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Under the dominion of the priests our earth became the ascetic planet; a squalid den careering through space, peopled by discontented and arrogant creatures, who were disgusted with life, abhorred their globe as a vale of tears, and who in their envy and hatred of beauty and joy did themselves as much harm as possible.
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School is a foretaste of life.
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Nietzsche says that as soon as he had read a single page of Schopenhauer, he knew he would read every page of him and pay heed to every word, even to the errors he might find. Every intellectual aspirant will be able to name men whom he has read in this way.
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It gradually dawned upon me that there was no one more difficult to please than my mother.
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Any feeling that I was enriching my mind from those surrounding me was unfortunately rare with me.
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Greatness has nothing to do with results or with success.
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He who does not understand a joke, he does not understand Danish.
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My first experiences of academic friendship made me smile in after years when I looked back on them. But my circle of acquaintances had gradually grown so large that it was only natural new friendships should grow out of it.
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I admired in others the strength that I lacked myself.
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Just about this time, when in imagination I was so great a warrior, I had good use in real life for more strength, as I was no longer taken to school by the nurse, but instead had myself to protect my brother, two years my junior.
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I encountered among my comrades the most varied human traits, from frankness to reserve, from goodness, uprightness and kindness, to brutality and baseness.
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Instead of trying to educate the human race, they should imitate the pedagogues of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, who concentrated their efforts on the education of a single person.
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I became an ardent, but never a specially good, dancer.
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Six hours a day I lived under school discipline in active intercourse with people none of whom were known to those at home, and the other hours of the twenty-four I spent at home, or with relatives of the people at home, none of whom were known to anybody at school.
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Among the delights of Summer were picnics to the woods.
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Those Christians had left to love on earth were then: brothers and sisters in hatred, whom they called then: brothers and sisters in love.
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Since fresh examples and proofs could always be found of the alleged relation between guilt and punishment: if you behave in such and such a way, it will go badly with you. Now, as it generally does go badly, the allegation was constantly confirmed; and thus popular morality, a pseudo- science on a level with popular medicine, continually gained ground.
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The educator shall help the young to educate themselves in opposition to the age.
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But I did not find any positive inspiration in my studies until I approached my nineteenth year.
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I was always hearing that I was pale and thin and small.
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Nietzsche attributes to himself an extremely vivid and sensitive instinct of cleanliness. At the first contact the filth lying at the base of another’s nature is revealed to him. The unclean are therefore ill at ease hi his presence
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It would be as impossible for me to attack Christianity as it would be impossible for me to attack werewolves.
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Being gifted needs courage.
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But my doubt would not be overcome. Kierkegaard had declared that it was only to the consciousness of sin that Christianity was not horror or madness. For me it was sometimes both.