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This mother needs happy, reputable children, and that one needs unhappy ones: otherwise she cannot show her kindness as a mother.
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In praise there is more obtrusiveness than in blame.
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[Heraclitus' language] dispenses with lightness and artificial decoration, foremost out of disgust for humanity and out of [his own] defiant feeling.
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I teach you the Overman. Man is something that shall be overcome. What have you done to overcome him? ... The time has come for man to set himself a goal. The time has come to plant the seed to his highest hope.
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Alas! There cometh the time when man will no longer give birth to any star. Alas! There cometh the time of the most despicable man, who can no longer despise himself.
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Jealous is every virtue of the others, and a dreadful thing is jealousy. Even virtues may succumb by jealousy.
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One does not only wish to be understood when one writes; one wishes just as surely not to be understood.
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Whether a man hides his bad qualities and vices or confesses them openly, his vanity wants to gain an advantage by it in both cases: just note how subtly he distinguishes between those he will hide his bad qualities from and those he will face honestly and candidly.
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Cynicism is the only form in which base souls approach honesty.
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You gave him an opportunity of showing greatness of character and he did not seize it. He will never forgive you for that.
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My formula for happiness: a Yes, a No, a straight line, a goal.
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From the sun did I learn this, when it goeth down, the exuberant one: gold doth it then pour into the sea, out of inexhaustible riches, -So that the poorest fisherman roweth even with golden oars! For this did I once see, and did not tire of weeping in beholding it. - Like the sun will also Zarathustra go down: now sitteth he here and waiteth, old broken tables around him, and also new tables half-written.
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The refinement of morality increases together with the refinement of fear. Today the fear of disagreeable feelings in other people is almost the strongest of our own disagreeable feelings.
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Freedom is the will to be responsible for ourselves.
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The 'kingdom of God' is not something one waits for; it has no yesterday or tomorrow, it does not come 'in a thousand years' - it is an experience within a heart; it is everywhere, it is nowhere...
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In laughter all that is evil comes together, but is pronounced holy and absolved by its own bliss.
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There exists above the "productive" man a yet higher species.
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Something unappeased, unappeasable, is within me.
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No one can draw more out of things, books included, than he already knows. A man has no ears for that to which experience has given him no access.
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We belong to an age whose culture is in danger of perishing through the means to culture.
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I am almost equal to a shadow.
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The philosopher caught in the nets of language.
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This is the antinomy: Insofar as we believe in morality we pass sentence on existence.
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Do you believe then that the sciences would have arisen and grown up if the sorcerers, alchemists, astrologers and witches had not been their forerunners; those who, with their promisings and foreshadowings, had first to create a thirst, a hunger, and a taste for hidden and forbidden powers?