Quote collection
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"What is the greatest thing ye can experience? It is the hour of great contempt. The hour in which even your happiness becometh loathsome unto you, and so also your reason and virtue."
"Shackled heart, free spirit.--Whoever binds his heart tightly and imprisons it may indulge his spirit in many liberties: I have already said that once. But no one believes me unless he already knows."
"The usual false conclusions of mankind are these: a thing exists, therefore it has a right to exist."
"I am interested only in the relations of a people to the rearing of the individual man, and among the Greeks the conditions were unusually favourable for the development of the individual; not by any means owing to the goodness of the people, but because of the struggles of their evil instincts.With the help of favourable measures great individuals might be reared who would be both different from and higher than those who heretofore have owed their existence to mere chance. Here we may still be hopeful: in the rearing of exceptional men."
"Not their love of humanity, but the impotence of their love, prevents the Christians of today - burning us."
"And nobody lies as much as the indignant do."
"Logic, too, also rests on assumptions that do not correspond to anything in the real world, e.g., on the assumption that there areequal things, that the same thing is identical at different points in time: but this science arose as a result of the opposite belief (that such things actually exist in the real world). And it is the same with mathematics, which would certainly never have arisen if it had been understood from the beginning that there is no such thing in nature as a perfectly straight line, a true circle, and absolute measure."
"The best of all things is something entirely outside your grasp: not to be born, not to be, to be nothing. But the second-best thing for you - is to die soon."
"You want to be paid as well, you virtuous! You want reward for virtue, and heaven for earth, and eternity for your today?"
"Man, however, is the most courageous animal: thereby has he overcome every animal. With sound of triumph has he overcome every pain; human pain, however, is the sorest pain."
"Desire is happiness: satisfaction as happiness is merely the ultimate moment of desire. To be wish and wish alone is happiness, and a new wish over and over again."
"I looked for great men, but all I found were the apes of their ideals."
"Lightning and thunder need time, the light of the stars needs time, deeds need time, even after they are done, to be seen and heard."
"One had better put on gloves before handling the New Testament. The presence of so much filth makes it highly advisable."
"Sometimes in conversation the sound of our own voice distracts us and misleads us into making assertions that in no way express our true opinions."
"I understand by 'freedom of spirit' something quite definite - the unconditional will to say No, where it is dangerous to say No."
"He who attains his ideal, precisely thereby surpasses it."
"Man alone resists the direction of gravitation: he constantly wants to fall--upwards."
"The wheel and the brake have different duties, but also one in common: to hurt one another."
"Very early in my life I took the question of the relation of art to truth seriously: even now I stand in holy dread in the face of this discordance. My first book was devoted to it. The Birth of Tragedy believes in art on the background of another belief"