Friedrich Nietzsche

How good music and bad reasons sound when one marches against an enemy.

A nation is a detour of nature to arrive at five or six great men- yes, and then to get around them.

Sometimes people don't want to hear the truth because they don't want their illusions destroyed.

As soon as a religion comes to dominate it has as its opponents all those who would have been its first disciples.

I consist of body and soul - in the worlds of a child. And why shouldn't we speak like children? But the enlightened, the knowledgealbe would say: I am body through and through, nothing more; and the soul is just a word for something on the body.

The same relation exists between merchant and pirate, who for a long period are one and the same person: where the one function appears to them inadvisable, they exercise the other.

If a man has character, he has also his typical experience, which always recurs.

It is certainly not the least charm of a theory that it is refutable; it is precisely thereby that it attracts the more subtle minds. It seems that the hundred-times-refuted theory of the "free will" owes its persistence to this charm alone; some one is always appearing who feels himself strong enough to refute it.

The snake which cannot cast its skin has to die. As well the minds which are prevented from changing their opinions; they cease to be mind.

Remorse.-- Never yield to remorse, but at once tell yourself: remorse would simply mean adding to the first act of stupidity a second.

I fear that, with our current veneration for the natural and the real, we have arrived at the opposite pole to all idealism, and have landed in the region of the waxworks.

I am alone again and I want to be so; alone with the pure sky and open sea.

At the bottom of all these noble races the beast of prey, the splendid blond beast, prowling about avidly in search of spoil and victory.

All truth is crooked, time itself is a circle

From people who merely pray we must become people who bless.

Society tames the wolf into a dog. And man is the most domesticated animal of all.

I am really very, very tired of everything - more than tired.

People are always angry at anyone who chooses very individual standards for his life; because of the extraordinary treatment which that man grants to himself, they feel degraded, like ordinary beings.

All great artists and thinkers are great workers.

Whoever reaches his ideal transcends it eo ipso.

We have art so that we shall not die of reality.