"This eternal accusation against Christianity I shall write upon all walls, wherever walls are to be found--I have letters that even the blind will be able to see. . . . I call Christianity the one great curse, the one great intrinsic depravity, the one great instinct of revenge, for which no means are venomous enough, or secret, subterranean and small enough,--I call it the one immortal blemish upon the human race..."

"No one can build you the bridge on which you, and only you, must cross the river of life. There may be countless trails and bridges and demigods who would gladly carry you across; but only at the price of pawning and forgoing yourself. There is one path in the world that none can walk but you. Where does it lead? Don't ask, walk!"

"That which now calls itself democracy differs from older forms of government solely in that it drives with new horses: the streets are still the same old streets, and the wheels are likewise the same old wheels."

"Human nature has nevertheless been changed by the ever new appearance of these teachers of the purpose of existence: It now has one additional need-the need for the ever new appearance of such teachers and teachings of a "purpose. Gradually, man has become a fantastic animal that has to fulfill one more condition of existence than any other animal: man has to believe, to know, from time to time why he exists; his race cannot flourish without a periodic trust in life-without faith in reason in life."

"It is always consoling to think of suicide: in that way one gets through many a bad night."

"Faith: not wanting to know what is true."

"All things are subject to interpretation. Whichever interpretation prevails at a given time is a function of power and not truth."

"In large states public education will always be mediocre, for the same reason that in large kitchens the cooking is usually bad."

"To die proudly when it is no longer possible to live proudly. Death of one's own free choice, death at the proper time, with a clear head and with joyfulness, consummated in the midst of children and witnesses: so that an actual leave-taking is possible while he who is leaving is still there."

"He who is a firstling is ever sacrificed."

"We are terrified by the idea of being terrified."

"Perhaps he even needs to have been a critic and a sceptic and a dogmatist and an historian, and in addition a poet and collector and traveller and puzzle-solver and moralist and seer and 'free spirit' and nearly all things, so that he can traverse the range of human values and value-feelings and be able to look with many kinds of eyes and consciences from the heights into every distance, from the depths into every height, from the corners into every wide expanse."

"Our crime against criminals lies in the fact that we treat them like rascals."

"Should not the giver be thankful that the receiver received? Is not giving a need? Is not receiving mercy?"

"There is an old illusion. It is called good and evil."

"Experience, as a desire for experience, does not come off. We must not study ourselves while having an experience."

"When one has a great deal to put into it a day has a hundred pockets."

"We are unknown to ourselves, we men of knowledge--and with good reason. We have never sought ourselves--how could it happen that we should ever find ourselves?"

"Shared joys make a friend not shared sufferings."

"Just as it is certain that one leaf is never totally the same as another, so it is certain that the concept "leaf" is formed by arbitrarily discarding these individual differences and by forgetting the distinguishing aspects. This awakens the idea that, in addition to the leaves, there exists in nature the "leaf": the original model according to which all the leaves were perhaps woven, sketched, measured, colored, curled, and painted--but by incompetent hands, so that no specimen has turned out to be a correct, trustworthy, and faithful likeness of the original model."

"The drive to knowledge has become too strong for us to be able to want happiness without knowledge or of a strong, firmly rooted delusion; even to imaginesuch a state of things is painful to us! Restless discovering and divining has such an attraction for us, and has grown as indispensable to us as is to the lover his unrequited love, which he would at no price relinquish for a state of indifference " perhaps,indeed, we too are unrequited lovers."

"There is nothing we like to communicate to others as much as the seal of secrecy together with what lies under it."

"What? You seek something? You wish to multiply yourself tenfold, a hundredfold? You seek followers? Seek zeros!"

"When the gratitude of many to one throws away all shame, we behold fame."

"A man far oftener appears to have a decided character from persistently following his temperament than from persistently following his principles."

"It is impossible to suffer without making someone pay for it; every complaint already contains revenge."

"Zarathustra answered: "I love mankind."

"Whatever they may think and say about their "egoism", the great majority nonetheless do nothing for their ego their whole life long: what they do is done for the phantom of their ego which has formed itself in the heads of those around them and has been communicated to them."

"Your bad love of yourselves makes solitude a prison to you."

"To do great things is difficult but to command great things is more difficult."

"What destroys a man more quickly than to work, think and feel without inner necessity, without any deep personal desire, without pleasure - as a mere automaton of duty?"

"There are no facts, only interpretations."

"There exists no more repulsive and desolate creature in the world than the man who has evaded his genius and who now looks furtively to left and right, behind him and all about him. In the end such a man becomes impossible to get hold of, since he is wholly exterior, without kernel, a tattered, painted bag of clothes, a decked-out ghost that cannot inspire even fear and certainly not pity."

"Sleeping is no mean art. For its sake one must stay awake all day."

"That the other suffers has to be learned, and it can never be learned fully."

"It breaks my heart. Better than your words, your eye tells me all your peril.You are not yet free, you still search for freedom. Your search has fatigued you and made you too wakeful.You long for the open heights, your soul thirsts for the stars. But your bad instincts too thirst for freedom. Your fierce dogs long for freedom; they bark for joy in their cellar when your spirit aspires to break open all prisons.To me you are still a prisoner who imagines freedom: ah, such prisoners of the soul become clever, but also deceitful and base."

"I teach you beyond Man (superman). Man is something that shall be surpassed. What have you done to surpass him?"

"Sometimes it is harder to accede to a thing than it is to see its truth."

"Without the errors which are active in every psychical pleasure and displeasrue a humanity would never have come into existence--whose fundamental feeling is and remains that man is the free being in a world of unfreedom, the external miracle worker whether he does good or ill, the astonishing exception, the superbeast and almost-god, the meaning of creation which cannot be thought away, the solution of the cosmic riddle, the mighty ruler over nature and the despiser of it, the creature which calls its history world history!--Vanitas vanitatum homo."

"We talk so abstractly about poetry because all of us are usually bad poets."

"To be ashamed of one's immorality: that is a step on the staircase at whose end one is also ashamed of one's morality."

"He who climbs upon the highest mountains laughs at all tragedies, real or imaginary."

"The abdomen is the reason why man does not easily take himself for a god."

"It says nothing against the ripeness of a spirit that it has a few worms."

"The beast lives unhistorically; for it 'goes into' the present, like a number, without leaving any curious remainder."

"Today I love myself as I love my god: who could charge me with a sin today? I know only sins against my god but who knows my god?"

"Anyone who has declared someone else to be an idiot, a bad apple, is annoyed when it turns out in the end that he isn't."

"The advantage of a bad memory is that one enjoys several times the same good things for the first time."

"Masks. - There are women who, however you may search them, prove to have no content but are purely masks. The man who associates with such almost spectral, necessarily unsatisfied beings is to be commiserated with, yet it is precisely they who are able to arouse the desire of the man most strongly: he seeks for her soul - and goes on seeking."

"You tell me: 'Life is hard to bear.' But if it were otherwise why should you have your pride in the morning and your resignation in the evening?Life is hard to bear: but do not pretend to be so tender! We are all of us pretty fine asses and asseses of burden!"