Quote collection
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"Not necessity, not desire - no, the love of power is the demon of men. Let them have everything - health, food, a place to live, entertainment - they are and remain unhappy and low-spirited: for the demon waits and waits and will be satisfied."
"Knapsack of the Metaphysicians.- Those who boast so mightily of the scientificality of their metaphysics should receive no answer; it is enough to pluck at the bundle which, with a certain degree of embarrassment, they keep concealed behind their back; if one succeeds in opening it, the products of that scientificality come to light, attended by their blushes: a dear little Lord God, a nice little immortality, perhaps a certain quantity of spiritualism, and in any event a whole tangled heap of 'wretched poor sinner' and Pharisee arrogance."
"Behind all their personal vanity, women themselves always have an impersonal contempt for woman."
"I am really very, very tired of everything - more than tired."
"Moral contempt is a far greater indignity and insult than any kind of crime."
"If you look long enough into the void, the void begins to look back through you."
"What then is truth? A movable host of metaphors, metonymies, and anthropomorphisms: in short, a sum of human relations which have been poetically and rhetorically intensified, transferred, and embellished, and which, after long usage, seem to a people to be fixed, canonical, and binding. Truths are illusions which we have forgotten are illusions — they are metaphors that have become worn out and have been drained of sensuous force."
"In the consciousness of the truth he has perceived, man now sees everywhere only the awfulness or the absurdity of existence and loathing seizes him."
"When self control is lacking in small things, the ability to apply it to matters of importance withers away. Every day in which one does not at least deny himself some trifle is badly spent and a threat to the day following."
"Our salvation lies not in knowing, but in creating!"
"Profundity of thought belongs to youth, clarity of thought to old age."
"If you buy the why, the how is infinitely bearable"
"Every man has his price. This is not true. But for every man there exists a bait which he cannot resist swallowing."
"My genius is in my nostrils."
"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."
"Above all, there is no exception to this rule: that the idea of political superiority always resolves itself into the idea of psychological superiority."
"Giving style” to one’s character - a great and rare art! It is exercised by those who see all the strengths and weaknesses of their own natures and then comprehend them in an artistic plan until everything appears as art and reason and even weakness delights the eye."
"Why does man not see things? He is himself standing in the way: he conceals things."
"What is the vanity of the vainest man compared with the vanity which the most modest possesses when, in the midst of nature and the world, he feels himself to be man!"
"The truth is ugly: we have art so as not to perish from the truth."