, a sum of human relations which were poetically and rhetorically heightened, transferred, and adorned, and after long use seem solid, canonical, and binding to a nation. Truths are illusions about which it has been forgotten that they are illusions.from "On Truth and Lying in an Extra-Moral Sense”

“O my brothers, your nobility should not look backward but ahead! Exiles shall you be from all father- and forefather-lands! Your children's land shall you love: this love shall be your new nobility — the undiscovered land in the most distant sea. For that I bid your sails search and search. In your children you shall make up for being the children of your fathers: thus shall you redeem all that is past.”

“Prejudice of the learned. – The learned judge correctly that people of all ages have believed they know what is good and evil, praise- and blameworthy. But it is a prejudice of the learned that we now know better than any other age.”

“The Christian church is an encyclopaedia of prehistoric cults and conceptions of the most diverse orgiin and that is why it is so capable of proselytising: it always could and it can still go wherever it pleases and it always found and it always finds something similar to itself to which it can adapt itself and gradually impose upon it a Christian meaning.”

“Only when he has attained a final knowledge of all things will man have come to know himself. For things are only the boundaries of man.”

“Must one first batter their ears, that they may learn to hear with their eyes? Must one clatter like kettledrums and penitential preachers? Or do they only believe the stammerer?”

“Nu viaţa veşnică e importantă, ci veşnica însufleţire.”

“Popular medicine and popular morality belong together and ought not to be evaluated so differently as they still are: both are the most dangerous pseudo-sciences.”

“Atheism and a kind of _second innocence_ belong together.”

“Valuing is creating: hear it, you creators! Valuing itself is the treasure and jewel of all valued things.”

“Our faith in others betrays that we would rather have faith in ourselves.”

“Slow is the experience of all deep fountains: long have they to wait until they know what has fallen into their depths.”

“The men of the period of corruption are witty and calumnious; they know that there are yet other ways of murdering than by the dagger and ambush--they know also that all that is well said is believed in.”

“Deniz kıyısında bir ihtiyar taşçı kayayı yontmaktadır. Güneş onu yakıp kavurur. O da Tanrıya yakarır keşke güneş olsaydım diye. "Ol" der Tanrı. Güneş oluverir. Fakat bulutlar gelir örter güneşi, hükmü kalmaz. Bulut olmak ister. "Ol" der Tanrı. Bulut olur. Rüzgar alır götürür bulutu, rüzgarın oyuncağı olur. Rüzgar olmak ister bu kez. Ona da "Ol" der Tanrı. Rüzgar her yere egemen olur, fırtına olur, kasırga olur. Herşey karşısında eğilir. Tam keyfi yerindeyken koca bir kayaya rastlar. Ordan esen burdan eser, kaya banamısın demez! Bildiniz, Tanrı kaya olmasına da izin verir. Dimdik ve güçlü durmaktadır artık dünyaya karşı... Sırtında bir acı ile uyanır.... Bir ihtiyar taşçı kayayı yontmaktadır. ..”

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

“Once the soul looked contemptuously upon the body, and then that contempt was the supreme thing: - the soul wished the body lean, monstrous, and famished. Thus it thought to escape from the body and the earth. But that soul was itself lean, monstrous, and famished; and cruelty was the delight of this soul! So my brothers, tell me: What does your body say about your soul? Is not your soul poverty and filth and miserable self-complacency?”

“Todo lo que se hace por amor, se hace más allá del bien y del mal.”

“At the moment when anyone begins to take philosophy seriously, all the world believes the opposite.”—Human, All Too Human, “Assorted Opinions and Maxims,”

“What if some day or night a demon were to steal after you into your loneliest loneliness and say to you: 'This life as you now live it and have lived it, you will have to live once more and innumerable times more; and there will be nothing new in it, but every painand every joy and every thought and sigh and everything unutterably small or great in your life will have to return to you, all in the same succession and sequence ... 'Would you not throw yourself down and gnash your teeth and curse the demon whospoke thus? Or have you once experienced a tremendous moment when you would haveanswered him, 'You are a god and never have I heard anything more divine.' ...The question in each and every thing, 'Do you desire this once more and innumerabletimes more?' would lie upon your actions as the greatest weight.”

“Love of one is a piece of barbarism: for it is practised at the expense of all others. Love of God likewise.”