Ten times must you laugh during the day, and be cheerful; otherwise your stomach, the father of affliction, will disturb you in the night.
Some die too young, some die too old; the precept sounds strange, but die at the right age.
History is nothing more than the belief in the senses, the belief in falsehood.
Whoever is related to me in the height of his aspirations will experience veritable ecstasies of learning; for I come from heights that no bird ever reached in its flight, I know abysses into which no foot ever strayed.
There was at all events one advantage in the choice of this day to my birth; my birthday throughout the whole of my childhood was a day of public rejoicing.
That God became man indicates only this: that man should not seek his salvation in eternity, but rather establish his heaven on earth.
Scholars who become politicians are usually assigned the comic role of having to be the good conscience of state policy.
He who strays from the customary becomes a sacrifice to the extraordinary; he who keeps to the customary becomes its slave. He iscondemned to perish in either case.
Every word has its fragrance: there is a harmony and a disharmony of fragrances, and hence of words.
The grand style follows suit with all great passion. It disdains to please, it forgets to persuade. It commands. It wills.
Our drives are reducible to the will to power. The will to power is the ultimate fact at which we arrive.
The will to power can express itself only against resistances; it seeks that which resists it – this is the native tendency of theamoeba when it extends its pseudopodia and gropes around.
They muddy the water, to make it seem deep.
To recognize untruth as a condition of life – that certainly means resisting accustomed value feelings in a dangerous way; and a philosophy that risks this would by that token alone place itself beyond good and evil.
All religions bear traces of the fact that they arose during the intellectual immaturity of the human race – before it had learned the obligations to speak the truth. Not one of them makes it the duty of its god to be truthful and understandable in his communications.
What if God were not exactly truth, and if this could be proved? And if he were instead the vanity, the desire for power, the ambitions, the fear, and the enraptured and terrified folly of mankind?
Does not the discipline of the scientific spirit just commence when one no longer harbours any conviction?
But what if pleasure and pain should be so closely connected that he who wants the greatest possible amount of the one must also have the greatest possible amount of the other, that he who wants to experience the “heavenly high jubilation,” must also be ready to be “sorrowful unto death”?
Doing ill to those on whom we have to make our power felt; for pain is a far more sensitive means for that purpose than pleasure: pain always asks concerning the cause, while pleasure is inclined to keep within itself and not look backward.
I have given a name to my pain, and call it “dog”.