Quotes to inspire and reflect

In the true man there is a child concealed - who wants to play.

I understand by 'freedom of spirit' something quite definite - the unconditional will to say No where it is dangerous to say No.

Man alone suffers so excruciatingly in the world that he was compelled to invent laughter.

The lie is a condition of life.

For every man there exists a bait which he cannot resist swallowing.

Better know nothing than half-know many things.

The more you let yourself go the less others let you go.

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

Strong hope is a much greater stimulant of life than any single realized joy could be.

The historian looks backward. In the end he also believes backward.

The abdomen is the reason why man does not easily take himself for a god.

To do great things is difficult but to command great things is more difficult.

Many are stubborn in pursuit of the path they have chosen few in pursuit of the goal.

What is it: is man only a blunder of God or God only a blunder of man?

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

Sometimes we owe a friend to the lucky circumstance that we give him no cause for envy.

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

The errors of great men are venerable because they are more fruitful than the truths of little men.

What is evil? - Whatever springs from weakness.

There are no eternal facts as there are no absolute truths.

Necessity is not an established fact but an interpretation.

He who would learn to fly one day must first learn to stand and walk and run and climb and dance one cannot fly into flying.

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

Courage is the best slayer-courage which attacketh for in every attack there is the sound of triumph.

In architecture the pride of man his triumph over gravitation his will to power assume a visible form. Architecture is a sort of oratory of power by means of forms.

Either you reach a higher point today or you exercise your strength in order to be able to climb higher tomorrow.

Science and art have that in common that everyday things seem to them new and attractive.

Let that day be lost to us on which we did not dance once I

Almost everything we call "higher culture" is based on the spiritualization of cruelty.

We are terrified by the idea of being terrified.

Generally speaking, punishment makes men hard and cold; it concentrates; it sharpens the feeling of alienation; it strengthens the power of resistance

And if your friend does evil to you, say to him, ''I forgive you for what you did to me, but how can I forgive you for what you did to yourself?

Every habit makes our hand more witty, and out wit more handy.

The wittiest authors raise the very slightest of smiles.

They are now informing me that not only are they better than the powerful, the masters of the world whose spittle they have to lick (not from fear, not at all from fear! but because God orders them to honour those in authority) – not only are they better, but they have a “better time”, or at least will have a better time one day. But enough! enough! I can’t bear it any longer. Bad air! Bad air! This workshop where ideals are fabricated – it seems to me just to stink of lies.

In order that there may be institutions, there must be a kind of will, instinct, or imperative, which is anti-liberal to the point of malice: the will to tradition, to authority, to responsibility for centuries to come, to the solidarity of chains of generations, forward and backward ad infinitum.

Still am I the richest and most to be envied - I, the lonesomest one!

I love the great despisers, because they are the great adorers, and arrows of longing for the other shore.

It is certainly not the least charm of a theory that it is refutable; it is precisely thereby that it attracts the more subtle minds. It seems that the hundred-times-refuted theory of the "free will" owes its persistence to this charm alone; some one is always appearing who feels himself strong enough to refute it.

To vigorous men intimacy is a matter of shame--and something precious.

Anarchists are mouthpieces of a declining stratum of society; when they work themselves into a state of righteous indignation demanding 'rights', 'justice', 'equal rights', they are just acting under the pressure of their own lack of culture, which has no way of grasping why they really suffer, or what they lack in life.

There is an innocence in admiration: it occurs in one who has not yet realized that they might one day be admired.

What? A great man? I only ever see the ape of his own ideal.

Visiting the sick' is an orgasm of superiority in the contemplation of our neighbor's helplessness

Every kind of contempt for sex, every impurification of it by means of the concept "impure", is the crime par excellence against life--is the real sin against the holy spirit of life

Invisible threads are the strongest ties.

Perhaps no one has yet been truthful enough about what 'truthfulness' is.

Even on this level, it is at bottom not deception [men] hate but the dire, inimical consequences of certain kinds of deception