The great epochs of our life are the occasions when we gain the courage to rebaptize our evil qualities as our best qualities.
— Friedrich Nietzsche
Is Wagner a human being at all? Is he not rather a disease? He contaminates everything he touches - he has made music sick.
What really raises one's indignation against suffering is not suffering intrinsically, but the senselessness of suffering.
A good writer possesses not only his own spirit but also the spirit of his friends.
In praise there is more obtrusiveness than in blame.
We do not hate as long as we still attach a lesser value, but only when we attach an equal or a greater value.
Rejoicing in our joy, not suffering over our suffering, makes someone a friend.
In the last analysis, even the best man is evil: in the last analysis, even the best woman is bad.
Admiration for a quality or an art can be so strong that it deters us from striving to possess it.
It is the most sensual men who need to flee women and torment their bodies.
A friend should be a master at guessing and keeping still: you must not want to see everything.
The demand to be loved is the greatest of all arrogant presumptions.
Whoever has provoked men to rage against him has always gained a party in his favor, too.
Whoever despises himself nonetheless respects himself as one who despises.
Whoever has witnessed another's ideal becomes his inexorable judge and as it were his evil conscience.
To be ashamed of one's immorality: that is a step on the staircase at whose end one is also ashamed of one's morality.
There is an innocence in admiration; it is found in those to whom it has never yet occurred that they, too, might be admired some day.
Sing me a new song; the world is transfigured; all the Heavens are rejoicing.
Germany is a great nation only because its people have so much Polish blood in their veins.
In everything one thing is impossible: rationality.
Before the effect one believes in different causes than one does after the effect.
What? You seek something? You wish to multiply yourself tenfold, a hundredfold? You seek followers? Seek zeros!
The abdomen is the reason why man does not readily take himself to be a god.
Regarding life, the wisest men of all ages have judged alike: it is worthless.
Our vanity is hardest to wound precisely when our pride has just been wounded.
Glance into the world just as though time were gone: and everything crooked will become straight to you.
Some are made modest by great praise, others insolent.
In the course of history, men come to see that iron necessity is neither iron nor necessary.
Behind all their personal vanity, women themselves always have an impersonal contempt for woman.
Whoever feels predestined to see and not to believe will find all believers too noisy and pushy: he guards against them.
What do I care about the purring of one who cannot love, like the cat?
What do you regard as most humane? To spare someone shame.
There is nothing we like to communicate to others as much as the seal of secrecy together with what lies under it.
There is a rollicking kindness that looks like malice.
What is great in man is that he is a bridge and not a goal.
I am a pure-blooded Polish nobleman without a single drop of bad blood - certainly not German blood.
Anyone who has declared someone else to be an idiot, a bad apple, is annoyed when it turns out in the end that he isn't.
When art dresses in worn-out material it is most easily recognized as art.
It is not when truth is dirty, but when it is shallow, that the lover of knowledge is reluctant to step into its waters.
What can everyone do? Praise and blame. This is human virtue, this is human madness.
Mystical explanations are thought to be deep; the truth is that they are not even shallow.
The desire to annoy no one, to harm no one, can equally well be the sign of a just as of an anxious disposition.
Those who cannot understand how to put their thoughts on ice should not enter into the heat of debate.
Do whatever you will, but first be such as are able to will.
Stupid as a man, say the women: cowardly as a woman, say the men. Stupidity in a woman is unwomanly.
You say it is the good cause that hallows even war? I say unto you: it is the good war that hallows any cause.
Whoever does not have a good father should procure one.
Genteel women suppose that those things do not really exist about which it is impossible to talk in polite company.
The bad gains respect through imitation, the good loses it especially in art.
There is not enough religion in the world even to destroy religion.
