"The believer in magic and miracles reflects on how to impose a law on nature--: and, in brief, the religious cult is the outcome of this reflection."

"There is a rollicking kindness that looks like malice."

"One has to pay dearly for immortality; one has to die several times while one is still alive."

"The Christian resolution to find the world ugly and bad has made the world ugly and bad."

"Idleness is the parent of psychology."

"The lonely one offers his hand too quickly to whomever he encounters."

"It is invisible hands that torment and bend us the worst."

"There is only a perspective seeing, only a perspective "knowing"; and the more affects we allow to speak about one thing, the more eyes, different eyes, we can use to observe one thing, the more complete will our "concept" of this thing, our "objectivity," be."

"He who laughs best today, will also laughs last."

"A joke is an epigram on the death of a feeling."

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

"Oh, my friends, that your self be in your deed as the mother is in her child - let that be your word concerning virtue!"

"All truth is simple... is that not doubly a lie?"

"But it is the same with man as with the tree. The more he seeks to rise into the height and light, the more vigorously do his roots struggle earthword, downword, into the dark, the deep - into evil."

"Two great European narcotics, alcohol and Christianity."

"To live is to suffer, to survive is to find some meaning in the suffering."

"I am a forest, and a night of dark trees: but he who is not afraid of my darkness, will find banks full of roses under my cypresses."

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

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

"Has a woman who knew that she was well dressed ever caught a cold?"

"Existence really is an imperfect tense that never becomes a present."

"The strongest intimidation, by the way, is the invention of a hereafter with a hell everlasting."

"To those human beings who are of any concern to me I wish suffering, desolation, sickness, ill-treatment, indignities-I wish that they should not remain unfamiliar with profound self-contempt, the torture of self-mistrust, the wretchedness of the vanquished: I have no pity for them, because I wish them the only thing that can prove today whether one is worth anything or not-that one endures."

"The Great Man... is colder, harder, less hesitating, and without fear of 'opinion'; he lacks the virtues that accompany respect and 'respectability,' and altogether everything that is the 'virtue of the herd.' If he cannot lead, he goes alone... He knows he is incommunicable: he finds it tasteless to be familiar... When not speaking to himself, he wears a mask. There is a solitude within him that is inaccessible to praise or blame."

"Those who know that they are profound strive for clarity. Those who would like to seem profound to the crowd strive for obscurity."

"War has always been the grand sagacity of every spirit which has grown too inward and too profound; its curative power lies even in the wounds one receives."

"And when he invented his hell, that was his heaven on earth."

"A well-constituted human being, a 'happy one', must perform certain actions and instinctively shrinks from other actions, he transports the order of which he is the physiological representative into his relations with other human beings and with things. In a formula: his virtue is the consequence of his happiness. Everything good is instinct-and consequently easy, necessary, free. Effort is an objection."

"What is great in man is that he is a bridge and not a goal."

"Women can form a friendship with a man very well but to preserve it a slight physical antipathy most probably helps."

"The word "Christianity" is already a misunderstanding - in reality there has been only one Christian, and he died on the Cross."

"Ultimately, it is the desire, not the desired, that we love."

"Dangerous Helpfulness. There are people who want to make men's lives more difficult for no other reason than afterwards to offer them their prescriptions for making life easier -- their Christianity, for example."

"We ought to face our destiny with courage."

"There are various eyes. Even the Sphinx has eyes: and as a result there are various truths, and as a result there is no truth."

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

"Convictions are more dangerous enemies of truth than lies."

"Fanatics are picturesque, mankind would rather see gestures than listen to reasons."

"The surest way of ruining a youth is to teach him to respect those who think as he does more highly than those who think differently from him."

"A thinker sees his own actions as experiments and questions--as attempts to find out something. Success and failure are for him answers above all."

"Who art thou then, O my soul!" (and here [Zarathustra] became frightened, for a sunbeam shot down from heaven upon his face.""O heaven above me," said he sighing, and sat upright, "thou gazest at me? Thou hearkenest unto my strange soul?When wilt thou drink this drop of dew that fell down upon all earthly things-when wilt thou drink this strange soul--When, thou well of eternity! thou joyous, awful, noontide abyss! when wilt thou drink my soul back into thee?"

"A friend should be a master at guessing and keeping still."

"Under peaceful conditions, the warlike man attacks himself."

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

"Ah, women. They make the highs higher and the lows more frequent."

"Ultimately, nobody can get more out of things, including books, than he already knows."

"At times one remains faithful to a cause only because its opponents do not cease to be insipid."

"Some men are born posthumously."

"That which does not kill me makes me stronger."

"But one thing is the thought, another thing is the deed, and another thing is the idea of the deed. The wheel of causality doth not roll between them."