...one can speak with the utmost clearness, and yet not be heard by anyone.
A letter is an unannounced visit, the postman the agent of rude surprises. One ought to reserve an hour a week for receiving letters and afterwards take a bath.
He who wants to do good knocks at the gate: he who loves finds the door open.
I have never come across someone who could inspire more respect than the Greek philosophers.
In music the passions enjoy themselves.
Those who are bent on revolutionizing society may be divided into those who seek something for themselves thereby and those who seek something for their children and grandchildren.
In all institutions from which the cold wind of open criticism is excluded, an innocent corruption begins to grow like a mushroom - for example, in senates and learned societies
Anecdote: Greatness Means Leading the Way. No stream is large and copious of itself, but becomes great by receiving and leading on so many tributary streams. It is so, also, with all intellectual greatness, It is only a question of someone indicating the direction to be followed by so many affluent; not whether he was richly or poorly gifted originally.
Whoever gives advice to a sick person acquires a feeling of superiority over him, whether the advice be accepted or rejected.
Gray hairs are signs of wisdom if you hold your tongue, speak and they are but hairs, as in the young.
If we lacked curiosity, we should do less for the good of our neighbor. But, under the name of duty or pity, curiosity steals into the home of the unhappy and the needy. Perhaps even in the famous mother-love there is a good deal of curiosity.
A man who is very busy seldom changes his opinions.
One who is publicly honest about himself ends up by priding himself somewhat on this honesty: for he knows only too well why he is honest-for the same reasons another person prefers illusion and dissimulation.
Thus the will to power strives towards oppositions, towards displeasure. There is a will to suffering at the foundation of all organic life (contrary to "happiness" as "goal").
The form of a work of art, which gives speech to their thoughts and is, therefore, their mode of talking, is always somewhat uncertain, like all kinds of speech.
A butterfly flitting from flower to flower ever remains mine, I lose the one that is netted by me.
What makes one heroic? - Going out to meet at the same time one's highest suffering and one's highest hope.
Men subsequently put whatever is newly learned or experienced to use as a plowshare, perhaps even as a weapon: but women immediately include it among their ornaments.
To be natural means to dare to be as immoral as Nature is.
We should consider every day lost on which we have not danced at least once.
THE SUFFERING OF GENIUS AND ITS VALUE. The artistic genius desires to give pleasure, but if his mind is on a very high plane he does not easily find anyone to share his pleasure; he offers entertainment but nobody accepts it. That gives him, in certain circumstances, a comically touching pathos; for he has no right to force pleasure on men. He pipes, but none will dance: can that be tragic?
If you are too weak to give yourselves your own law, then a tyrant shall lay his yoke upon you and say: "Obey! Clench your teeth and obey!" And all good and evil shall be drowned in obedience to him.
Time flies apace-we would fain believe that everything flies forward with it.
My genius is in my nostrils.
Where neither love nor hatred is in the game, a woman's game is mediocre.
Love ever your neighbour as yourselves - but first be such as love themselves.
That the world is not the embodiment of an eternal rationality can be conclusively proved by the fact that the piece of the worldthat we know--I mean our human reason--is not so very rational. And if it is not eternally and completely wise and rational, then the rest of the world will not be either; here the conclusion a minori ad majus, a parte ad totum applies, and does so with decisive force.
Some people throw a bit of their personality after their bad arguments, as if that might straighten their paths and turn them into right and good arguments-just as a man in a bowling alley, after he has let go of the ball, still tries to direct it with gestures.
What is the task of higher education? To make a man into a machine. What are the means employed? He is taught how to suffer being bored.
Stupid as a man, say the women: cowardly as a woman, say the men. Stupidity in a woman is unwomanly.
It is the same life that emerges in joy through the dust of the earth into numberless waves of flower.
The living is merely a type of what is dead, and a very rare type.
If we have our own why of life, we shall get along with almost any how. Man does not strive for pleasure; only the Englishman does.
The desire to create continually is vulgar and betrays jealousy, envy, ambition. If one is something one really does not need to make anything --and one nonetheless does very much. There exists above the ''productive'' man a yet higher species.
The same stream of life that runs through my veins night and day runs through the world and dances in rhythmic measures. It is the same life that shoots in joy through the dust of the earth in numberless blades of grass and breaks into tumultuous waves of leaves and flowers.
Speaking generally, punishment hardens and numbs, it produces concentration, it sharpens the consciousness of alienation, it strengthens the power of resistance.
Everything about woman is a riddle, and everything about woman has a single solution: that is, pregnancy
No, life has not disappointed me. On the contrary, I find it truer, more desirable and mysterious every year -- ever since the day when the great liberator came to me: the idea that life could be an experiment of the seeker for knowledge -- and not a duty, not a calamity, not trickery.
Physiologists should think before putting down the instinct of self-preservation as the cardinal instinct of an organic being. A living thing seeks above all to discharge its strength--life itself is will to power; self-preservation is only one of the indirect and most frequent results.
To regard states of distress in general as an objection, as something which must be abolished is the greatest nonsense on earth; having the most disastrous consequences, fatally stupid- almost as stupid as a wish to abolish bad weather - out of pity for the poor.
The devotion of the greatest is to encounter risk and danger, and play dice for death.
We forget our guilt when we have confessed it to another, but the other does not usually forget it.
My philosophy is inverted Platonism: the further a thing is from true being, the purer, the lovelier, the better it is. Living inillusion as a goal!
Love is more afraid of change than destruction.
Exhaustion is the shortest way to equality and fraternity.
What do you regard as most humane? To spare someone shame.
Love is an endless mystery, because there is no reasonable cause that could explain it.
A woman's pity, which is talkative, carries the sick person's bed to the public marketplace.
If an architect wants to strengthen a decrepit arch, he increases the load laid upon it, for thereby the parts are joined more firmly together.
One who has a why can endure anyhow.
There will always be rocks in the road ahead of us. They will be stumbling blocks or stepping stones; it all depends on how you use them.
The criminal type is the type of the strong human being under unfavorable circumstances: a strong human being made sick.
The more abstract the truth you wish to teach, the more must you allure the senses to it.
The familiarity of superiors embitters one, because it may not be returned.
For men are not equal: thus speaks justice.
I want to know whether you are a person devoted to creating or to exchanging in some respect or other: as a creator you belong tothe free, as an exchanger you are their slave and instrument.
He who does not lie does not know what truth is.
Ah, women. They make the highs higher and the lows more frequent.
People who live in an age of corruption are witty and slanderous; they know that there are other kinds of murder than by dagger or assault; they also know that whatever is well said is believed.
Dark clouds become heaven's flowers when kissed by light.
