The ‘kingdom of God’ is not something one waits for; it has no yesterday or tomorrow, it does not come ‘in a thousand years’ it is an experience within a heart; it is everywhere, it is nowhere...
He who is punished is never he who performed the deed. He is always the scapegoat.
We are always in our own company.
Without cruelty there is no festival: thus the longest and most ancient part of human history teaches and in punishment there is so much that is festive!
For those who need consolation no means of consolation is so effective as the assertion that in their case no consolation is possible: it implies so great a degree of distinction that they at once hold up their heads again.
We often contradict an opinion for no other reason than that we do not like the tone in which it is expressed.
We want to be poets of our life first of all in the smallest most everyday matters.
That every will must consider every other will its equal would be a principle hostile to life, an agent of the dissolution and destruction of man, an attempt to assassinate the future of man, a sign of weariness, a secret path to nothingness.
When one gives up Christian belief one thereby deprives oneself of the right to Christian morality. For the latter is absolutely not self-evident: one must make this point clear again and again, in spite of English shallowpates.
The beautiful exists just as little as the true. In every case it is a question of the conditions of preservation of a certain type of man: thus the herd-man will experience the value feeling of the true in different things than will the overman.
Our vanity would have just that which we do best count as that which is hardest for us. The origin of many a morality.
Art furnishes us with eyes and hands and above all the good conscience to be able to turn ourselves into such a phenomenon.
It is possible to imagine a society flushed with such a sense of power that it could afford to let its offenders go unpunished.
One is honest about oneself either with a sense of shame or with vanity.
I cook every chance in my pot. And only when it is cooked through do I welcome it as my food.
A little health now and again is the ailing person’s best remedy.
Surrounded by the flames of jealousy, the jealous one winds up, like the scorpion, turning the poisoned sting against himself.
The creation of freedom for oneself and a sacred “No” even to duty – for that, my brothers, the lion is needed.
Ah, only he who knows where he sails, knows what wind is good, and a fair wind for him.
In solitude there grows what anyone brings into it, the inner beast too. Therefore solitude is inadvisable to many.