Friedrich Nietzsche

“Even the wisest among you is only a conflict and hybrid of plant and ghost.”

“Tout comprende, c'est tout mepriser.”

“Cada uno tiene su forma; yo tengo la mía. En cuanto a la mejor manera, la manera correcta, la única manera, no existe.”

“The vanity of others runs counter to our taste only when it runs counter to our vanity.”

“And if you gaze for long into an abyss, the abyss gazes also into you.”

“Not necessity, not desire- no, the love of power isthe demon of men.”

“When one is young, one venerates and despises without that art of nuances which constitutes the best gain of life, and it is only fair that one has to pay dearly for having assaulted men and things in this manner with Yes and No. Everything is arranged so that the worst of tastes, the taste for the unconditional, should be cruelly fooled and abused until a man learns to put a little art into his feelings and rather to risk trying even what is artificial — as the real artists of life do.”

“Light for some time to come will have to be called darkness.”

“You say you're a pessimist, but I happen to know that you're in the habit of practicing your flute for two hours every evening.”

“My humanity is a constant self-overcoming.”

“‎The struggle of maturity is to recover the seriousness of a child at play.”

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

“Most people are far too much occupied with themselves to be malicious.”

“...wherever the strength of a faith steps decisively into the foreground, we infer a certain weakness in its ability to demonstrate its truth, even the improbability of what it believes. We, too, do not deny that the belief “makes blessed,” but for that very reason we deny that the belief proves something—a strong belief which confers blessedness creates doubts about what it has faith in. It does not ground “truth.” It grounds a certain probability— delusion.”

“Our crime against criminals lies in the fact that we treat them like rascals.”

“A degree of culture, and assuredly a very high one, is attained when man rises above superstitions and religious notions and fears, and, for instance, no longer believes in guardian angels or in original sin, and has also ceased to talk of the salvation of his soul.”

“The melancholy of everything completed!”

“Everything goes, everything comes back; eternally rolls the wheel of being. Everything dies, everything blossoms again; eternally runs the year of being. Everything breaks, everything is joined anew; eternally the same House of Being is built. Everything parts, everything greets every other thing again; eternally the ring of being remains faithful to itself. In every Now, being begins; round every Here rolls the sphere There. The center is everywhere. Bent is the path of eternity.”

“By saying 'God sees into the heart' it denies the deepest and the highest desires of life and takes God for the enemy of life. The saint in whom God takes pleasure is the ideal castrate. Life is at an end where the kingdom of God begins.”

“The time is gone when mere accidents could still happen to me; and what could still come to me now that was not mine already? What returns, what finally comes home to me, is my own self and what of myself has long been in strange lands and scattered among all things and accidents.”

“Man Is Something That Must Be Overcome”

“For man to be redeemed from revenge, that is for me the bridge to the highest hope, and a rainbow after long storms.Distrust all in whom the impulse to punish is powerful!”

“Excess of strength alone is proof of strength”

“Man does not strive for happiness; only the Englishman does that.”

“Il cristianesimo dette da bere il veleno a Eros. Questi non ne morì, ma ben degenerò, in vizio.”

“The greatest weight.-- 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 pain and 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 - even this spider and this moonlight between the trees, and even this moment and I myself. The eternal hourglass of existence is turned upside down again and again, and you with it, speck of dust!"Would you not throw yourself down and gnash your teeth and curse the demon who spoke thus?... Or how well disposed would you have to become to yourself and to life to crave nothing more fervently than this ultimate eternal confirmation and seal?”

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

“Man is the cruelest animal," says Zarathustra. "When gazing at tragedies, bull-fights, crucifixations he hath hitherto felt happier than at any other time on Earth. And when he invented Hell...lo, Hell was his Heaven on Earth"; he could put up with suffering now, by contemplating the eternal punishment of his oppressors in the other world.”

“Visiting the sick' is an orgasm of superiority in the contemplation of our neighbor's helplessness”

“Die at the right time”

“Die Dummheit der Guten ist unergründlich klug.”

“...inability to lie is still far from being love to truth. Be on your guard! ... He who cannot lie, doth not know what truth is.”

“Success has always been the greatest liar - and the "work" itself is a success; the great statesman, the conqueror, the discoverer is disguised by his creations, often beyond recognition; the "work," whether of the artist or the philosopher, invents the man who has created it, who is supposed to have create it; "great men," as they are venerated, are subsequent pieces of wretched minor fiction”

“We are unknown to ourselves, we men of knowledge - and with good reason. We have never sought ourselves - how could it happen that we should ever find ourselves? It has rightly been said: "Where your treasure is, there will your heart be also"; our treasure is where the beehives of our knowledge are.”

“Anarchists are mouthpieces of a declining stratum of society; when they work themselves into a state of righteous indignation demanding 'rights', 'justice', 'equal rights', they are just acting under the pressure of their own lack of culture, which has no way of grasping why they really suffer, or what they lack in life.”

“What good is all this free-thinking, modernity, and turncoat flexibility if at some gut level you are still a Christian, a Catholic, and even a priest!”

“Every characteristic absence of spirituality, every piece of common vulgarity, is due to an inability to resist a stimulus - you have to react, you follow every impulse.”

“If you invest all your energy in economics, world commerce, parliamentarianism, military engagements, power and power politics, -if you take the quantum of intelligence, seriousness, will, and self-overcoming that you embody and expend it all in this one direction, there there won't be any left for the other direction. Culture and the state - let us be honest with ourselves - these are adversaries.”

“People have always wanted to 'improve' human beings; for the most part, this has been called morality.”

“How Rhythm Beautifies.- Rhythm casts a veil over reality; it causes various artificiality’s of speech and obscurities of thought; by the shadow it throws upon thought it sometimes conceals it, and sometimes brings it into prominence. As shadow is necessary to beauty, so the “dull” is necessary to lucidity. Art makes the aspect of life endurable by throwing over it the veil of obscure thought.”

“To learn to see- to accustom the eye to calmness, to patience, and to allow things to come up to it; to defer judgment, and to acquire the habit of approaching and grasping an individual case from all sides. This is the first preparatory schooling of intellectuality. One must not respond immediately to a stimulus; one must acquire a command of the obstructing and isolating instincts.”

“For truth to tell, dancing in all its forms cannot be excluded from the curriculum of all noble education: dancing with the feet, with ideas, with words, and, need I add that one must also be able to dance with pen- that one must learn how to write”

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

“That is an artist as I love artists, modest in his needs: he really wants only two things, his bread and his art - panem et Circen.”

“...For action has no sense. It merely binds one to existence. All existence, however, has no sense. Evil is interpreted as that which leads to irrationalism: to the affirmation of means whose end is denied. A road to nonentity is the desideratum, hence all emotional impulses are regarded with horror.”

“Who has not for the sake of his reputation sacrificed himself?”

“The word "Christianity" is already a misunderstanding; in reality there has been only one Christian, and he died on the cross.”

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

“The one necessary thing.— A person must have one or the other. Either a cheerful disposition by nature, or a disposition made cheerful by art and knowledge.”

“Another Christian concept, no less crazy, has passed even more deeply into the tissue of modernity: the concept of the 'equality of souls before God.' This concept furnishes the prototype of all theories of equal rights...”