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

"Without forgetting it is quite impossible to live at all."

"What can everyone do? Praise and blame. This is human virtue, this is human madness."

"All truly great thoughts are conceived by walking."

"Psychology has falsified love as surrender and altruism, while it is an appropriation or a bestowal following from a super-abundance of personality. Only the most complete persons can love. The depersonalized and objective are the worst lovers."

"One has to take a somewhat bold and dangerous line with this existence: especially as, whatever happens, we are bound to lose it."

"There are people who want to make men's lives more difficult for no other reason than the chance it provides them afterwards to offer their prescription for alleviating life; their Christianity, for instance."

"I assess the power of a will by how much resistance, pain, torture it endures and knows how to turn to its advantage."

"All that exists is just and unjust and is equally justified in both respects."

"Hope in reality is the worst of all evils because it prolongs the torments of man."

"My Ego taught me a new pride, I teach it to men: No longer to bury the head in the sand of heavenly things, but to carry it freely, an earthly head which creates meaning for the earth!"

"Physician, heal thyself: then wilt thou also heal thy patient. Let it be his best cure to see with his eyes him who maketh himself whole."

"To forget one's purpose is the commonest form of stupidity."

"What then in the last resort are the truths of mankind? They are the irrefutable errors of mankind."

"Love, too, has to be learned."

"We do not belong to those who have ideas only among books, when stimulated by books. It is our habit to think outdoors - walking, leaping, climbing, dancing, preferably on lonely mountains or near the sea where even the trails become thoughtful."

"A thing can only live through a pious illusion."

"Like a last signpost to the other path, Napoleon appeared, the most isolated and late-born man there has even been, and in him the problem of the noble ideal as such made flesh--one might well ponder what kind of problem it is; Napoleon this synthesis of the inhuman and the superhuman."

"But I need solitude--which is to say, recovery, return to myself, the breath of a free, light, playful air."

"And granted that your imperative, "living according to Nature," means actually the same as "living according to life"--how could you do DIFFERENTLY? Why should you make a principle out of what you yourselves are, and must be?"

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

"Weariness that wants to reach the ultimate with one leap, with one fatal leap, a poor ignorant weariness that does not want to want any more: this created all gods and afterworlds."

"Equality before the enemy -that is the main condition to fight a fair duel. Where you have contempt, you cannot wage war; where you are in command, where you can see someone beneath you, you should not wage war."

"When, however, you have an enemy, then do not requite him good for evil: for that would shame him. Instead, prove that he did some good for you. And rather be angry than put to shame! And when you are cursed, I do not like it that you want to bless. Rather curse a little also! And if you are done a great injustice, then quickly add five small ones. Hideous to behold is he who is obsessed with an injustice."

"The higher we soar the smaller we appear to those who cannot fly."

"Do you love tragedies and everything that breaks the heart?"

"In architecture the pride of man his triumph over gravitation his will to power assume a visible form. Architecture is a sort of oratory of power by means of forms."

"The craving for equality can express itself either as a desire to pull everyone down to our own level (by belittling them, excluding them, tripping them up) or as a desire to raise ourselves up along with everyone else (by acknowledging them, helping them, and rejoicing in their success)."

"Energy wasted on negative ends."

"Every habit makes our hand more witty, and out wit more handy."

"You look up when you wish to be exalted. And I look down because I am exalted."

"Nothing is beautiful, only man: on this piece of naivete rests all aesthetics, it is the first truth of aesthetics. Let us immediately add its second: nothing is ugly but degenerate man - the domain of aesthetic judgment is therewith defined."

"A thought comes when it will, not when I will."

"Whoever does not have a good father should procure one."

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

"In order that there may be institutions, there must be a kind of will, instinct, or imperative, which is anti-liberal to the point of malice: the will to tradition, to authority, to responsibility for centuries to come, to the solidarity of chains of generations, forward and backward ad infinitum."

"It may be that until now there has been no more potent means for beautifying man himself than piety: it can turn man into so much art, surface, play of colors, graciousness that his sight no longer makes one suffer."

"When a hundred men stand together, each of them loses his mind and gets another one."

"O my brothers, I dedicate and direct you to a new nobility: you shall become procreators and cultivators and sowers of the future - verily, not to a nobility that you might buy like shopkeepers and with shopkeepers' gold: for whatever has its price has little value. Not whence you came shall henceforth constitute your honor, but whither you are going! Your will and your foot which has a will to go over and beyond yourselves - that shall constitute your new honor."

"We love life, not because we are used to living but because we are used to loving."

"Ah, ye brethren, that God whom I created was human work and human madness, like all the Gods!"

"It was suffering and incapacity that created all afterworlds - this, and that brief madness of bliss which is experienced only by those who suffer deeply. Weariness that wants to reach the ultimate with one leap, with one fatal leap, a poor ignorant weariness that does not want to want any more: this created all gods and afterworlds."

"New struggles. -- After Buddha was dead, they still showed his shadow in a cave for centuries -- a colossal, horrible shadow. God is dead, but given the way people are, there may still be caves for millennia in which his shadow is displayed. -- And we -- we must still defeat his shadow as well!"

"Love's cruel notion. - Every great love brings with it the cruel idea of killingthe object of that love, so that he may be removed once and for all fromthe wicked game of change: for love dreads change more than it doesdestruction."

"What, then, is truth? A mobile army of metaphors, metonyms, and anthropomorphisms " in short, a sum of human relations, which have been enhanced, transposed, and embellished poetically and rhetorically, and which after long use seem firm, canonical, and obligatory to a people: truths are illusions about which one has forgotten that this is what they are; metaphors which are worn out and without sensuous power; coins which have lost their pictures and now matter only as metal, no longer as coins."

"When thou goest to woman take thy whip."

"It is good to express a thing twice right at the outset and so to give it a right foot and also a left one. Truth can surely stand on one leg, but with two it will be able to walk and get around."

"Generally speaking, punishment makes men hard and cold; it concentrates; it sharpens the feeling of alienation; it strengthens the power of resistance."

"Every man is a creative cause of what happens, a primum mobile with an original movement."

"What is familiar is what we are used to; and what we are used to is most difficult to 'Know' - that is, to see as a problem; that is, to see as strange, as distant, as 'outside us'."