Cows sometimes wear an expression resembling wonderment arrested on its way to becoming a question. In the eye of superior intelligence, on the other hand, lies the nil admirari spread out like the monotony of a cloudless sky.
Not with wrath do we kill, but with laughter. Come, let us kill the spirit of gravity!
Around the hero everything turns into a tragedy, around the demigod, a satyr-play, and around God – what? perhaps a “world”?
When gods die, they always die many sorts of death.
When we dream about those who are long since forgotten or dead, it is a sign that we have undergone a radical transformation and that the ground on which we live has been completely dug up: then the dead rise up, and our antiquity becomes modernity.
What makes us heroic? – Confronting simultaneously our supreme suffering and our supreme hope.
Mathematics is merely the means to a general and ultimate knowledge of man.
Noble and wise men once believed in the music of the spheres: noble and wise men still continue to believe in the “moral significance of existence.” But one day even this sphere-music will no longer be audible to them! They will wake up and take note that their ears were dreaming.
I awoke you from your sleep because I saw that you were having a nightmare. And now you are cross and say to me: “What are we supposed to do now? Everything is still night!” You ingrates! You should go to sleep again and dream better.
At one time or another, almost every politician needs an honest man so badly that, like a ravenous wolf, he breaks into a sheep-fold: not to devour the ram he has stolen, however, but rather to conceal himself behind its wooly back.
We are in the greatest danger of being run over when we have just gotten out of the way of a carriage.
We seldom break a leg as long as we are climbing wearily upwards in our lives, instead we do it when we start going easy on ourselves and choosing the comfortable paths.
A thing can only live through a pious illusion.
One can lie with the mouth, but with the accompanying grimace one nevertheless tells the truth.
Everything becomes and recurs eternally – escape is impossible!
To become the founder of a new religion one must be psychologically infallible in one’s knowledge of a certain average type of souls who have not yet recognized that they belong together.
Many find their heart when they have lost their head.
To those human beings who are of any concern to me, I wish suffering, desolation, sickness, ill treatment, indignities, profound self-contempt, the torture of self-mistrust, and the wretchedness of the vanquished.
Do you want to have an easy life? Then always stay with the herd and lose yourself in the herd.
Assuming that we have trained our imagination to denounce the past, we will not suffer much from unfulfilled wishes.