The slave and those whose present life is miserable and who can find no consolation in the heavens are assured that at least the future belongs to them. The future is the only kind of property that the masters willingly concede to the slaves.
Generally, I like all islands. There, it is easier to rule.
If pimps and thieves everywhere were always punished, honest people would all believe themselves always to be innocent.
I always found misogyny vulgar and stupid, and I found almost all the women I have known to be my betters. However, placing them so high, I used them more often than I served them. How does one make sense of this?
These are facts the heart can feel; yet they call for careful study before they become clear to the intellect.
The world is unimportant and whoever recognizes this conquers his liberty.
Something must happen; that is the reason for most human relationships. Something must happen; even servitude in love, in war, ordeath.
God is not necessary to create culpability, or to punish. Our fellow men are enough for that, helped by ourselves.
A fate is not a punishment.
There is nothing abstract about pain. It is specific, it is real, and, when it is intense, it is world destroying.
The mistake that men make is that they do not believe in theater. Otherwise, they would know that every man is allowed to play thecelestial tragedies and to become god. All he has to do is harden his heart.
For a man who loves power, competition from the gods is annoying. I have done away with that. I have proven to these illusory godsthat a man, if he has the will, can practice, without any apprenticeship, their ridiculous trade.
Men and women consume one another rapidly in what is called “the act of love,” or else settle down to a mild habit of conjugality. We seldom find a mean between these two extremes.
Most men are like me. They cannot live in a universe where the most bizarre thought can in one second enter into the realm of reality – where, most often, it does enter, like a knife in a heart.
Men cry because things are not what they ought to be.
What is a firm hand to me, of what use to me is this astonishing power if I cannot change the order of things, if I cannot make the sun set in the east, that suffering diminish and that beings no longer die?
There always comes a time when one must choose between contemplation and action. This is called becoming a man.
There is not one talent for living and another for creating. The same suffices for both. And one can be sure that the talent that could not produce but an artificial work could not sustain but a frivolous life.
To me, art is not a solitary delight. It is a means of stirring the greatest number of men by providing them with a privileged image of our common joys and woes.
No matter how the sun shone, the sea held forth no more promises.