The god on the cross is a curse on life, a signpost to seek redemption from life; Dionysus cut to pieces is a promise of life: it will be eternally reborn and return again from destruction.
Winter, a bad guest, sitteth with me at home; blue are my hands with his friendly handshaking.
If you wish to understand a philosopher, do not ask what he says, but find out what he wants.
Belief in form, but disbelief in content – that’s what makes an aphorism charming.
Women are quite able to make friends with a man; but to preserve such a friendship – that no doubt requires the assistance of a slight physical antipathy.
An artist chooses his subjects: that is the way he praises.
I desire that your conjectures should not reach beyond your creative will. Could you create a god? Then do not speak to me of any gods.
Living in a constant chase after gain compels people to expend their spirit to the point of exhaustion.
I am not a human being, I am dynamite.
There are highly gifted spirits who are always infertile simply because, owing to a weakness in temperament, they are too impatient to wait out their pregnancy to term.
Righteousness exalteth a nation.
The reasons and purposes for habits are always lies that are added only after some people begin to attack these habits and to ask for reasons and purposes. At this point the conservatives of all ages are thoroughly dishonest: they add lies.
Freedom is the will to be responsible for ourselves. It is to preserve the distance which separates us from other men. To grow more indifferent to hardship, to severity, to privation, and even to life itself.
I teach you the Overman. Man is something which shall be surpassed.
Is Wagner a human being at all? Is he not rather a disease? He contaminates everything he touches – he has made music sick.
The advent of the Christian God, as the maximum god attained so far, was therefore accompanied by the maximum feeling of guilty indebtedness on earth.
Moralities and religions are the principal means by which one can make whatever one wishes out of man, provided one possesses a superfluity of creative forces and can assert one’s will over long periods of time in the form of legislation and customs.
It is difficult to preach, this morality of mediocrity! It may never admit what it is and what it wants! It must speak about restraint and worth and duty and love of one’s neighbor.
There is something laughable about the sight of authors who enjoy the rustling folds of long and involved sentences: they are trying to cover up their feet.
O, what nowadays does science not conceal! How much, at least, it is meant to conceal!