| # | Quote |
|---|
| 1 | The best weapon against an enemy is another enemy. |
| 2 | To wake up in the morning, in the fullness of youth, and open a book. Now that is what I call vicious! |
| 3 | I am too inquisitive, too skeptical, too arrogant, to let myself be satisfied with an obvious and crass solution of things. God is such an obvious and crass solution; a solution which is a sheer indelicacy to us thinkers - at bottom He is really nothing but a coarse commandment against us: ye shall not think! |
| 4 | Life is not, after all, a product of morality. |
| 5 | Let the World End. But let there be Philosophy. Let there be a Philosopher. Let there be me! |
| 6 | You need chaos in your soul to give birth to a dancing star. |
| 7 | And those who danced were considered mad by those who could not hear the music. |
| 8 | But thus I counsel you, my friends: Mistrust all in whom the impulse to punish is powerful. They are people of a low sort and stock; the hangmen and the bloodhound look out of their faces. Mistrust all who talk much of their justice! Verily, their souls lack more than honey. And when they call themselves the good and the just, do not forget that they would be pharisees, if only they had-power. |
| 9 | We love life, not because we are used to living but because we are used to loving. |
| 10 | We have art to save ourselves from the truth. |
| 11 | We should consider every day lost on which we have not danced at least once. |
| 12 | He who has a why to live can bear almost any how. |
| 13 | There is always some madness in love. But there is also always some reason in madness. |
| 14 | No artist tolerates reality. |
| 15 | Convictions are greater enemies to the truth than lies. |
| 16 | Without cruelty there is no festival. There is much about punishment that is festive. |
| 17 | Fear is the mother of morality. |
| 18 | Every Church is a stone on the grave of a God-Man. They do not want him to rise up again under any circumstances. |
| 19 | Of all that a man has written, I want to know what he has written in his own blood. |
| 20 | Christianity is the metaphysics of the hangman. |
| 21 | The earth has become small, and upon it hops the Ultimate Man, who makes everything small. His race is as inexterminable as the flea; the Ultimate Man lives longest. "We have discovered happiness," say the Ultimate Men and blink. . . . They still work, for work is entertainment. But they take care the entertainment does not exhaust them. Nobody grows rich or poor any more: both are too much of a burden. Who still wants to rule? Who obey? Both are too much of a burden. |
| 22 | That faith makes blessed under certain circumstances, that blessedness does not make of a fixed idea a true idea, that faith moves no mountains but puts mountains where there are none: a quick walk through a madhouse enlightens one sufficiently about this. |
| 23 | The man of knowledge must not only be able to love his enemies but also to hate his friends. |
| 24 | The word "Christianity" is already a misunderstanding -- in reality there has been only one Christian, and he died on the Cross. |
| 25 | For believe me!-the secret of realizing the greatest fruitfulness and the greatest enjoyment of existence is: to live dangerously! Build your cities on the slopes of Vesuvius! Send your ships out into uncharted seas! Live in conflict with your equals and with yourselves! Be robbers and ravagers as long as you cannot be rulers and owners, you men of knowledge! The time will soon be past when you could be content to live concealed in the woods like timid deer! |
| 26 | Selfishness has as much value as the physiological value of him who possesses it: it may be very valuable or it may be vile and contemptible. Each individual may be looked at with respect to whether he represents an ascending or a descending line of life. When that is determined, we have a canon for determining the value of his selfishness. If he represent the ascent in the line of life, his value is in fact very great - and on account of the collective life which in him makes a further step, the concern about his maintenance, about providing his optimum of conditions, may even be extreme. . . . If he represent descending development, decay, chronic degeneration, or sickening, he has little worth, and the greatest fairness would have him take away as little as possible from the well-constituted. He is then no more than their parasite. |
| 27 | Not every one has the right to be an egoist. Whereas in some egoism would be a virtue, in others it may be an insufferable vice which should be stamped out at all costs. |
| 28 | Only the day after tomorrow belongs to me. Some are born posthumously. |
| 29 | I know my fate. One day there will be associated with my name the recollection of something frightful -- of a crisis like no other before on earth, of the profoundest collision of conscience, of a decision evoked against everything that until then had been believed in, demanded, sanctified. I am not a man I am dynamite. |
| 30 | Whoever lives for the sake of combatting an enemy has an interest in the enemy's survival. |
| 31 | Life without music would be a mistake. |
| 32 | The surest way to corrupt a youth is to instruct him to hold in higher esteem those who think alike than those who think differently. |
| 33 | The Christian resolution to see the World as ugly and bad has made the World ugly and bad. |
| 34 | He who would learn to fly one day must first learn to stand and walk and run and climb and dance. One cannot fly into flying. |
| 35 | Out of chaos comes order. |
| 36 | Woman was God's second mistake. |
| 37 | It was Christianity which first painted the devil on the worlds wall; It was Christianity which first brought sin into the world. Belief in the cure which it offered has now been shaken to it's deepest roots; but belief in the sickness which it taught and propagated continues to exist'. |
| 38 | A woman does not want the truth; what is truth to women? From the beginning, nothing has been more alien, repugnant, and hostile to woman than the truth - her great art is the lie, her highest concern is mere appearance and beauty. |
| 39 | Growth in wisdom can be measured precisely by decline in bile. |
| 40 | Madness is something rare in individuals-but in groups, parties, peoples, ages it is the rule. |
| 41 | Convictions are more dangerous enemies of truth than lies. |
| 42 | There are no moral phenomena at all, only a moral interpretation of phenomena. |
| 43 | Remedium amoris--The cure for love is still in most cases that ancient radical medicine: love in return. |
| 44 | To live alone one must be an animal or a god, says Aristotle. There is yet a third case: one must be both--a philosopher. |
| 45 | Either we have no dreams or our dreams are interesting. We should learn to arrange our waking life the same way: nothing or interesting. |
| 46 | He who considers more deeply knows that, whatever his acts and judgments may be, he is always wrong. |
| 47 | How can anyone become a thinker if he does not spend at least a third of the day without passions, people and books? |
| 48 | We are like shop windows in which we are continually arranging, concealing or illuminating the supposed qualities others ascribe to us-in order to deceive ourselves. |
| 49 | So long as you are praised think only that you are not yet on your own path but on that of another. |
| 50 | Ultimately, no one can extract from things, books included, more than he already knows. |
| 51 | The man of knowledge must be able not only to love his enemies but also to hate his friends. |
| 52 | Why does man not see things? He is himself standing in the way: he conceals things. |
| 53 | He who fights with monsters should look to it that he himself does not become a monster. And when you gaze long into an abyss the abyss also gazes into you. |
| 54 | True, we love life, not because we are used to living but because we are used to loving. There is always some madness in love. But there is also always some reason in madness... |
| 55 | I love the great despisers. Man is something that must be overcome... |
| 56 | The higher we soar, the smaller we seem to those who cannot fly. |
| 57 | One hears only those questions for which one is able to find answers. |
| 58 | The irrationality of a thing is no argument against its existence, rather a condition of it. |
| 59 | Mighty waters draw much stone and rubble along with them, mighty spirits many stupid and bewildered heads. |
| 60 | That which is done out of love always takes place beyond good and evil. |
| 61 | I am by far the most terrible human being there has ever been; this does not mean I shall not be the most beneficent... |
| 62 | I am not a man, I am dynamite. |
| 63 | We should consider every day lost on which we have not danced at least once. And we should call every truth false which was not accompanied by at least one laugh. |
| 64 | Of all that is written I love only what a man has written with his blood...Whoever writes in blood and aphorisms does not want to be read but to be learned by heart. |
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