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The most spiritual men, as the strongest, find their happiness where others would find their destruction: in the labyrinth, in hardness against themselves and others, in experiments. Their joy is self-conquest: asceticism becomes in them nature, need, and instinct. Difficult tasks are a privilege to them; to play with burdens that crush others, a recreation. Knowledge-a form of asceticism. They are the most venerable kind of man: that does not preclude their being the most cheerful and the kindliest.
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The best weapon against an enemy is another enemy.
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What does not kill me makes me stronger.
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When art dresses in worn-out material it is most easily recognized as art.
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The bite of conscience is indecent.
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Many a man fails as an original thinker simply because his memory it too good.
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It is not a lack of love, but a lack of friendship that makes unhappy marriages.
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Let your love to life be love to your highest hope; and let your highest hope be the highest thought of life!
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The best author will be the one who is ashamed to become a writer.
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Love matches, so called, have illusion for their father and need for their mother.
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The inability to lie is far from the love of truth.
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All truths are bloody truths to me.
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One must be born to any superior world — to make it plainer, one must be bred for it. One has a right to philosophy (taking the word in its greatest sense) only by virtue of one's breeding; one's ancestors, one's "blood," decides this, too. Many generations must have worked on the origin of a philosopher; each one of his virtues must have been separately earned, cared for, passed on, and embodied.
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Without art we would be nothing but foreground and live entirely in the spell of that perspective which makes what is closest at hand and most vulgar appear as if it were vast, and reality itself.
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Niemand kann dir die Brücke bauen, auf der gerade du über den Fluß des Lebens schreiten mußt, niemand außer dir allein.
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Love and hatred are not blind, but are blinded by the fire they bear within themselves.
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Love ever your neighbour as yourselves - but first be such as love themselves.
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I tell the story of these philosophers in simplified form: I merely wish to bring out in each system that point which represents a piece of the personality, and which history must preserve as a part of what is irrefutable and indisputable.
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There is always some madness in love. But there is also always some reason in madness.
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I cannot believe in a God who wants to be praised all the time.
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When one gives up Christian belief one thereby deprives oneself of the right to Christian morality. For the latter is absolutely not self-evident: one must make this point clear again and again, in spite of English shallowpates.
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In revenge and in love, woman is more barbarous than man.
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When a man is in love he endures more than at other times; he submits to everything.
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He who fights with monsters should look to it that he himself does not become a monster. And if you gaze long into an abyss, the abyss also gazes into you.