But by my love and hope I beseech you: do not throw away the hero in your soul! Hold holy your highest hope!
Every power draws its ultimate consequences at every moment.
Let us not underestimate the privileges of the mediocre. As one climbs higher, life becomes ever harder, the coldness increases, responsibility increases.
Folk music is the original melody of man; it is the musical mirror of the world.
In every age the wisest have passed the identical judgment on life: it is worthless...
Discontent is the seed of ethics.
Whatever a theologian regards as true must be false: there you have almost a criterion of truth.
What we do is never understood, but always merely praised or blamed.
The most fundamental form of human stupidity is forgetting what we were trying to do in the first place.
Do I advise you to love the neighbor? I suggest rather to escape from the neighbor and to love those who are the farthest away from you. Higher than the love for the neighbor is the love for the man who is distant and has still to come.
You say a good cause justifies any war; but I say a good war justifies any cause.
Narrow souls I cannot abide; There’s almost no good or evil inside.
One hears but one does not seek; one takes – one does not ask who gives; a thought flashes up like lightning, it comes of necessity and unfalteringly formed.
How far is truth susceptible of embodiment? That is the question, that is the experiment.
Only individuals have a sense of responsibility.
He who thinks a great deal is not suited to be a party man: he thinks his way through the party and out the other side too soon.
We are terrified by the idea of being terrified.
I understand by ‘freedom of spirit’ something quite definite – the unconditional will to say No, where it is dangerous to say No.
Wherever I found a living creature, there I found the will to power.
One is healthy when one can laugh at the earnestness and zeal with which one has been hypnotized by any single detail of one’s life.