"Ascetic: one who makes a necessity of virtue."

"Wherever I found a living creature there I found the will to power."

"Glance into the world just as though time were gone: and everything crooked will become straight to you."

"Every word is a prejudice."

"Never to talk of oneself is a form of hypocrisy."

"We possess art lest we perish of the truth."

"Love is blind; friendship closes its eyes."

"We should consider every day lost on which we have not danced at least once. And we should call every truth false which was not accompanied by at least one laugh."

"To have to combat one's instincts-that is the formula for decadence: as long as life is ascending, happiness and instinct are one."

"We have to be careful that in throwing out the devil, we don't throw out the best part of ourselves."

"We have abolished the real world: what world is left? The apparent world perhaps? . . . But no! with the real world we have also abolished the apparent world."

"Of man there is little here: therefore do their women masculinize themselves. For only he who is man enough will save the woman in woman."

"I am a wanderer and mountain-climber, said he to his heart, I love not the plains, and it seemeth I cannot long sit still.And whatever may still overtake me as fate and experience-a wandering will be therein, and a mountain-climbing: in the end one experienceth only oneself."

"One ought to hold on to one's heart; for if one lets it go, one soon loses control of the head too."

"One does not hate as long as one has a low esteem of someone, but only when one esteems him as an equal or a superior."

"At the centre of all these noble races we cannot fail to see the blond beast of prey, the magnificent blond beast avidly prowling round for spoil and victory; this hidden centre needs release from time to time, the beast must out again, must return to the wild: - Roman, Arabian, Germanic, Japanese nobility, Homeric heroes, Scandinavian Vikings - in this requirement they are all alike. It was the noble races which left the concept of 'barbarian' in their traces wherever they went; even their highest culture betrays the fact that they were conscious of this and indeed proud of it."

"One must reach out and try to grasp this astonishing finesse, that the value of lif cannot be estimated."

"We hear only those questions for which we are in a position to find answers."

"Mystical explanations are thought to be deep; the truth is that they are not even shallow."

"The surest way to corrupt a youth is to instruct him to hold in higher esteem those who think alike than those who think differently."

"Some are made modest by great praise, others insolent."

"The existence of forgetting has never been proved: we only know that some things do not come to our mind when we want them to."

"As yet hath his knowledge not learned to smile, and to be without jealously ; as yet hath his gushing passion not become calm in beauty."

"Against the censurers of brevity. - Something said briefly can be the fruit of much long thought: but the reader who is a novice in this field, and has as yet reflected on it not at all, sees in everything said briefly something embryonic, not without censuring the author for having served him up such immature and unripened fare."

"Is life not a thousand times too short for us to bore ourselves?"

"My world has just become perfect, midnight is also noonday, pain is also joy, a curse is also a blessing, the night is also a sun " be gone, or you will learn: a wise man is also a fool."

"Every kind of contempt for sex, every impurification of it by means of the concept "impure", is the crime par excellence against life--is the real sin against the holy spirit of life."

"Our vanity is hardest to wound precisely when our pride has just been wounded."

"Wit is the epitaph of an emotion."

"Man is the cruelest animal."

"Sometimes we owe a friend to the lucky circumstance that we give him no cause for envy."

"Is man merely a mistake of God's? Or God merely a mistake of man?"

"A thinking man never be a party man."

"I deny morality as I deny alchemy."

"That is an artist as I love artists, modest in his needs: he really wants only two things, his bread and his art - panem et Circen."

"The irrationality of a thing is no argument against its existence, rather a condition of it."

"He who has a why to live can bear almost any how."

"Just as in the second part of a verse bad poets seek a thought to fit their rhyme, so in the second half of their lives people tend to become more anxious about finding actions, positions, relationships that fit those of their earlier lives, so that everything harmonizes quite well on the surface: but their lives are no longer ruled by a strong thought, and instead, in its place, comes the intention of finding a rhyme."

"Ah, brothers, this God which I created was human work and human madness, like all gods!He was human, and only a poor piece of man and Ego: this phantom came to me from my own fire and ashes, that is the truth! It did not come from the 'beyond'!"

"You must have chaos within you to give birth to a dancing star."

"There is always some madness in love. But there is also always some reason in madness."

"I am one thing, my writings are another."

"Stupid as a man, say the women: cowardly as a woman, say the men. Stupidity in a woman is unwomanly."

"No small art is it to sleep: it is necessary for that purpose to keep awake all day."

"As is well known, the priests are the most evil enemies-but why? Because they are the most impotent. It is because of their impotence that in them hatred grows to monstrous and uncanny proportions, to the most spiritual and poisonous kind of hatred. The truly great haters in world history have always been priests; likewise the most ingenious haters: other kinds of spirit hardly come into consideration when compared with the spirit of priestly vengefulness."

"Courage is the best slayer-courage which attacketh for in every attack there is the sound of triumph."

"Giving style to one's character - a great and rare art! It is exercised by those who see all the strengths and weaknesses of their own natures and then comprehend them in an artistic plan until everything appears as art and reason and even weakness delights the eye."

"I would believe only in a God that knows how to Dance."

"Perhaps I know best why it is man alone who laughs; he alone suffers so deeply that he had to invent laughter."

"Let that day be lost to us on which we did not dance once I."