Two possibilities: making oneself infinitely small or being so. The second is perfection, that is to say, inactivity, the first is beginning, that is to say, action.
Towards the avoidance of a piece of verbal confusion: What is intended to be actively destroyed must first of all have been firmly grasped; what crumbles away crumbles away, but cannot be destroyed.
The man in ecstasy and the man drowning – both throw up their arms. The first to signify harmony, the second to signify strife with the elements.
Every word first looks around in every direction before letting itself be written down by me.
He who would be free must strike the first blow.
From the first I saw no chance of bettering the condition of the freedman until he should cease to be merely a freedman and should become a citizen.
Fugitive slaves were rare then, and as a fugitive slave lecturer, I had the advantage of being the first one out.
Original minds are not distinguished by being the first to see a new thing, but instead by seeing the old, familiar thing that is over-looked as something new.
Everyone who has ever built anywhere a “new heaven” first found the power thereto in his own hell.
All things that are truly great are at first thought impossible.
You cannot learn to fly by flying. First you must learn to walk, to run, to climb, to dance.
Do whatever you will, but first be such as are able to will.
And he who must be a creator in good and evil: verily, he must be an annihilator first and demolish values.
The first opinion that occurs to us when we are suddenly asked about something is usually not our own but only the current one pertaining to our class, position, or parentage; our own opinions seldom swim on the surface.
When a nation is on the downward path, when it feels its belief in its own future, its hope of freedom slipping from it, when it begins to see submission as a first necessity and the virtues of submission as measures of self-preservation, then it must overhaul its God.
It is an end with priests and gods, if man becomes scientific. Moral: science is the thing forbidden in itself – it alone is forbidden. Science is the first sin, the germ of all sin, original sin. This alones is mortality: Thou shalt not know.
As soon as a religion comes to dominate it has as its opponents all those who would have been its first disciples.
To be the equal of one’s opponent-this is the first condition of an honourable duel.
It was Christianity, with its heartfelt resentment against life, that first made something unclean of sexuality: it threw filth on the origin, on the essential fact of our life.
This demand follows from an insight that I was the first to articulate: that there are no moral facts.