Quotes
Quotes to inspire and reflect
The historian looks backward. In the end he also believes backward.
17
Strong hope is a much greater stimulant of life than any single realized joy could be.
16
To do great things is difficult but to command great things is more difficult.
16
The abdomen is the reason why man does not easily take himself for a god.
20
Many are stubborn in pursuit of the path they have chosen few in pursuit of the goal.
16
What is it: is man only a blunder of God or God only a blunder of man?
17
Sometimes we owe a friend to the lucky circumstance that we give him no cause for envy.
16
Women can form a friendship with a man very well but to preserve it a slight physical antipathy most probably helps.
20
The errors of great men are venerable because they are more fruitful than the truths of little men.
24
A friend should be a master at guessing and keeping still.
19
There are no eternal facts as there are no absolute truths.
18
What is evil? - Whatever springs from weakness.
19
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.
17
Necessity is not an established fact but an interpretation.
15
Courage is the best slayer-courage which attacketh for in every attack there is the sound of triumph.
17
When a hundred men stand together each of them loses his mind and gets another one.
15
Either you reach a higher point today or you exercise your strength in order to be able to climb higher tomorrow.
16
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.
17
Let that day be lost to us on which we did not dance once I
15
Science and art have that in common that everyday things seem to them new and attractive.
14
We are terrified by the idea of being terrified.
21
Almost everything we call "higher culture" is based on the spiritualization of cruelty.
16
Generally speaking, punishment makes men hard and cold; it concentrates; it sharpens the feeling of alienation; it strengthens the power of resistance
19
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?
21
Every habit makes our hand more witty, and out wit more handy.
21
The wittiest authors raise the very slightest of smiles.
12
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.
19
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.
19
I love the great despisers, because they are the great adorers, and arrows of longing for the other shore.
18
Still am I the richest and most to be envied - I, the lonesomest one!
21
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.
16
To vigorous men intimacy is a matter of shame--and something precious.
20
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.
17
There is an innocence in admiration: it occurs in one who has not yet realized that they might one day be admired.
17
What? A great man? I only ever see the ape of his own ideal.
16
Visiting the sick' is an orgasm of superiority in the contemplation of our neighbor's helplessness
15
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
19
Invisible threads are the strongest ties.
17
Even on this level, it is at bottom not deception [men] hate but the dire, inimical consequences of certain kinds of deception
16
Perhaps no one has yet been truthful enough about what 'truthfulness' is.
17
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?
17
Admiration for a quality or an art can be so strong that it deters us from striving to possess it.
17
Around the hero, everything becomes a tragedy.Around God, everything becomes what? a world?
17
No one can build you the bridge on which you, and only you, must cross the river of life. There may be countless trails and bridges and demigods who would gladly carry you across; but only at the price of pawning and forgoing yourself. There is one path in the world that none can walk but you. Where does it lead? Don’t ask, walk!
17
Be careful when you cast out your demons that you don’t throw away the best of yourself.
19
It is the evening that questions thus from within me.
17
And as long as you are in any way ashamed before yourself, you do not yet belong with us.
14
Should not the giver be thankful that the receiver received? Is not giving a need? Is not receiving mercy?
22