A nation is a detour of nature to arrive at five or six great men- yes, and then to get around them.

Remember, our kind protects you Normals from the Pures. We are the rope tied between man and super-beast. A rope forever dangling from the precipice. I tap Zetania’s shoulder and ask, “What’s a precipice?” “A...

For one thing is needful: that a human being should attain satisfaction with himself, whether it be by means of this or that poetry or art; only then is a human being at all tolerable...

In Nietzsche’s usage, the word ‘Christianity’ does not even refer primarily to the religion; using it like a code word, he is thinking more of a particular religio-metaphysically influenced disposition, an ascetically (in the penitent...

Sombres, dites-vous? Mais posez-vous la question docteur : pourquoi tous les grands philosophes sont-ils sombres? Demandez-vous qui sont les gens satisfaits, rassurés et éternellement joyeux! Laissez-moi vous donner la réponse : ce sont ceux qui...

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

To recognize untruth as a condition of life–that certainly means resisting accustomed value feelings in a dangerous way; and a philosophy that risks this would by that token alone place itself beyond good and evil.

This kind of renunciation, in fact, has often been the strength, born of necessity, of the world’s disinherited, of those who do not fit in with their surroundings or with their own body or with...

Blessed are the forgetful, for they get the better even of their blunders.

Both Marx and Nietzsche understood that moral outrage is the last resort of the powerless. That is why Marx refused to issue moral condemnations of capitalism, preferring instead to lay out, calmly and ruthlessly, his...

Socialism, Puritanism, Philistinism, Christianity—he saw them all as allotropic forms of democracy, as variations upon the endless struggle of quantity against quality, of the weak and timorous against the strong and enterprising, of the botched...

My genius is in my nostrils.

Your educators can only be your liberators.

What doesn’t kill us makes a good story.

One not only wants to be understood when one writes, but also quite as certainly not to be understood. It is by no means an objection to a book when someone finds it unintelligible: perhaps...

The priest invents and encourages every kind of suffering and distress so that man may not have the opportunity to become scientific, which requires a considerable degree of free time, health, and an outlook of...

Friedrich Nietzsche, who famously gave us the ‘God is dead’ phrase was interested in the sources of morality. He warned that the emergence of something (whether an organ, a legal institution, or a religious ritual)...

Croire qu’il lui appartient de dépasser sa condition et de s’orienter vers celle de surhomme, c’est oublier qu’il a du mal à tenir le coup en tant qu’homme, et qu’il n’y parvient qu’à force de...

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...

You see, the bodily resurrection of Jesus isn’t a take-it-or-leave-it thing, as though some Christians are welcome to believe it and others are welcome not to believe it. Take it away, and the whole picture...

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

No other German writer of comparable stature has been a more extreme critic of German nationalism than Nietzsche.

Nietzsche, an infinitely harder and more courageous intellect, was incapable of any such confusion of ideas; he seldom allowed sentimentality to turn him from the glaring fact.

Everything goes, everything comes back; eternally rolls the wheel of being. Everything dies, everything blossoms again; eternally runs the year of being. Everything breaks, everything is joined anew; eternally the same House of Being is...

O puro espírito é pura mentira. Enquanto o padre continuar a passar por ser uma espécie superior – o padre, esse negador, esse caluniador, esse envenenador da vida por profissão – , não há resposta...

You would not enjoy Nietzsche, sir. He is fundamentally unsound.

Everyone who has ever built anywhere a new heaven first found the power thereto in his own hell.

Nietzsche says very clearly all the way through his career that if you want to define human nature the first thing you must say is that human beings insist on value–we see the world through...

If I were stranded on a desert island, and could have only one person and three things with me, I’d want Nietzsche, a pen, paper, and a stick-on mustache.

I ascended, I ascended, I dreamt, I thought,—but everything oppressed me. A sick one did I resemble, whom bad torture wearieth, and a worse dream reawakeneth out of his first sleep.—But there is something in...

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

Almighty God, I am sorry I am now an atheist, but have You read Nietzsche?

Your only problem, perhaps, is that you scream without letting yourself cry.

In post-Nietzschean spirit, the West appears to be busily undermining its own erstwhile metaphysical foundations with an unholy mélange of practical materialism, political pragmatism, moral and cultural relativism, and philosophical skepticism.

I am convinced that when Nietzsche came to Switzerland and went insane, it was not because of venereal disease, though he did have this disease. Rather, it was because he understood that insanity was the...

And as long as you are in any way ashamed before yourself, you do not yet belong with us.

The worst readers are those who behave like plundering troops: they take away a few things they can use, dirty and confound the remainder, and revile the whole.

Life was indeed cruel; but it was better to glorify the Will than deny it.

Our faith in others betrays that we would rather have faith in ourselves. Our longing for a friend is our betrayer. And often with our love we want merely to overcome envy. And often we...

For a brief moment I felt I was the older, the more mature.”A gift of life,” I responded, “if not to say, a gift of God, such as music, should not have the mocking charge...

Is a picture really worth a thousand words? What thousand words? A thousand words from a lunatic, or a thousand words from Nietzsche? Actually, Nietzsche was a lunatic, but you see my point. What about...

If you stare at someone long enough, they’ll eventually look back at you.

The snake which cannot cast its skin has to die. As well the minds which are prevented from changing their opinions; they cease to be mind.

Fukuyama’s thesis that history has climaxed with liberal capitalism may have been widely derided, but it is accepted, even assumed, at the level of the cultural unconscious. It should be remembered, though, that even when...

you make me laugh, with your metaphysical anguish, its just that you’re scared silly, frightened of life, of men of action, of action itself, of lack of order. But everything is disorder, dear boy. Vegetable,...

Great intellects are skeptical.

It is the fate of great achievements, born from a way of life that sets truth before security, to be gobbled up by you and excreted in the form of shit. For centuries great, brave,...

Truth is a mobile army of metaphors, metonyms, anthropomorphisms, in short a sum of human relations which have been subjected to poetic and rhetorical intensification, translation and decoration […]; truths are illusions of which we...

Language has been mobilised and sent into battle; it directs the human carnage of conflict with its enunciation of emotion, stimulating souls to abandon peace.

You desire to LIVE “according to Nature”? Oh, you noble Stoics, what fraud of words! Imagine to yourselves a being like Nature, boundlessly extravagant, boundlessly indifferent, without purpose or consideration, without pity or justice, at...