Genuine historical knowledge requires nobility of character, a profound understanding of human existence – not detachment and objectivity.
Man does not strive for happiness; only the Englishman does that.
The value of many men and books rests solely on their faculty for compelling all to seek out the most hidden and intimate things.
I need solitude, which is to say, recovery, return to my self, the breath of a free, light, playful air.
All truths are bloody truths to me.
The Christian church has left nothing untouched by its depravity; it has turned every value into worthlessness, and every truth into a lie.
It is an end with priests and gods, if man becomes scientific. Moral: science is the thing forbidden in itself – it alone is forbidden. Science is the first sin, the germ of all sin, original sin. This alones is mortality: Thou shalt not know.
But anyone who has really made sacrifices knows that he wanted and got something in return perhaps something for something of himself – that he gave up in order to have more here or at least to feel that he has “more”.
Those who create are hard of heart.
The greatest giver of alms is cowardice.
Wherever progress is to ensue, deviating natures are of greatest importance.
We ought to fear a man who hates himself, for we are at risk of becoming victims of his anger and revenge. Let us then try to lure him into self-love.
Aphorisms should be peaks – and those who are addressed, tall and lofty. The air thin and pure, danger near, and the spirit full of gay sarcasm: these go well together.
A man should not play the coward to his deeds. He should not repudiate them once he has performed them. Pangs of conscience are indecent.
Happiness is a fata morgana. the only way to not end up unhappy is to not long for happiness.
There are no limits to God’s compassion with Paradises over their one universally felt want: he immediately created other animals besides. God’s first blunder: Man didn’t find the animals amusing, – he dominated them and didn’t even want to be an ‘animal.’
Master-morality and Slave-morality.
There are ages in which the rational man and the intuitive man stand side by side, the one in fear of intuition, the other with scorn for abstraction. The latter is just as irrational as the former is inartistic.
Become who you are. Make what only you can make.
I wish to be at any time hereafter only a yea-sayer!