Very early in my life I took the question of the relation of art to truth seriously: even now I stand in holy dread in the face of this discordance. My first book was devoted to it. The Birth of Tragedy believes in art on the background of another belief.
If we have our own why of life, we shall get along with almost any how. Man does not strive for pleasure; only the Englishman does.
I fly in dreams, I know it is my privilege, I do not recall a single situation in dreams when I was unable to fly. To execute every sort of curve and angle with a light impulse, a flying mathematics – that is so distinct a happiness that it has permanently suffused my basic sense of happiness.
If one uses one’s intellect to become master over the unlimited emotions, it may produce a sorry and diversionary effect upon the intellect.
We forget our guilt when we have confessed it to another, but the other does not usually forget it.
The elimination of the will altogether and the switching off of the emotions all and sundry, is tantamount to the elimination of reason: intellectual castration.
Men have hitherto treated women like birds which have strayed down to them from the heights; as something more delicate, more fragile, more savage, stranger, sweeter, soulful – but as something which has to be caged up so that it shall not fly away.
We are franker towards others than towards ourselves.
Instinct. When the house burns one forgets even lunch. Yes, but one eats it later in the ashes.
Rather perish than hate and fear, and twice rather perish than make oneself hated and feared – this must some day become the highest maxim for every single commonwealth.
Many a one cannot loosen his own fetters, but is nevertheless his friend’s emancipator.
Systems of morals are only a sign-language of the emotions.
Moderation sees itself as beautiful; it is unaware that in the eye of the immoderate it appears black and sober and consequently ugly-looking.
And this do I call immaculate perception of all things: to want nothing else from them, but to be allowed to lie before them as a mirror with a hundred facets.
Almost two thousand years, and no new god!
The Germans are incapable of any conception of greatness: proof Schumann.
As far as Germany extends it ruins culture.
I believe only in French culture and consider everything in Europe that calls itself ‘culture’ a misunderstanding, not to speak of German culture.
My formula for greatness in a human being is amor fati: that one wants nothing to be other than it is, not in the future, not in the past, not in all eternity.
Verily, I do not want to be like the ropemakers: They drag out their threads and always walk backwards.