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What the father kept silent the son speaks out.
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We are unknown to ourselves, we men of knowledge - and with good reason. We have never sought ourselves - how could it happen that we should ever find ourselves? It has rightly been said: "Where your treasure is, there will your heart be also"; our treasure is where the beehives of our knowledge are.
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Enjoyment and innocence are the most bashful things: both do not want to be sought.
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No one talks more passionately about his rights than he who in the depths of his soul doubts whether he has any.
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Impoliteness is frequently the sign of an awkward modesty that loses its head when surprised and hopes to conceal this with rudeness.
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I want to know whether you are a person devoted to creating or to exchanging in some respect or other: as a creator you belong tothe free, as an exchanger you are their slave and instrument.
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A book calls for pen, ink, and a writing desk; today the rule is that pen, ink, and a writing desk call for a book.
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Eins ist not. - Seinem Charakter 'Stil geben'.
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We must understand how to hide in darkness in order to escape the gnat-swarms of utterly annoying admirers.
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One must separate from anything that forces one to repeat No again and again.
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There is no more dreary or more repulsive creature than the man who has evaded his genius.
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"Belief in the truth commences with the doubting of all those "truths" we once believed."
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What can everyone do? Praise and blame. This is human virtue, this is human madness.
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Man is something that is to be surpassed.
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Only ideas won by walking have any value.
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One can only be silent and sit peacefully when one hath arrow and bow; otherwise one prateth and quarrelleth. Let your peace be a victory!
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Judgments, value judgments concerning life, for or against, can in the last resort never be true: they possess value only as symptoms, they come into consideration only as symptoms - in themselves such judgments are stupidities.
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The great wars of the present age are the effects of the study of history.
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The god on the cross is a curse on life, a signpost to seek redemption from life; Dionysus cut to pieces is a promise of life: it will be eternally reborn and return again from destruction.
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It is nobler to declare oneself wrong than to insist on being right --especially when one is right.
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...the only psychologist from whom I have anything to learn.
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Art depends upon the inexactitude of sight.
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Books for general reading always smell bad; the odor of common people hangs around them.
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Truth as Circe. - Error has transformed animals into men; is truth perhaps capable of changing man back into an animal?