People to whom their daily life appears too empty and monotonous easily grow religious; this is comprehensible and excusable, only they have no right to demand religious sentiments from those whose daily life is not empty and monotonous.
Christianity in particular should be dubbed a great treasure-chamber of ingenious consolations, such a store of refreshing, soothing, deadening drugs has it accumulated within itself.
It is far pleasanter to injure and afterwards beg forgiveness than to be injured and grant forgiveness. He who does the former gives evidence of power and afterwards of kindness of character.
Every society has a tendency to reduce it’s opponents to caricatures.
Strength is the morality of the man who stands out from the rest, and it is mine.
Our salvation lies not in knowing, but in creating!
Objectivity and justice have nothing to do with one another.
Marriage was contrived for ordinary people, for people who are capable of neither great love nor great friendship, which is to say, for most people – but also for those exceptionally rare ones who are capable of love as well as of friendship.
Those who show pity and are always ready to help during times of trouble are seldom the same ones who rejoice in our joy: when others are happy they have nothing to do, they become superfluous and lose their feeling of superiority, and so they easily show their displeasure.
One day soon you will meet a man, and he will rise like a phoenix from the ashes, and it is my greatest hope that he will not give you syphilis.
The only excuse for God is that he doesn’t exist.
Madness is not a consequence of uncertainty but of certainty.
He who delights in solitude is either a wild beast or a god.
What is evil?-Whatever springs from weakness.
Both classically- and romantically-minded spirits-inasmuch as these two species always exist-occupy themselves with a vision of the future: but the former do so out of a strength of their age, the latter out of its weakness.
Just look at the faces of the great Christians! They are the faces of great haters.
In pain there is as much wisdom as in pleasure: like the latter it is one of the best self preservatives of a species.
In architecture the pride of man, his triumph over gravitation, his will to power, assume a visible form. Architecture is a sort of oratory of power by means of forms.
What is more harmful than any vice? Practical sympathy and pity for all the failures and all the weak : Christianity.
Crude men who feel themselves insulted tend to assess the degree of insult as high as possible, and talk about the offense in greatly exaggerated language, only so they can revel to their heart’s content in the aroused feelings of hatred and revenge.