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I want to learn more and more to see as beautiful what is necessary in things; then I shall be one of those who make things beautiful. Amor fati: let that be my love henceforth! I do not want to wage war against what is ugly. I do not want to accuse; I do not even want to accuse those who accuse. Looking away shall be my only negation. And all in all and on the whole: some day I wish to be only a Yes-sayer.
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There are no moral phenomena at all, but only a moral interpretation of phenomena.
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The Devil has the broadest perspectives for God; therefore, he keeps so far away from God -- the Devil being the most ancient friend of wisdom.
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The sensible author writes for no other posterity than his own--that is, for his age--so as to be able even then to take pleasurein himself.
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He who fights with monsters might take care lest he thereby become a monster. Is not life a hundred times too short for us to bore ourselves?
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Science rushes headlong, without selectivity, without "taste," at whatever is knowable, in the blind desire to know all at any cost.
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Gradually it has become clear to me what every great philosophy so far has been: namely, the personal confession of its author and a kind of involuntary and unconscious memoir.
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I awoke you from your sleep because I saw that you were having a nightmare. And now you are cross and say to me: "What are we supposed to do now? Everything is still night!" You ingrates! You should go to sleep again and dream better.
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Loving and perishing: it's been a rhyme all these eternities. The will to love: that is, also being willing to die.
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One is healthy when one can laugh at the earnestness and zeal with which one has been hypnotized by any single detail of one's life.
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Today a man of knowledge might well feel as though he were God transformed into an animal.
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Society tames the wolf into a dog. And man is the most domesticated animal of all.
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Sometimes in our relationship to another human being the proper balance of friendship is restored when we put a few grains of impropriety onto our own side of the scale.
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A refined nature is vexed by knowing that some one owes it thanks, a coarse nature by knowing that it owes thanks to some one.
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The spiritual activity of millennia is deposited in language.
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Someone said: "I have been prejudiced against myself from my earliest childhood: hence I find some truth in all blame and some stupidity in all praise. I generally estimate praise too poorly and blame too highly.
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Supposing truth is a woman -- what then?
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When one does away with oneself one does the most estimable thing possible: one thereby almost deserves to live.
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There is nothing more necessary than truth, and in comparison with it everything else has only secondary value. This absolute will to truth: what is it? Is it the will to not allow ourselves to be deceived? Is it the will not to deceive? One does not want to be deceived, under the supposition that it is injurious, dangerous, or fatal to be deceived.
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Everything good, fine or great they do is first of all an argument against the skeptic inside them.
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To be ashamed of one's immorality: that is a step on the staircase at whose end one is also ashamed of one's morality.
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Youth is an unpleasant period; for then it is not possible or not prudent to be productive in any sense whatsoever.
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Sleep is no mean art.
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Madness is rare in individuals - but in groups, parties, nations, and ages it is the rule.