Friedrich Nietzsche

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

“One should part from life as Ulysses parted from Nausicaa-- blessing it rather than in love with it.”

“Like tourists huffing and puffing to reach the peak we forget the view on the way up.”

“The free intellect copies human life, but it considers this life to be something good and seems to be quite satisfied with it. That immense framework and planking of concepts to which the needy man clings his whole life long in order to preserve himself is nothing but a scaffolding and toy for the most audacious feats of the liberated intellect. And when it smashes this framework to pieces, throws it into confusion, and puts it back together in an ironic fashion, pairing the most alien things and separating the closest, it is demonstrating that it has no need of these makeshifts of indigence and that it will now be guided by intuitions rather than by concepts.”

“But it is the same with man as with the tree. The more he seeks to rise into the height and light, the more vigorously do his roots struggle earthword, downword, into the dark, the deep - into evil.”

“In belief in what? In love with what? In hope for what?—There’s no doubt that these weak people—at some time or another they also want to be the strong people, some day their "kingdom" is to arrive—they call it simply "the kingdom of God" as I mentioned. People are indeed so humble about everything! Only to experience that, one has to live a long time, beyond death—in fact, people must have an eternal life, so they can also win eternal recompense in the "kingdom of God" for that earthly life "in faith, in love, in hope." Recompense for what? Recompense through what? In my view, Dante was grossly in error when, with an ingenuity inspiring terror, he set that inscription over the gateway into his hell:"Eternal love also created me." Over the gateway into the Christian paradise and its "eternal blessedness" it would, in any event, be more fitting to let the inscription stand "Eternal hate also created me"—provided it’s all right to set a truth over the gateway to a lie! For what is the bliss of that paradise? Perhaps we might have guessed that already, but it is better for it to be expressly described for us by an authority we cannot underestimate in such matters, Thomas Aquinas, the great teacher and saint: "In the kingdom of heaven" he says as gently as a lamb, "the blessed will see the punishment of the damned, so that they will derive all the more pleasure from their heavenly bliss.”

“Se guarderai a lungo in un abisso, anche l'abisso vorrà guardare dentro di te...”

“The Great Man... is colder, harder, less hesitating, and without fear of 'opinion'; he lacks the virtues that accompany respect and 'respectability,' and altogether everything that is the 'virtue of the herd.' If he cannot lead, he goes alone... He knows he is incommunicable: he finds it tasteless to be familiar... When not speaking to himself, he wears a mask. There is a solitude within him that is inaccessible to praise or blame.”

“What therefore is truth? A mobile army of metaphors, metonymies, anthropomorphisms: in short a sum of human relations which became poetically and rhetorically intensified, metamorphosed, adorned, and after long usage seem to a notion fixed, canonic, and binding; truths are illusions of which one has forgotten that they are illusions; worn-out metaphors which have become powerless to affect the senses; coins which have their obverse effaced and now are no longer of account as coins but merely as metal.”

“L'ateismo, per me, non è un risultato, e tanto meno un avvenimento - come tale non lo conosco: io lo intendo per istinto. Sono troppo curioso, troppo problematico, troppo tracotante, perché possa piacermi una risposta grossolana. Dio è una risposta grossolana, un'indelicatezza verso noi pensatori - in fondo è solo un grossolano divieto che ci viene fatto: non dovete pensare!”

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

“When we have to change an opinion about any one, we charge heavily to his account the inconvenience he thereby causes us.”

“For ten years you have climbed here to my cave: you would have become weary of shining and of the journey, had it not been for me, my eagle, and my serpent.”

“To make an individual uncomfortable, that is my task.”

“When a woman has scholarly inclinations there is usually something wrong with her sexuality.”

“The mother of excess is not joy but joylessness.”

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

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

“People who have given us their complete confidence believe that they have a right to ours. The inference is false, a gift confers no rights.”

“Ich will keinen Autor mehr lesen, dem man anmerkt, er wollte ein Buch machen; sondern nur jene, deren Gedanken unversehens ein Buch werden.”

“And many such good inventions are there, that they are like woman’s breasts: useful at the same time, and pleasant.”

“Neither can such a doctrine argue: it simply does not understand that other doctrines exist, can exist, it simply does not know how to imagine an opinion contrary to its own”

“So long as the priest, that denier, calumniator and poisoner of life by profession, still counts as a higher kind of human being, there can be no answer to the question: what is truth? One has already stood truth on its head when the conscious advocate of denial and nothingness counts as the representative of ‘truth”

“It was only Christianity, with resentment against life in its foundations, which made sexuality something impure: it threw filth on the beginning, on the prerequisite of our life”

“It is unworthy of great spirits to spread abroad the agitation they feel”

“In this condition one enriches everything out of one's own abundance: what one sees, what one desires, one sees swollen, pressing, strong, over laden with energy. The man in this condition transforms things until they mirror his power - until they are reflections of his perfections”

“Life is at an end where the kingdom of God begins”

“What does our great historical hunger signify, our clutching about us of countless cultures, our consuming desire for knowledge, if not the loss of myth, of a mythic home, the mythic womb?”

