Quote collection
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"And it is the great noon when man stands at the midpoint of his course between beast and superman and celebrates his way to the evening as his highest hope: for it is the way to a new morning."
"There exists above the "productive" man a yet higher species."
"It is, indeed, a fact that, in the midst of society and sociability every evil inclination has to place itself under such great restraint, don so many masks, lay itself so often on the procrustean bed of virtue, that one could well speak of a martyrdom of the evil man. In solitude all this falls away. He who is evil is at his most evil in solitude: which is where he is at his best - and thus to the eye of him who sees everywhere only a spectacle also at his most beautiful."
"What is originality? To see something that has no name as yet and hence cannot be mentioned although it stares us all in the face. The way men usually are, it takes a name to make something visible for them."
"One hears but one does not seek; one takes -- one does not ask who gives; a thought flashes up like lightning, it comes of necessity and unfalteringly formed."
"New ways I go, a new speech comes to me; weary I grow, like all creators, of the old tongues. My spirit no longer wants to walk on worn soles."
"Christianity has done its utmost to close the circle and declared even doubt to be sin. One is supposed to be cast into belief without reason, by a miracle, and from then on to swim in it as in the brightest and least ambiguous of elements: even a glance towards land, even the thought that one perhaps exists for something else as well as swimming, even the slightest impulse of our amphibious nature"
"On the tree, Future, we build our nest; and in our solitude eagles shall bring us nourishment in their beaks!"
"A martyr's disciples suffer more than the martyr."
"It is possible to imagine a society flushed with such a sense of power that it could afford to let its offenders go unpunished."
"When we dream about those who are long since forgotten or dead, it is a sign that we have undergone a radical transformation and that the ground on which we live has been completely dug up: then the dead rise up, and our antiquity becomes modernity."
"We have no dreams at all or interesting ones. We should learn to be awake the same way- not at all or in an interesting manner"
"All contempt for the sexual life, all denigration under the concept 'impure" is the essential crime against Life- against the Holy Spirit of Life"."
"I devote myself to what I love the most, and for this very reason I hesitate to designate it with lofty words: I do not want to risk believing that it is a sublime compulsion, a law, which I obey: I love what I love the most too much to wish to appear to it as one compelled."
"Scholars who become politicians are usually assigned the comic role of having to be the good conscience of state policy."
"Under conditions of peace the warlike man attacks himself."
"Christianity has taken the part of all the weak, the low, the botched; it has made an ideal out of antagonism to all the self preservative instincts of sound life; it has corrupted even the faculties of those natures that are intellectually most vigorous, by representing the highest intellectual values as sinful, as misleading, as full of temptation."
"The superman is the meaning of the earth. Let your will say: the superman is to be the meaning of the earth! I beseech you, my brothers, be true to the earth, and do not believe those who speak to you of otherworldly hopes! They are poisoners, whether they know it or not."
"In a man devoted to knowledge, pity seems almost ridiculous, like delicate hands on a cyclops."
"Let old ones go. Dont be a memory-monger! Once you were young──now you are even younger."