"Youth's longing misconceived inconsistency.Those whom I deemedChanged to my kin, the friends of whom I dreamed,Have aged and lost our old affinity:One has to change to stay akin to me."

"There is no pre-established harmony between the furtherance of truth and the well-being of mankind."

"The best weapon against an enemy is another enemy."

"Man is the cruelest animal," says Zarathustra. "When gazing at tragedies, bull-fights, crucifixations he hath hitherto felt happier than at any other time on Earth. And when he invented Hell...lo, Hell was his Heaven on Earth"; he could put up with suffering now, by contemplating the eternal punishment of his oppressors in the other world."

"Alas, where in the world have there been greater follies than with the compassionate?And what in the world has caused more suffering than the follies of the compassionate?Woe to all lovers who cannot surmount pity!Thus spoke the Devil to me once: Even God has his Hell: it is his love for man.And I lately heard him say these words: God is dead; God has died of his pity for man."

"Women are still cats and birds. Or at the best, cows."

"Love your enemies because they bring out the best in you."

"Not to he who is offensive to us are we most unfair but to he who does not concern us at all."

"There are no facts only interpretations."

"And 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."

"One repays a teacher badly if one always remains nothing but a pupil."

"Necessity is not an established fact but an interpretation."

"All modern philosophizing is political, policed by governments, churches, academics, custom, fashion, and human cowardice, all off which limit it to a fake learnedness."

"Thus the man who is responsive to artistic stimuli reacts to the reality of dreams as does the philosopher to the reality of existence; he observes closely, and he enjoys his observation: for it is out of these images that he interprets life, out of these processes that he trains himself for life."

"There is a certain right by which we many deprive a man of life, but none by which we may deprive him of death; this is mere cruelty."

"We no longer have a sufficiently high estimate of ourselves when we communicate. Our true experiences are not garrulous. They could not communicate themselves if they wanted to: they lack words. We have already grown beyond whatever we have words for. In all talking there lies a grain of contempt. Speech, it seems, was devised only for the average medium, communicable. The speaker has already vulgarized himself by speaking."

"I mistrust all systematizers and avoid them. the will to a system is a lack of integrity."

"What is Genius?- To aspire to a lofty aim and to will the means to that aim."

"Even now man is more of an ape than any of the apes."

"Art as the single superior counter-force against all will to negation of life, art as the anti-Christian, anti-Buddhist, anti-Nihilist par excellence."

"When virtue has slept it will arise more vigorous."

"Whatever is done for love always occurs beyond good and evil."

"Every moment of life wants to tell us something, but we do not want to hear what it has to say: when we are alone and quiet we are afraid that something will be whispered into our ear and hence we despise quiet and drug ourselves with sociability."

"Man does not strive for happiness, only the Englishman does that."

"Most people are far too much occupied with themselves to be malicious."

"He who cannot put his thoughts on ice should not enter into the heat of dispute."

"The great works are produced in such an ecstasy of love that they must always be unworthy of it, however great their worth otherwise."

"To use the same words is not a sufficient guarantee of understanding; one must use the same words for the same genus of inward experience; ultimately one must have one's experiences in common."

"What does our great historical hunger signify, our clutching about us of countless cultures, our consuming desire for knowledge, if not the loss of myth, of a mythic home, the mythic womb?"

"But how can we venture to reprove or praise the universe! Let us beware of attributing to it heartlessness and unreason or their opposites: it is neither perfect nor beautiful nor noble, and has no desire to become any of these; it is by no means striving to imitate mankind! It is quite impervious to all our aesthetic and moral judgments! It has likewise no impulse to self-preservation or impulses of any kind; neither does it know any laws. Let us beware of saying there are laws in nature. There are only necessities: there is no one to command, no one to obey, no one to transgress..."

"In praise there is more obtrusiveness than in blame."

"Remain faithful to the earth, my brothers, with the power of your virtue. Let your gift-giving love and your knowledge serve the meaning of the earth. Thus I beg and beseech you. Do not let them fly away from earthly things and beat with their wings against eternal walls. Alas, there has always been so much virtue that has flown away. Lead back to the earth the virtue that flew away, as I do-back to the body, back to life, that it may give the earth a meaning, a human meaning."

"To learn to see- to accustom the eye to calmness, to patience, and to allow things to come up to it; to defer judgment, and to acquire the habit of approaching and grasping an individual case from all sides. This is the first preparatory schooling of intellectuality. One must not respond immediately to a stimulus; one must acquire a command of the obstructing and isolating instincts."

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

"And just look at these men: their eye saith it - they know nothing better on earth than to be with a woman.Filth is at the bottom of their souls, and alas! If their filth hath spirit in it!"

"The end of a melody is not its goal: but nonetheless, had the melody not reached its end it would not have reached its goal either. A parable."

"The relatives of a suicide always take it in bad part that he did not remain alive out of consideration for the family dignity."

"To use the same words is not a sufficient guarantee of understanding one must use the same words for the same genus of inward experience ultimately one must have one's experiences in common."

"Rejoicing in our joy, not suffering over our suffering, makes someone a friend."

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

"Thoughts are the shadows of our feelings - always darker, emptier and simpler."

"The visionary lies to himself, the liar only to others."

"With hard men intimacy is a thing of shame- and something precious."

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

"When one is young, one venerates and despises without that art of nuances which constitutes the best gain of life, and it is only fair that one has to pay dearly for having assaulted men and things in this manner with Yes and No. Everything is arranged so that the worst of tastes, the taste for the unconditional, should be cruelly fooled and abused until a man learns to put a little art into his feelings and rather to risk trying even what is artificial - as the real artists of life do."

"It is nobler to declare oneself wrong than to insist on being right --especially when one is right."

"The body is a big sagacity, a plurality with one sense, a war and a peace, a flock and a shepherd."

"Plato was a bore."

"One loves ultimately one's desires, not the thing desired."

"These people abstain, it is true: but the bitch Sensuality glares enviously out of all they do."