The apprentice and the master love the master in different ways.
Just as soon as we notice that someone has to force himself to pay attention when dealing and talking with us, we have a valid demonstration that he does not love us or that he does not love us anymore.
What is it that you love in others? – My hopes.
I feel all those human beings to be pernicious who can no longer oppose what they love: they thereby ruin the best things and people.
I devote myself to what I love the most, and for this very reason I hesitate to designate it with lofty words: I do not want to risk believing that it is a sublime compulsion, a law, which I obey: I love what I love the most too much to wish to appear to it as one compelled.
Loving and perishing: it’s been a rhyme all these eternities. The will to love: that is, also being willing to die.
The machine is impersonal, it takes the pride away from a piece of work, the individual merits and defects that go along with allwork that is not done by a machine – which is to say, its little bit of humanity.
The woman and the genius do not work. Up to now, woman has been mankind’s supreme luxury. In all those moments when we do our best, we do not work. Work is merely a means to these moments.
The surest sign that two people no longer speak the same language is that both say ironic things to one another but that neither senses the irony.
The empty, the one, the unmoved, the full, satiation, wanting nothing – that would be my evil: in short, dreamless sleep.
A man who possesses genius is insufferable unless he also possesses at least two other things: gratitude and cleanliness.
It is doubtful whether anyone who has travelled widely has found anywhere in the world regions more ugly than in the human face.
Joy wants the eternity of all things, wants deep, wants deep eternity.
We should conserve evil just as we should conserve the forests. It is true that by thinning and clearing the forests the earth grew warmer.
Beware of spitting against the wind!
Shackled heart, free spirit. – Whoever binds his heart tightly and imprisons it may indulge his spirit in many liberties: I have already said that once. But no one believes me unless he already knows.
Willing sets you free: that is the true doctrine of will and freedom – thus Zarathustra instructs you.
What a person is begins to betray itself when his talent weakens – when he stops showing what he can do. Talent, too, is ornamentation, and ornamentation, too, is a hiding place.
With one more talent one frequently stands with greater instability than with one less, as a table stands better on three legs than on four.
Some people appear to be more meager in talent than they are, just because the tasks they set themselves are always too great.