-
We evaluate the services that anyone renders to us according to the value he puts on them, not according to the value they have for us.
-
Do you call yourself Free? It is your ruling thought that I would hear, and not that you have escaped from a yoke.
-
Democracy represents the disbelief in all great men and in all elite societies: everybody is everybody's equal.
-
Mothers easily become jealous of their sons' friends when they are particularly successful. As a rule a mother loves herself in her son more than she does the son himself.
-
It is our taste that decides against Christianity now, no longer our reasons.
-
If you are considering marriage, ask yourself one question: Will I still enjoy talking with her when I'm old?
-
Whatever a theologian regards as true must be false: there you have almost a criterion of truth.
-
He who is punished is never he who performed the deed. He is always the scapegoat.
-
Faith is the path of least resistance.
-
Here the ways of men part: if you wish to strive for peace of soul and pleasure, then believe; if you wish to be a devotee of truth, then inquire.
-
Asceticism is the right way of thinking for those who have to extirpate their sensual drives because they are ravening beasts of prey. But only for those!
-
When a hundred men stand together, each of them loses his mind and gets another one.
-
More and more it seems to me that the philosopher, being of necessity a man of tomorrow and the day after tomorrow, has always found himself, and had to find himself, in contradiction to his today: his enemy was ever the ideal of today. So far all these extraordinary furtherers of men whom one calls philosophers, though they themselves have rarely felt like friends of wisdom but rather like disagreeable fools and dangerous question marks, have found their task, their hard, unwanted, inescapable task, but eventually also the greatness of their task, in being the bad conscience of their time.
-
Man Is Something That Must Be Overcome.
-
For out of fear and need each religion is born, creeping into existence on the byways or reason.
-
What is now decisive against Christianity is our taste, no longer our reasons.
-
What was formerly merely sickly now becomes indecent : it is indecent to be a Christian today.
-
I obviously do everything to be "hard to understand" myself.
-
Rather perish than hate and fear, and twice rather perish than make oneself hated and feared — this must some day become the highest maxim for every single commonwealth.
-
To find everything profound - that is an inconvenient trait. It makes one strain one's eyes all the time, and in the end one finds more than one might have wished.
-
Many are stubborn in pursuit of the path they have chosen, few in pursuit of the goal.
-
The bite of conscience, like the bite of a dog into a stone, is a stupidity.
-
It is very noble hypocrisy not to talk of one's self.
-
Man is the cruelest animal.