-
All sciences are now under the obligation to prepare the ground for the future task of the philosopher, which is to solve the problem of value, to determine the true hierarchy of values.
-
One can also be undignified and flattering toward a virtue.
-
There are the terrible ones who carry about in themselves the beast of prey, and have no choice except lusts or self-laceration. And even their lusts are self-laceration.
-
How can anyone become a thinker unless he spends at least a third of every day away from passions, people, and books?
-
In architecture the pride of man, his triumph over gravitation, his will to power, assume a visible form. Architecture is a sort of oratory of power by means of forms.
-
Those who are devoid of purpose will make the void their purpose.
-
For this remains as I have already pointed out the essential difference between the two religions of decadence : Buddhism promises nothing, but actually fulfils; Christianity promises everything, but fulfils nothing.
-
When we have to change our mind about a person, we hold the inconvenience he causes us very much against him.
-
The magnitude of a progress is gauged by the greatness of the sacrifice that it requires.
-
Pharisaism is not a degeneration in a good man: a large portion of it is rather the condition of all being-good.
-
You must be ready to burn yourself in your own flame; how could you rise anew if you have not first become ashes?
-
No power can be maintained when it is only represented by hypocrites.
-
In everything one thing is impossible: rationality.
-
So far no one had had enough courage and intelligence to reveal me to my dear Germans. My problems are new, my psychological horizon frighteningly comprehensive, my language bold and clear; there may well be no books written in German which are richer in ideas and more independent than mine.
-
It is so little true that martyrs offer any support to the truth of a cause that I am inclined to deny that any martyr has ever had anything to do with the truth at all.
-
That lies should be necessary to life is part and parcel of the terrible and questionable character of existence.
-
What destroys a man more quickly than to work, think and feel without inner necessity, without any deep personal desire, without pleasure - as a mere automaton of duty?
-
The way to transmute your iron duty into gold in everyone's eyes is this: always deliver more than you promise.
-
Great things demand that we either remain silent about them or speak in a great manner: in a great manner, that is-cynically and with innocence.
-
There is a universal need to exercise some kind of power, or to create for one's self the appearance of some power, if only temporarily, in the form of intoxication.
-
To the mediocre, mediocrity is a form of happiness.
-
Go through the moral demands...one by one and you will find that man could not live up to them; the intention is not that he should become more moral, but that he should feel as sinful as possible. If man had failed to find this feeling pleasant - why should he have engendered such an idea and adhered to it for so long?... Man was by every means to be made sinful and thereby become excited, animated, enlivened in general. To excite, animate, enliven at any price.
-
The machine is impersonal, it takes the pride away from a piece of work, the individual merits and defects that go along with allwork that is not done by a machine--which is to say, its little bit of humanity.
-
It seems to me that to take a book of mine into his hands is one of the rarest distinctions that anyone can confer upon himself. I even assume that he removes his shoes when he does so-not to speak of boots.