Quotes to inspire and reflect

The body is a big sagacity, a plurality with one sense, a war and a peace, a flock and a shepherd.

The power of gradually losing all feeling of strangeness or astonishment, and finally being pleased at anything, is called the historical sense or historical culture.

He sees daily evidence that many things held to be true by nine-tenths of all men are, in reality, false, and he is thereby apt to acquire a doubt of everything, including his own beliefs.

Even now man is more of an ape than any of the apes.

God is dead. God remains dead. And we have killed him. How shall we comfort ourselves, the murderers of all murderers? What was holiest and mightiest of all that the world has yet owned has bled to death under our knives: who will wipe this blood off us? What water is there for us to clean ourselves? What festivals of atonement, what sacred games shall we have to invent? Is not the greatness of this deed too great for us? Must we ourselves not become gods simply to appear worthy of it?

What is familiar is what we are used to; and what we are used to is most difficult to 'Know' - that is, to see as a problem; that is, to see as strange, as distant, as 'outside us'.

Every past is worth condemning.

The craving for equality can express itself either as a desire to pull everyone down to our own level (by belittling them, excluding them, tripping them up) or as a desire to raise ourselves up along with everyone else (by acknowledging them, helping them, and rejoicing in their success).

to have to combat one’s instincts—that is the formula for decadence: as long as life is ascending, happiness and instinct are one.

It is invisible hands that torment and bend us the worst

I obviously do everything to be "hard to understand" myself

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

One must shed the bad taste of wanting to agree with many. "Good" is no longer good when one's neighbor mouths it. And how should there be a "common good"! The term contradicts itself: whatever can be common always has little value. In the end it must be as it is and always has been: great things remain for the great, abysses for the profound, nuances and shudders for the refined, and, in brief, all that is rare for the rare.

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.

The higher man is distinguished from the lower by his fearlessness and his readiness to challenge misfortune.

He who is a firstling is ever sacrificed.

It is the brain's full and absolute responsibility to evolve, nobody will do it for it, and grace and salvation do not exist. The brain must take its place as the source of grace and learn to operate itself properly. In fact, its transformation will begin when it will bear all responsibility alone.

The strongest intimidation, by the way, is the invention of a hereafter with a hell everlasting.

In practice it is death that works so seductively behind the image of its brother, sleep

The vanity of others runs counter to our taste only when it runs counter to our vanity.

All things are subject to interpretation. Whichever interpretation prevails at a given time is a function of power and not truth.

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 value colored eyes. We do not know how to look at things neutrally, value-free. So, it's not a question of giving up all values, it's simply a question of which values.

The Church today is more likely to alienate than to seduce...

Let the young soul survey its own life with a view of the following question: ‘What have you truly loved thus far? What has ever uplifted your soul, what has dominated and delighted it at the same time?

The Christian church is an encyclopedia of prehistoric cults and conceptions of the most diverse origin and that is why it is so capable of proselytising: it always could and it can still go wherever it pleases and it always found and it always finds something similar to itself to which it can adapt itself and gradually impose upon it a Christian meaning.

Physician, heal thyself: then wilt thou also heal thy patient. Let it be his best cure to see with his eyes him who maketh himself whole.

In the end we are always rewarded for our good will, our patience, fair-mindedness, and gentleness with what is strange.

Where solitude endeth, there beginneth the market-place; and where the market-place beginneth, there beginneth also the noise of the great actors, and the buzzing of the poison-flies.

Healthy introspection, without undermining oneself; it is a rare gift to venture into the unexplored depths of the self, without delusions or fictions, but with an uncorrupted gaze.

Solitude is a virtue for us, since it is a sublime inclination and impulse to cleanliness which shows that contact between people, “society”, inevitably makes things unclean. Somewhere, sometime, every community makes people—“base.

Every moment of life wants to tell us something, but we do not want to hear what it has to say: when we are alone and quiet we are afraid that something will be whispered into our ear and hence we despise quiet and drug ourselves with sociability.

Believe me, friend Hellishnoise: the greatest events—they are not our loudest but our stillest hours.

Your bad love of yourselves makes solitude a prison to you.

But I need solitude--which is to say, recovery, return to myself, the breath of a free, light, playful air.

Only those thoughts which come from walking have any value

There are many good inventions on earth, some useful, some pleasing: for their sake, the earth is to be loved. And there is such a variety of well-invented things that the earth is like the breasts of a woman: useful as well as pleasing.

We have to cease to think, if we refuse to do it in the prison house of language; for we cannot reach further than the doubt which asks whether the limit we see is really a limit.

A thought comes when it will, not when I will.

The misunderstanding of passion and reason, as if the latter were an independent entity and not rather a system of relations between various passions and desires; and as if every passion did not possess its quantum of reason

A thought, even a possibility, can shatter and transform us.

Writers whose thoughts are expressed with clarity and precision are assumed by readers to be superficial. Where the meaning is obscured, then readers give more attention and consider the fruit of their labour more valuable

He who writes in blood and aphorisms does not want to be read, he wants to be learned by heart.

Sometimes, you have to love beyond yourself! And that's how you learn to love! That's why you had to drink the bitter glass of your love.

The end of a melody is not its goal: but nonetheless, had the melody not reached its end it would not have reached its goal either. A parable.

Early in the morning, at break of day, in all the freshness and dawn of one’s strength, to read a book – I call that viciousness!

Pity is the most agreeable feeling among those who have little pride and no prospects of great conquests.

One sticks to an opinion because he prides himself on having come to it on his own, and another because he has taken great pains to learn it and is proud to have grasped it: and so both do so out of vanity.

The surest way of ruining a youth is to teach him to respect those who think as he does more highly than those who think differently from him.