“Where has God gone?” [the madman asked] “I shall tell you. Wehave killed him – you and I. We are his murderers. But how have wedone this? How were we able to drink up the seas? Who gave us thesponge to wipe away the entire horizon? What did we do when weunchained the earth from its sun? Whither is it moving now?Whither are we moving now? Away from all suns? Are we not perpetually falling? Backwards, sideward, forward, in all directions? Is there any up or down left? Are we not straying as though through Infinite nothing?Where is God? God is Dead. Go remains dead. And we have killed him. How shall we, murders of all murders, console ourselves?”

“Some cannot loosen their own chains and can nonetheless redeem their friends.”

“Always look on the bright side of the abyss”

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

“Let us face ourselves. We are Hyperboreans; we know very well how far off we live. 'Neither by land nor by sea will you find the way to the Hyperboreans'—Pindar already knew this about us. Beyond the north, ice, and death—our life, our happiness. We have discovered happiness, we know the way, we have found the exit out of the labyrinth of thousands of years. Who else has found it? Modern man perhaps? 'I have got lost; I am everything that has got lost,' sighs modern man. This modernity was our sickness: lazy peace, cowardly compromise, the whole virtuous uncleanliness of the modern Yes and No. … Rather live in the ice than among modern virtues and other south winds! We were intrepid enough, we spared neither ourselves nor others; but for a long time we did not know where to turn with our intrepidity. We became gloomy, we were called fatalists. Our fatum—abundance, tension, the damming of strength. We thirsted for lightning and deeds and were most remote from the happiness of the weakling, 'resignation.' In our atmosphere was a thunderstorm; the nature we are became dark—for we saw no way. Formula for our happiness: a Yes, a No, a straight line, a goal.”

“Warning to the despised. – If you have unmistakably sunk in the estimation of men you should hold on like grim death to decorum in society with others: otherwise you will betray to them that you have sunk in your own estimation too. When a man is cynical in society it is a sign that he treats himself like a dog when he is alone.”

“Your educators can only be your liberators.”

“One has to take a somewhat bold and dangerous line with this existence: especially as, whatever happens, we are bound to lose it.”

“It is not the strength, but the duration, of great sentiments that makes great men.”

“The philosopher is lacking who interprets the deed and does not merely transpose it.”

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

“Dove la moralità è troppo forte l'intelletto perisce.”

“we often refuse to accept an idea merely because the way in which it has been expressed is unsympathetic to us.”

“We say it is "explanation" but it is only in "description" that we are in advance of the older stages of knowledge and science. We describe better we explain just as little as our predecessors. We have discovered a manifold succession where the naive man and investigator of older cultures saw only two things "cause" and "effect " as it was said we have perfected the conception of becoming but have not got a knowledge of what is above and behind the conception. The series of "causes" stands before us much more complete in every case we conclude that this and that must first precede in order that that other may follow - but we have not grasped anything thereby. The peculiarity for example in every chemical process seems a "miracle " the same as before just like all locomotion nobody has "explained" impulse. How could we ever explain We operate only with things which do not exist with lines surfaces bodies atoms divisible times divisible spaces - how can explanation ever be possible when we first make everything a conception our conception It is sufficient to regard science as the exactest humanizing of things that is possible we always learn to describe ourselves more accurately by describing things and their successions. Cause and effect: there is probably never any such duality in fact there is a continuum before us from which we isolate a few portions - just as we always observe a motion as isolated points and therefore do not properly see it but infer it. The abruptness with which many effects take place leads us into error it is however only an abruptness for us. There is an infinite multitude of processes in that abrupt moment which escape us. An intellect which could see cause and effect as a continuum which could see the flux of events not according to our mode of perception as things arbitrarily separated and broken - would throw aside the conception of cause and effect and would deny all conditionality.”

“This book is intended for calm readers.”

“Nevertheless, I am versed in the use of two weapons: saber and cannon — and, perhaps, one other . . .”

“There is an old illusion. It is called good and evil.”

“Behold! I am weary of my wisdom, like the bee that has gathered too much honey; I need hands outstretched to take it from me. I wish to spread it and bestow it, until the wise have once more become joyous in their folly, and the poor happy in their riches.”

“Was mich nicht umbringt, macht mich stärker.”

“As long as a man knows very well the strength and weaknesses of his teaching, his art, his religion, its power is still slight. The pupil and apostle who, blinded by the authority of the master and by the piety he feels toward him, pays no attention to the weaknesses of a teaching, a religion, and soon usually has for that reason more power than the master. The influence of a man has never yet grown great without his blind pupils. To help a perception to achieve victory often means merely to unite it with stupidity so intimately that the weight of the latter also enforces the victory of the former.”

“He who fights with monsters should look to it that he himself does not become a monster . . . when you gaze long into the abyss the abyss also gazes into you”

“The spirit now wills his own will, and he who had been lost to the world now conquers the world.”