Friedrich Nietzsche

Buddha says: "Do not flatter your benefactor!". Let one repeat this saying in a Christian church : it immediately purifies the air of everything Christian.

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.

For this remains as I have already pointed out the essential difference between the two religions of decadence : Buddhism promises nothing, but actually fulfils; Christianity promises everything, but fulfils nothing.

Not their love of humanity, but the impotence of their love, prevents the Christians of today - burning us.

The great epochs of our life come when we gain the courage to rechristen our evil as what is best in us.

Among human beings there is no greater banality than death. Second in order, because it is possible to die without being born, comes birth, and next comes marriage.

Our greatest experiences are our quietest moments.

Why does man not see things? He is himself standing in the way: he conceals things.

God is Dead; but given the way of men, there may still be caves for thousands of years in which his shadow will be shown. And we - we still have to vanquish his shadow, too.

Actual philosophers... are commanders and law-givers: they say "thus it shall be!", it is they who determine the Wherefore and Whither of mankind, and they possess for this task the preliminary work of all the philosophical laborers, of all those who have subdued the past - they reach for the future with creative hand, and everything that is or has been becomes for them a means, an instrument, a hammer.

The errors of great men are venerable because they are more fruitful than the truths of little men.

Error has made man so deep, sensitive, and inventive that he has put forth such blossoms as religions and arts. Pure knowledge could not have been capable of it.

He who has always spared himself much will in the end become sickly of so much consideration. Praised be what hardens!

Everyone thinks that the principal thing to the tree is the fruit, but in point of fact the principal thing to it is the seed.

Youth is an unpleasant period; for then it is not possible or not prudent to be productive in any sense whatsoever.

The most common sort of lie is the one uttered to one's self.

The idealist is incorrigible: if he is thrown out of his heaven he makes an ideal of his hell.

Only the most acute and active animals are capable of boredom.

We operate with nothing but things which do not exist, with lines, planes, bodies, atoms, divisible time, divisible space - how should explanation even be possible when we first make everything into an image, into our own image!

It is obvious that all sense has gone out of modern marriage; which is, however, no objection to marriage but to modernity.

One should not understand this compulsion to construct concepts, species, forms, purposes, laws ('a world of identical cases') as if they enabled us to fix the real world; but as a compulsion to arrange a world for ourselves in which our existence is made possible:-we thereby create a world which is calculable, simplified, comprehensible, etc., for us.