Friedrich Nietzsche

Books and drafts mean something quite different for different thinkers. One collects in a book the lights he was able to steal and carry home swiftly out of the rays of some insight that suddenly dawned on him, while another thinker offers us nothing but shadows - images in black and grey of what had built up in his soul the day before.

Iron necessity is a thing which in the course of history men come to see as neither iron nor necessary.

Where is the lightning to lick you with its tongue? Where is the madness with which you should be cleansed? Behold, I show you the Superman. He is this lightning, he is this madness.

The true man wants two things: danger and play. For that reason he wants woman, as the most dangerous plaything.

The tragedy is that we cannot believe the dogmas of religion and metaphysics if we have the strict methods of truth in heart and head, but on the other hand, we have become through the development of humanity so tenderly suffering that we need the highest kind of means of salvation and consolation: whence arises the danger that man may bleed to death through the truth that he realises.

The higher man is distinguished from the lower by his fearlessness and his readiness to challenge misfortune.

The abdomen is the reason why man does not readily take himself to be a god.

If that glad message of your Bible were written in your faces, you would not need to demand belief in the authority of that book in such stiff-necked fashion.

Reason" in language - oh, what an old deceptive female she is! I am afraid we are not rid of God because we still have faith in grammar.

The belief in authority is the source of conscience; which is therefore not the voice of God in the heart of man, but the voice of some men in man.

Our faith in others betrays that we would rather have faith in ourselves. Our longing for a friend is our betrayer. And often with our love we want merely to overcome envy. And often we attack and make ourselves enemies, to conceal that we are vulnerable.

What if God were not exactly truth, and if this could be proved? And if he were instead the vanity, the desire for power, the ambitions, the fear, and the enraptured and terrified folly of mankind?

Happiness is the feeling that power increases - that resistance is being overcome.

"This - is now my way - where is yours"? Thus did I answer those who asked me "the way". For the way - it does not exist!

Even in the lust of knowledge I feel only my will's delight in begetting and becoming; and if there be innocence in my knowledge it is because my procreative will is in it.

Madness is rare in individuals - but in groups, parties, nations, and ages it is the rule.

The wisest man would be the one richest in contradictions, who has, as it were, antennae for all types of men---as well as his great moments of grand harmony---a rare accident even in us! A sort of planetary motion---

Is Wagner a human being at all? Is he not rather a disease? He contaminates everything he touches - he has made music sick.

The usual false conclusions of mankind are these: a thing exists, therefore it has a right to exist.

In Christianity neither morality nor religion come into contact with reality at any point.

It is not enough to prove something, one also has to seduce or elevate people to it. That is why the man of knowledge should learns how to speak his wisdom: and often in such a way that it sounds like folly!