Quote collection
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"I have learned to walk: since then I have run. I have learned to fly: since then I do not have to be pushed in order to move. Now I am nimble, now I fly, now I see myself under myself, now a god dances within me."
"The coward does not know what it means to be alone: an enemy is always standing behind his chair."
"Reason" in language - oh, what an old deceptive female she is! I am afraid we are not rid of God because we still have faith in grammar."
"Words are acoustical signs for concepts; concepts, however, are more or less definite image signs for often recurring and associated sensations, for groups of sensations. To understand one another, it is not enough that one use the same words; one also has to use the same words for the same species of inner experiences; in the end one has to have one's experiences in common."
"Scholarship has the same relationship to wisdom as righteousness has to holiness: it is cold and dry, it is loveless and knows nodeep feelings of inadequacy or longing."
"Happiness is the feeling that power increases - that resistance is being overcome."
"It has therewith come to be recognized that the history of moral valuations is at the same time the history of an error, the error of responsibility, which is based upon the error of the freedom of will."
"Pharisaism is not a degeneration in a good man: a large portion of it is rather the condition of all being-good."
"Men inadvertently comport themselves with nobility when they have grown accustomed to wanting nothing from others and always giving to them."
"Man is more sensitive to the contempt that others feel towards him than to the contempt that he feels towards himself."
"Show me that you are redeemed, and I will believe in your Redeemer."
"If God had wanted to become an object of love, he would first of all have had to forgo judging and justice : a judge, and even a gracious judge, is no object of love."
"The more a person indulges himself the less others are willing to indulge him."
"The people we keep standing in the anteroom of our favor either start fermenting or turn sour."
"There is a lake that one day refused to flow away and threw up a dam at the place where it had before flowed out and since then this lake has always risen higher and higher. Perhaps the very act of renunciation provides us with the strength to bear it ; perhaps man will rise ever higher and higher when he no longer flows out into a God."
"God is a too palpably clumsy answer; an answer which shows a lack of delicacy towards us thinkers-fundamentally, even a crude prohibition to us: you shall not think!"
""God", "the immortality of the soul", "salvation", "the beyond"-even as a child I had no time for such notions, I do not waste any time upon them-maybe I was never childish enough for that?"
"Away from God and gods did this will lure me: what would there be to create if gods existed?"
"The believer in magic and miracles reflects on how to impose a law on nature--: and, in brief, the religious cult is the outcome of this reflection."
"The bite of conscience, like the bite of a dog into a stone, is a stupidity."