Whatever we have words for, that we have already got beyond.
It is neither the best nor the worst things in a book that defy translation.
What is the vanity of the vainest man compared with the vanity which the most modest possesses when, in the midst of nature and the world, he feels himself to be man!
Your soul will be dead even before your body: fear nothing further.
What the father kept silent the son speaks out.
Too long, the earth has been a madhouse!
Early in the morning, at break of day, in all the freshness and dawn of one’s strength, to read a book -I call that vicious!
Reason is the cause of our falsification of the evidence of the senses. In so far as the senses show becoming, passing away, change, they do not lie.
Beggars should be entirely abolished! Truly, it is annoying to give to them and annoying not to give to them.
In every ascetic morality man worships a part of himself as God and for that he needs to diabolize the other part.
I fear animals regard man as a creature of their own kind which has in a highly dangerous fashion lost its healthy animal reason – as the mad animal, as the laughing animal, as the weeping animal, as the unhappy animal.
To escape boredom, man works either beyond what his usual needs require, or else he invents play, that is, work that is designed to quiet no need other than that for working in general.
Be your self! All you are now doing, thinking, desiring, is not you yourself.
The thousand mysteries around us would not trouble but interest us, if only we had cheerful, healthy hearts.
Of all writings I love only that which is written with blood. Write with blood: and you will discover that blood is spirit.
Smooth iceis paradisefor those who dance with expertise.
If ye would go up high, then use your own legs! Do not get yourselves carried aloft; do not seat yourselves on other people’s backs and heads!
The patient. The pine tree seems to listen, the fir tree to wait: and both without impatience: – they give no thought to the little people beneath them devoured by their impatience and their curiosity.
Every virtue inclines to stupidity, every stupidity to virtue; “stupid to the point of sanctity,” they say in Russia, – let us be careful lest out of pure honesty we eventually become saints and bores!
The love of power is the demon of mankind.