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In magnanimity there is the same amount of egoism as in revenge, but egoism of a different quality.
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There exists no more repulsive and desolate creature in the world than the man who has evaded his genius and who now looks furtively to left and right, behind him and all about him. ... He is wholly exterior, without kernel, a tattered, painted bag of clothes.
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Deception, flattering, lying, deluding, talking behind the back, putting up a false front, living in borrowed splendor, wearing a mask, hiding behind convention, playing a role for others and for oneself -- in short, a continuous fluttering around the solitary flame of vanity -- is so much the rule and the law among men that there is almost nothing which is less comprehensible than how an honest and pure drive for truth could have arisen among them.
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I might believe in the Redeemer if his followers looked more redeemed.
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My idea of paradise is a straight line to goal.
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Let thy virtue be too high for the familiarity of names, and if thou must speak of it, be not ashamed to stammer about it.
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Scholars who become politicians are usually assigned the comic role of having to be the good conscience of state policy.
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In a certain state it is indecent to live longer.
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A vocation makes us unthinking; that is its greatest blessing. For it is a bulwark behind which we are permitted to withdraw whencommonplace doubts and cares assail us.
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Watch them clamber, these swift monkeys! They clamber over one another and thus drag one another into the mud and the depth. They all want to get to the throne: that is their madness — as if happiness sat on the throne. Often, mud sits on the throne — and often the throne also on mud. Mad they all appear to me, clambering monkeys and overardent. Foul smells their idol, the cold monster: foul, they smell to me altogether, these idolators.
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Danger alone acquaints us with our own resources, our virtues, our armor and weapons, our spirit, and forces us to be strong.
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We labour at our daily work more ardently and thoughtlessly than is necessary to sustain our life because it is even more necessary not to have leisure to stop and think. Haste is universal because everyone is in flight from himself.
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If a man wishes to become a hero, then the serpent must first become a dragon: otherwise he lacks his proper enemy.
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I love him who liveth in order to know, and seeketh to know in order that the Superman may hereafter live. Thus seeketh he his own down-going.
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Every day I count wasted in which there has been no dancing.
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Praise is more obtrusive than a reproach.
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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.
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Never trust a thought that didn't come by walking.
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He who cannot command himself should obey. And many can command themselves, but much is still lacking before they can obey themselves.
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The best way to give assistance to those who are deeply embarrassed and to calm them down is to praise them decisively.
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We should turn our death into a celebration, even if only out of a malice towards life: towards the woman who wants to leave--us!
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In the end things must be as they are and have always been--the great things remain for the great, the abysses for the profound, the delicacies and thrills for the refined, and, to sum up shortly, everything rare for the rare.
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In his lonely solitude, the solitary man feeds upon himself; in the thronging multitude, the many feed upon him. Now choose.
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Convictions are more dangerous foes of truth than lies.