Quote collection
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"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 people we have employed in an undertaking that has turned out badly should be doubly rewarded."
"We criticize a man or a book most sharply when we sketch out their ideal."
"The public easily confuses him who fishes in troubled waters with him who draws up water from the depths."
"It is the evening that questions thus from within me."
"Worldly Wisdom Do not stay in the field! Nor climb out of sight. The best view of the world Is from a medium height."
"Books that teach us to dance: There are writers who, by portraying the impossible as possible, and by speaking of morality and genius as if both were high-spirited freedom, as if man were rising up on tiptoe and simply had to dance out of inner pleasure."
"We laugh at a man who, stepping out of his room at the very minute when the sun is rising, says, “It is my will that the sun shall rise”; or at him who, unable to stop a wheel, says, “I wish it to roll”; or, again, at him who, thrown in a wrestling match, says, “Here I lie, but here I wish to lie.” But, joking apart, do we not act like one of these three persons whenever we use the expression “I wish”?"
"A man who wills commands something within himself that renders obedience, or that he believes renders obedience."
"Memory says, 'I did that.' Pride replies, 'I could not have done that.' Eventually, memory yields."
"In the world of high finance the shilling of the idle rich man can buy more than that of the poor, industrious man."
"The command 'become hard! ', the deep conviction that all creators are hard, is the really distinctive sign of a Dionysian nature."
"Only as an aesthetic product can the world be justified to all eternity."
"His (the theologian) basic instinct of self preservation forbids him to respect reality at any point or even to let it get a word in."
"What was a lie in the father becomes a conviction in the son."
"The best belongs to me and mine; and if we are not given it, we take it: the best food, the purest sky, the most robust thoughts, the fairest women!"
"The spirit of the poet craves spectators... even if only buffaloes."
"To experience a thing as beautiful means: to experience it necessarily wrongly."
"I can be thrown by the wayside, but I'm looking at the stars."
"A married philosopher is a comic character."