There is a prodigious selfishness in dreams: they live perfectly deaf and invulnerable amid the cries of the real world.
It would repel me less to be a hangman than a soldier, because the one is obliged to put to death only criminals sentenced by the law, but the other kills honest men who like himself bathe in innocent blood at the bidding of some superior.
The same battle in the clouds will be known to the deaf only as lightning and to the blind only as thunder.
Sanctity and genius are as rebellious as vice.
Existence is a miracle, and, morally considered, a free gift from moment to moment.
Skepticism is the chastity of the intellect, and it is shameful to surrender it too soon or to the first comer.
The traveller must be somebody and come from somewhere, so that his definite character and moral traditions may supply an organ and a point of comparison for his observations.
Music contains a whole gamut of experience, from sensuous elements to ultimate intellectual harmonies.
It would hardly be possible to exaggerate man’s wretchedness if it were not so easy to overestimate his sensibility.
Nietzsche was personally more philosophical than his philosophy. His talk about power, harshness, and superb immorality was the hobby of a harmless young scholar and constitutional invalid.
What is false in the science of facts may be true in the science of values.
Nature drives with a loose rein and vitality of any sort can blunder through many a predicament in which reason would despair.
Religion is the love of life in the consciousness of impotence.
All spiritual interests are supported by animal life.
To fight is a radical instinct; if men have nothing else to fight over they will fight over words, fancies, or women, or they will fight because they dislike each other’s looks, or because they have met walking in opposite directions.
The constant demands of the heart and the belly can allow man only an incidental indulgence in the pleasures of the eye and the understanding.
The works of nature first acquire a meaning in the commentaries they provoke.
A body seriously out of equilibrium, either with itself or with its environment, perishes outright. Not so a mind. Madness and suffering can set themselves no limit.
It is one thing to lack a heart and another to possess eyes and a just imagination.
The Fates, like an absent-minded printer, seldom allow a single line to stand perfect and unmarred.