I teach the No to all that makes weak – that exhausts. I teach the Yes to all that strengthens, that stores up strength, that pride.
Nothing in life possesses value except the degree of power – assuming that life itself is the will to power.
Evaluation is creation: hear it, you creators! Evaluating is itself the most valuable treasure of all that we value. It is only through evaluation that value exists: and without evaluation the nut of existence would be hollow. Hear it, you creators!
And he who must be a creator in good and evil: verily, he must be an annihilator first and demolish values.
Love forgives the lover even his lust.
In our own presence, we all pretend to be simpler than we are: thus we take a break from our fellow human beings.
In his lonely solitude, the solitary man feeds upon himself; in the thronging multitude, the many feed upon him. Now choose.
The most general deficiency in our sort of culture and education is gradually dawning on me: no one learns, no one strives towards, no one teaches – enduring loneliness.
Enjoying praise is in some people merely a civility of the heart – and just the opposite of a vanity of the spirit.
The best way to give assistance to those who are deeply embarrassed and to calm them down is to praise them decisively.
We must understand how to hide in darkness in order to escape the gnat-swarms of utterly annoying admirers.
The public easily confuses him who fishes in troubled waters with him who draws up water from the depths.
We criticize a thinker more acutely when he advances a proposition that is disagreeable to us; and yet it would be more reasonableto do so when his proposition is agreeable to us.
We criticize a man or a book most sharply when we sketch out their ideal.
The people we have employed in an undertaking that has turned out badly should be doubly rewarded.
The humanity of famous intellectuals lies in being wrong with gracious courtesy when dealing with those who are not famous.
Clever people are never credited with their follies: what a deprivation of human rights!
Science rushes headlong, without selectivity, without “taste,” at whatever is knowable, in the blind desire to know all at any cost.
Death is close enough at hand so we do not need to be afraid of life.
We should turn our death into a celebration, even if only out of a malice towards life: towards the woman who wants to leave – us!