Friedrich Nietzsche

Insanity in individuals is something rare - but in groups, parties, nations and epochs, it is the rule.

I have not come to know atheism as a result of logical reasoning and still less as an event in my life: in me it is a matter of instinct.

A very popular error: having the courage of one's convictions; rather it is a matter of having the courage for an attack on one's convictions.

Every tradition grows continually more venerable, and the more remote its origins, the more this is lost sight of. The veneration paid the tradition accumulates from generation to generation, until it at last becomes holy and excites awe.

Everyone wants to be foremost in this future-and yet death and the stillness of death are the only things certain and common to all in this future! How strange that this sole thing that is certain and common to all, exercises almost no influence on men, and that they are the furthest from regarding themselves as the brotherhood of death! It makes me happy to see that men do not want to think at all of the idea of death!

Curiosity creeps into the houses of the unfortunate and the needy under the name of duty or of pity.

When one rows it is not the rowing which moves the ship: rowing is only a magical ceremony by means of which one compels a demon to move the ship.

A small revenge is more human than no revenge at all.

There are slavish souls who carry their appreciation for favors done them so far that they strangle themselves with the rope of gratitude.

For all things are baptized at the font of eternity, and beyond good and evil; good and evil themselves, however, are but intervening shadows and damp afflictions and passing clouds.

Be careful when you fight the monsters, lest you become one.

Beyond Good and Evil, Aphorism 153

What we call truths are just those errors that we cannot give up.

Mistrust those in whom the urge to punish is strong.

If Islam despises Christianity, it has a thousandfold right to do so: Islam at least assumes that it is dealing with men.

"Faith" as an imperative is a veto against science-in praxi, it means lies at any price.

What then is truth? A movable host of metaphors, metonymies, and anthropomorphisms: in short, a sum of human relations which have been poetically and rhetorically intensified, transferred, and embellished, and which, after long usage, seem to a people to be fixed, canonical, and binding. Truths are illusions which we have forgotten are illusions — they are metaphors that have become worn out and have been drained of sensuous force.

In individuals, insanity is rare; but in groups, parties, nations and epochs, it is the rule.

One receives as reward for much ennui, despondency, boredom -such as a solitude without friends, books, duties, passions must bring with it -those quarter-hours of profoundest contemplation within oneself and nature. He who completely entrenches himself against boredom also entrenches himself against himself: he will never get to drink the strongest refreshing draught from his own innermost fountain.

It quite often happens that the old man is subject to the delusion of a great moral renewal and rebirth, and from this experience he passes judgments on the work and course of his life, as if he had only now become clear-sighted; and yet the inspiration behind this feeling of well-being and these confident judgements is not wisdom, but weariness .

For a tree to become tall it must grow tough roots among the rocks.