Quote collection
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"Buddhism is a hundred times as realistic as Christianity it is part of its living heritage that it is able to face problems objectively and coolly; it is the product of long centuries of philosophical speculation."
"A man who has depths in his shame meets his destiny and his delicate decisions upon paths which few ever reach . . ."
"Anything which is a living and not a dying body... will have to be an incarnate will to power, it will strive to grow, spread, seize, become predominant - not from any morality or immorality but because it is living and because life simply is will to power... 'Exploitation'... belongs to the essence of what lives, as a basic organic function; it is a consequence of the will to power, which is after all the will to life."
"Buddha says: "Do not flatter your benefactor!". Let one repeat this saying in a Christian church : it immediately purifies the air of everything Christian."
"In solitude there grows what anyone brings into it, the inner beast too. Therefore solitude is inadvisable to many."
"One sticks to an opinion because he prides himself on having come to it on his own, and another because he has taken great pains to learn it and is proud to have grasped it: and so both do so out of vanity."
"There is a great ladder of religious cruelty, and, of its many rungs, three are the most important. People used to make human sacrifices to their god, perhaps even sacrificing those they loved the best ... Then, during the moral epoch of humanity, people sacrificed the strongest instincts they had, their 'nature,' to their god... Finally: what was left to be sacrificed? ... Didn't people have to sacrifice God himself and worship rocks, stupidity, gravity, fate, or nothingness out of sheer cruelty to themselves?"
"Thinking has to be learned in the way dancing has to be learned."
"Everything becomes and recurs eternally - escape is impossible!"
"I call a lie: wanting not to see something one does see, wanting not to see something as one sees it... The most common lie is the lie one tells to oneself; lying to others is relatively the exception."
"I see many soldiers; could I but see many warriors! "Uniform" one calleth what they wear; may it not be uniform what they therewith hide!"
"Objection, evasion, joyous distrust, and love of irony are signs of health; everything absolute belongs to pathology."
"It is the privilege of greatness to confer intense happiness with insignificant gifts."
"Science is about finding ever better approximations rather than pretending you have already found ultimate truth. A casual stroll through the lunatic asylum shows that faith does not prove anything."
"What, then is truth?... Truths are illusions about which one has forgotten that this is what they are."
"Some people appear to be more meager in talent than they are, just because the tasks they set themselves are always too great."
"It is far pleasanter to injure and afterwards beg forgiveness than to be injured and grant forgiveness. He who does the former gives evidence of power and afterwards of kindness of character."
"If one considers how much reason every person has for anxiety and timid self-concealment, and how three-quarters of his energy and goodwill can be paralyzed and made unfruitful by it, one has to be very grateful to fashion"
"One never perishes through anybody but oneself."
"He turns all of his injuries into strengths, that which does not kill him makes him stronger, he is superman."