One is not converted to christianity; one must be morbid enough for it.
The soul must have its chosen sewers to carry away its ordure. This function is performed by persons, relationships, professions, the fatherland, the world, or finally, for the really arrogant – I mean our modern pessimists – by the Good God himself.
Poets and writers who are in love with the superlative all want to do more than they can.
What verse is for the poet, dialectical thinking is for the philosopher. He grasps for it in order to get hold of his own enchantment, in order to perpetuate it.
The great wars of the present age are the effects of the study of history.
Only in war are you holy, and when you are robbers and cruel.
In war personal revenge maintains its silence.
Yet for all that, there is nothing in me of a founder of a religion – religions are affairs of the rabble; I find it necessary to wash my hands after I have come into contact with religious people.
Every god-man created his own god: and there is no worse enmity on earth than that between gods.
Generally speaking, the greater a woman’s beauty, the greater her modesty.
The grand style arises when beauty wins a victory over the monstrous.
To one who is accustomed to thinking a lot, every new thought that he hears or reads about immediately appears as a link in a chain.
Those with very loud voices in their throats are nearly incapable of thinking subtle thoughts.
We cannot even reproduce our thoughts entirely in words.
The thought is merely a sign, as the word is merely a sign for the thought.
The flame is not as bright to itself as it is to those it illuminates: so too the sage.
Scholarship has the same relationship to wisdom as righteousness has to holiness: it is cold and dry, it is loveless and knows nodeep feelings of inadequacy or longing.
It was modesty that invented the word “philosopher” in Greece and left the magnificent overweening presumption in calling oneselfwise to the actors of the spirit – the modesty of such monsters of pride and sovereignty as Pythagoras, as Plato.
To become wise you have to want to experience certain experiences, and so to run into their open jaws. This is very dangerous, tobe sure; many a “wise man” has been eaten up in doing so.
Once and for all, there are many things I choose not to know. – Wisdom sets limits even to knowledge.