"The crowd of influences streaming on the young soul is so great, the clods of barbarism and violence flung at him so strange and overwhelming, that an assumed stupidity is his only refuge."

"Thus I spoke, more and more softly; for I was afraid of my own thoughts and the thoughts behind my thoughts."

"In every real man a child is hidden that wants to play."

"Insanity in individuals is something rare - but in groups parties nations and epochs it is the ru)e."

"A man who wills commands something within himself that renders obedience, or that he believes renders obedience."

"None of the people have any real interest in a science, who only begin to be enthusiastic about it when they themselves have made discoveries in it."

"Love is not consolation. It is light."

"Great intellects are skeptical."

"Men have hitherto treated women like birds which have strayed down to them from the heights; as something more delicate, more fragile, more savage, stranger, sweeter, soulful " but as something which has to be caged up so that it shall not fly away."

"What really arouses indignation against suffering is not suffering as such but the senselessness of suffering..."

"Every select man strives instinctively for a citadel and a privacy, where he is FREE from the crowd, the many, the majority-- where he may forget "men who are the rule," as their exception;-- exclusive only of the case in which he is pushed straight to such men by a still stronger instinct, as a discerner in the great and exceptional sense."

"A friend should be a master at guessing and keeping still: you must not want to see everything."

"Art is not merely an imitation of the reality of nature, but in truth a metaphysical supplement to the reality of nature, placed alongside thereof for its conquest."

"One must shed the bad taste of wanting to agree with many. "Good" is no longer good when one's neighbor mouths it. And how should there be a "common good"! The term contradicts itself: whatever can be common always has little value. In the end it must be as it is and always has been: great things remain for the great, abysses for the profound, nuances and shudders for the refined, and, in brief, all that is rare for the rare."

"Extreme positions are not succeeded by moderate ones, but by contrary extreme positions."

"The press, the machine, the railway, the telegraph are premises whose thousand-year conclusion no one has yet dared to draw."

"The slow arrow of beauty. The most noble kind of beauty is that which does not carry us away suddenly, whose attacks are not violent or intoxicating (this kind easily awakens disgust), but rather the kind of beauty which infiltrates slowly, which we carry along with us almost unnoticed, and meet up with again in dreams; finally, after it has for a long time lain modestly in our heart, it takes complete possession of us, filling our eyes with tears, our hearts with longing. What do we long for when we see beauty? To be beautiful. We think much happiness must be connected with it. But that is an error."

"It is disgraceful for a philosopher to say: the good and the beautiful are one; if he adds 'also the true', one ought to beat him. Truth is ugly. We possess art lest we perish of the truth."

"Words are but symbols for the relations of things to one another and to us; nowhere do they touch upon absolute truth."

"Be careful when you cast out your demons that you don't throw away the best of yourself."

"They're so cold, these scholars!May lightning strike their foodso that their mouths learn howto eat fire!"

"It is not the strength, but the duration, of great sentiments that makes great men."

"For art to exist, for any sort of aesthetic activity to exist, a certain physiological precondition is indispensable: intoxication."

"The final reward of the dead - to die no more."

"Popular medicine and popular morality belong together and ought not to be evaluated so differently as they still are: both are the most dangerous pseudo-sciences."

"Genius too does nothing but learn first how to lay bricks then how to build, and continually seek for material and continually form itself around it.Every activity of man is amazingly complicated, not only that of the genius: but none is a 'miracle."

"If a woman possesses manly virtues one should run away from her; and if she does not possess them she runs away from herself."

"Whoever has witnessed another's ideal becomes his inexorable judge and as it were his evil conscience."

"The best author will be the one who is ashamed to become a writer."

"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."

"One sticks to an opinion because he prides himself on having come to it on his own, and another because he has taken great pains to learn it and is proud to have grasped it: and so both do so out of vanity."

"The world itself is the will to power - and nothing else! And you yourself are the will to power - and nothing else!"

"Everything the State says is a lie, and everything it has it has stolen."

"We have art in order not to die of the truth."

"One is punished most for one's virtues."

"A moral system valid for all is basically immoral."

"Either you reach a higher point today or you exercise your strength in order to be able to climb higher tomorrow."

"A good writer possesses not only his own spirit but also the spirit of his friends."

"Morality is the herd-instinct in the individual."

"It is intoxicating joy for the sufferer to look away from his suffering and to forget himself."

"Pure logic is the impossibility by means of which science is maintained."

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

"The maturity of man-that means, to have reacquired the seriousness that one had as a child at play."

"The more thoroughly a person understands life, the less he will mock, though in the end he might still mock the "thoroughness of his understanding."

"Species do not grow more perfect: the weaker dominate the strong again and again - the reason being they are the great majority, and they are also cleverer.... Darwin forgot the mind (- that in English): the weak possess more mind. ... To acquire mind one must need mind - one loses it when one no longer needs it. He who possesses strength divests himself of mind."

"Belief means not wanting to know what is true."

"Twofold misjudgement. - The misfortune suffered by clear-minded and easily understood writers is that they are taken for shallow and thus little effort is expended on reading them: and the good fortune that attends the obscure is that the reader toils at them and ascribes to them the pleasure he has in fact gained from his own zeal."

"He who would learn to fly one day must first learn to stand and walk and run and climb and dance one cannot fly into flying."

"How can a man become great if he does not feel in himself the force and the will to inflict great pain."

"Go up close to your friend, but do not go over to him! We should also respect the enemy in our friend."