A high civilization is a pyramid: it can stand only on a broad base; its primary prerequisite is a strong and soundly consolidated mediocrity.
Courageous, untroubled, mocking, violent – thus does Wisdom want us: she is a woman and always loves only a warrior.
No matter how strongly a thing may be believed, strength of belief is no criterion of truth.′ But what is truth? Perhaps a kind of belief that has become a condition of life?
We hear only the questions to which we are capable of finding an answer.
Lighting and thunder require time; the light of the stars requires time; deeds, though done, still require time to be seen and heard.
WE are unknown, we knowers, ourselves to ourselves: this has its own good reason.
Nihilism stands at the door: whence comes this uncanniest of all guests?
That Luther’s Reformation succeeded in the North suggests that the north of Europe was retarded compared to the south...
But have you ever asked yourselves sufficiently how much the erection of every ideal on earth has cost? How much reality has had to be misunderstood and slandered, how many lies have had to be sanctified, how many consciences disturbed, how much “God” sacrificed every time? If a temple is to be erected a temple must be destroyed: that is the law – let anyone who can show me a case in which it is not fulfilled!
All the means by which one has so far attempted to make mankind moral were through and through immoral.
Religion is a form of gratitude. A man is grateful for his own existence: to that end he needs a god.
Great poets create only from their own reality – to the point where they cannot stand their work any more afterwards... Whenever I glance through my Zarathustra, I walk around the room for half an hour, sobbing uncontrollably.
Once you were apes, and even now, too, man is more ape than any ape.
Thus spake the devil unto me, once on a time: “Even God hath his hell: it is his love for man.
Representatives of truth. The champions of truth are hardest to find, not when it is dangerous to tell it, but rather when it is boring.
Brave people are persuaded to an action when it is represented as more dangerous than it is.
At times, one can win clever people over to a principle merely by presenting it in the form of an outrageous paradox.
Aside from a few philosophers, men have always placed pity rather low in the hierarchy of moral feelings – and rightly so.
When law is no longer a tradition, as in our case, it can only be commanded, or forced; none of us has a traditional sense of justice any longer; therefore we must content ourselves with arbitrary laws, which express the necessity of having to have a law.
The whole morality of the Sermon on the Mount belongs here; man takes a truly voluptuous pleasure in violating himself by exaggerated demands and then deifying this something in his soul that is so tyrannically taxing. In each ascetic morality, man prays to one part of himself as god and also finds its necessary to diabolify the rest.
Judgements, judgements of value, concerning life, for it or against it, can, in the end, never be true: they have value only as symptoms, they are worthy of consideration only as symptoms; in themselves such judgements are stupidities. One must by all means stretch out one’s fingers and make the attempt to grasp this amazing finesse, that the value of life cannot be estimated.