The small force that it takes to launch a boat into the stream should not be confused with the force of the stream that carries it along: but this confusion appears in nearly all biographies.
No, life has not disappointed me. On the contrary, I find it truer, more desirable and mysterious every year – ever since the day when the great liberator came to me: the idea that life could be an experiment of the seeker for knowledge – and not a duty, not a calamity, not trickery.
It is certainly not the least charm of a theory that it is refutable.
That roguish and cheerful vice, politeness.
One must never have spared oneself, one must have acquired hardness as a habit to be cheerful and in good spirits in the midst of nothing but hard truths.
Assuming that he believes at all, the everyday Christian is a pitiful figure, a man who really cannot count up to three, and who besides, precisely because of his mental incompetence, would not deserve such a punishment as Christianity promises him.
A high civilization is a pyramid: it can stand only on a broad base; its primary prerequisite is a strong and soundly consolidated mediocrity.
The surest aid in combating the male’s disease of self-contempt is to be loved by a clever woman.
One begins to mistrust very clever people when they become embarrassed.
Little prigs and three-quarter madmen may have the conceit that the laws of nature are constantly broken for their sakes.
The bite of conscience, like the bite of a dog into a stone, is a stupidity.
What I understand by “philosopher”: a terrible explosive in the presence of which everything is in danger.
Morality in Europe today is herd-morality.
In constructing concepts, we overlook the fact that no two things are the same. There is no such thing as the concept of a leaf, only billions and billions of leaves.
I do not give alms; I am not poor enough for that.
Nothing ever succeeds which exuberant spirits have not helped to produce.
Physician, help yourself: thus help your patient too. Let this be his best help: that he may behold with his eyes the man who heals himself.
Those who are failures from the start, downtrodden, crushed – it is they, the weakest, who must undermine life among men, who call into question and poison most dangerously our trust in life, in man, and in ourselves.
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.