Quotes to inspire and reflect

One should hold fast one's heart; for when one letteth it go, how quickly doth one's head run away!

Music heals all forms of misery

At a certain place in Beethoven's Ninth Symphony, for example, he might feel that he is floating above the earth in a starry dome, with the dream of immortality in his heart; all the stars seem to glimmer around him, and the earth seems to sink ever deeper downwards.

In music the passions enjoy themselves.

And those who were seen dancing were thought to be insane by those who could not hear the music.

We should consider every day lost on which we have not danced at least once.

How can a man become great if he does not feel in himself the force and the will to inflict great pain

If something is to stay in the memory it must be burned in: only that which never ceases hurting stays in the memory.

Man has been reared by his errors: first he never saw himself other than imperfectly, second he attributed to himself imaginary qualities, third he felt himself in a false order of rank with animal and nature, fourth he continually invented new tables of values and for a time took each of them to be eternal and unconditional...If one deducts the effect of these four errors, one has also deducted away humanity, humaneness, and 'human dignity'.

And granted that your imperative, "living according to Nature," means actually the same as "living according to life"--how could you do DIFFERENTLY? Why should you make a principle out of what you yourselves are, and must be?

Yet tell me, my brothers: if a goal for humanity is still lacking, is there not still lacking--humanity itself?

People have always wanted to 'improve' human beings; for the most part, this has been called morality.

But thus do I counsel you, my friends: distrust all in whom the impulse to punish is powerful!

But it is the same with man as with the tree. The more he seeks to rise into the height and light, the more vigorously do his roots struggle earthward, downward, into the dark, the deep - into evil.

The conviction reigns that it is only through the sacrifices and accomplishments of the ancestors that the tribe exists--and that one has to pay them back with sacrifices and accomplishments; one thus recognizes a debt that constantly grows greater, since these forebears never cease, in their continued existence as powerful spirits, to accord the tribe new advantages and new strength.

Like a last signpost to the other path, Napoleon appeared, the most isolated and late-born man there has even been, and in him the problem of the noble ideal as such made flesh--one might well ponder what kind of problem it is; Napoleon this synthesis of the inhuman and the superhuman

All truly great thoughts are conceived while walking.

Some men are born posthumously.

Art as the single superior counter-force against all will to negation of life, art as the anti-Christian, anti-Buddhist, anti-Nihilist par excellence.

The worst readers are those who behave like plundering troops: they take away a few things they can use, dirty and confound the remainder, and revile the whole.

That is an artist as I love artists, modest in his needs: he really wants only two things, his bread and his art - panem et Circen.

Art is essentially the affirmation, the blessing, and the deification of existence.

For art to exist, for any sort of aesthetic activity or perception to exist, a certain physiological precondition is indispensable: intoxication.

If you know the why, you can live any how.

Who art thou then, O my soul!" (and here [Zarathustra] became frightened, for a sunbeam shot down from heaven upon his face.""O heaven above me," said he sighing, and sat upright, "thou gazest at me? Thou hearkenest unto my strange soul?When wilt thou drink this drop of dew that fell down upon all earthly things—when wilt thou drink this strange soul——When, thou well of eternity! thou joyous, awful, noontide abyss! when wilt thou drink my soul back into thee?

We have art in order not to die of the truth.

What is happening to me happens to all fruits that grow ripe. It is the honey in my veins that makes my blood thicker, and my soul quieter.

Our way is upward, from the species across to the super-species. But the degenerate mind which says ‘All for me’ is a horror to us.

Christianity gave Eros poison to drink; he did not die of it, certainly, but degenerated to Vice.

Dangerous Helpfulness. There are people who want to make men's lives more difficult for no other reason than afterwards to offer them their prescriptions for making life easier -- their Christianity, for example.

In Christianity neither morality nor religion come into contact with reality at any point.

The word "Christianity" is already a misunderstanding; in reality there has been only one Christian, and he died on the cross.

Is the world really beautified by the fact that man thinks it beautiful? He has humanized it, that is all.

hitherto we have been permitted to seek beauty only in the morally good - a fact which sufficiently accounts for our having found so little of it and having had to seek about for imaginary beauties without backbone! - As surely as the wicked enjoy a hundred kinds of happiness of which the virtuous have no inkling, so too they possess a hundred kinds of beauty: and many of them have not yet been discovered.

Love's cruel notion. - Every great love brings with it the cruel idea of killing the object of that love, so that he may be removed once and for all from the wicked game of change: for love dreads change more than it does destruction.

It is disgraceful for a philosopher to say: the good and the beautiful are one; if he adds 'also the true', one ought to beat him. Truth is ugly. We possess art lest we perish of the truth.

Among such persons are those women who transform themselves into just that function of a man that is but weakly developed in him, and then become his purse, or his politics, or his social intercourse. Such beings maintain themselves best when they insert themselves in an alien organism; if they do not succeed they become vexed, irritated, and eat themselves up.

Man is something that shall be overcome.Man is a rope,tied between beast and overman - a rope over an abyss.What is great in man is that he is a bridge and not an end.

Men have hitherto treated women like birds which have strayed down to them from the heights; as something more delicate, more fragile, more savage, stranger, sweeter, soulful – but as something which has to be caged up so that it shall not fly away.

A real man wants two things: danger and play. Therefore he wants woman as the most dangerous plaything. Man shall be educated for war, and woman for the recreation of the warrior: all else is folly.

Of man there is little here: therefore do their women masculinize themselves. For only he who is man enough will save the woman in woman.

The happiness of man is: I will. The happiness of woman is: he wills. ‘Behold, just now the world became perfect!’—thus thinks every woman when she obeys out of entire love. And women must obey and find a depth for her surface. Surface is the disposition of woman: a mobile, stormy film over shallow water. Man’s disposition, however, is deep; his river roars in subterranean caves: woman feels his strength but does not comprehend it.

We set no special value on the possession of a virtue until we percieve that it is entirely lacking in our adversary.

A thinking man never be a party man.

Philosophy is not suited for the masses, what they need is holiness.

Today as always, men fall into two groups: slaves and free men. Whoever does not have two-thirds of his day for himself, is a slave, whatever he may be: a statesman, a businessman, an official, or a scholar.

Freedom is the will to be responsible for ourselves.

Let your peace be a victory!