Quotes
Quotes to inspire and reflect
How good music and bad reasons sound when one marches against an enemy.
17
When we have to change an opinion about any one, we charge heavily to his account the inconvenience he thereby causes us.
11
Most people are far too much occupied with themselves to be malicious.
9
A light has dawned for me: I need companions, living ones, not dead companions and corpses which I carry with me wherever I wish. But I need living companions who follow me because they want to follow themselves— and who want to go where I want to go.
14
Shared joys make a friend, not shared sufferings.
10
No small art is it to sleep: it is necessary for that purpose to keep awake all day.
9
Thus I spoke, more and more softly; for I was afraid of my own thoughts and the thoughts behind my thoughts.
12
Every characteristic absence of spirituality, every piece of common vulgarity, is due to an inability to resist a stimulus - you have to react, you follow every impulse.
11
We do not belong to those who have ideas only among books, when stimulated by books. It is our habit to think outdoors - walking, leaping, climbing, dancing, preferably on lonely mountains or near the sea where even the trails become thoughtful.
13
All good things are powerful stimulants to life, even a good book written against life.
12
Do you love tragedies and everything that breaks the heart?
10
Books and drafts mean something quite different for different thinkers. One collects in a book the lights he was able to steal and carry home swiftly out of the rays of some insight that suddenly dawned on him, while another thinker offers us nothing but shadows - images in black and grey of what had built up in his soul the day before.
11
None of the people have any real interest in a science, who only begin to be enthusiastic about it when they themselves have made discoveries in it.
10
Deeds need time, even after they are done, in order to be seen or heard.
13
Glance into the world just as though time were gone: and everything crooked will become straight to you.
12
It is nobler to declare oneself wrong than to insist on being right --especially when one is right.
11
Marriage as a long conversation. - When marrying you should ask yourself this question: do you believe you are going to enjoy talking with this woman into your old age? Everything else in a marriage is transitory, but most of the time that you're together will be devoted to conversation.
14
In large States public education will always be extremely mediocre, for the same reason that in large kitchens the cooking is at best only mediocre.
9
They're so cold, these scholars!May lightning strike their food so that their mouths learn how to eat fire!
9
Success has always been the greatest liar - and the "work" itself is a success; the great statesman, the conqueror, the discoverer is disguised by his creations, often beyond recognition; the "work," whether of the artist or the philosopher, invents the man who has created it, who is supposed to have create it; "great men," as they are venerated, are subsequent pieces of wretched minor fiction
13
Ultimately, nobody can get more out of things, including books, than he already knows.
9
The drive to knowledge has become too strong for us to be able to want happiness without knowledge or of a strong, firmly rooted delusion; even to imagine such a state of things is painful to us! Restless discovering and divining has such an attraction for us, and has grown as indispensable to us as is to the lover his unrequited love, which he would at no price relinquish for a state of indifference – perhaps,indeed, we too are unrequited lovers.
11
Knowledge kills action action requires the veils of illusion.
10
What good is all this free-thinking, modernity, and turncoat flexibility if at some gut level you are still a Christian, a Catholic, and even a priest!
12
A degree of culture, and assuredly a very high one, is attained when man rises above superstitions and religious notions and fears, and, for instance, no longer believes in guardian angels or in original sin, and has also ceased to talk of the salvation of his soul.
12
It may be that until now there has been no more potent means for beautifying man himself than piety: it can turn man into so much art, surface, play of colors, graciousness that his sight no longer makes one suffer.---
13
As is well known, the priests are the most evil enemies—but why? Because they are the most impotent. It is because of their impotence that in them hatred grows to monstrous and uncanny proportions, to the most spiritual and poisonous kind of hatred. The truly great haters in world history have always been priests; likewise the most ingenious haters: other kinds of spirit hardly come into consideration when compared with the spirit of priestly vengefulness.
11
Fanatics are picturesque, mankind would rather see gestures than listen to reasons.
9
There is not enough love and goodness in the world to permit giving any of it away to imaginary beings.
9
The believer in magic and miracles reflects on how to impose a law on nature--: and, in brief, the religious cult is the outcome of this reflection.
12
Is man merely a mistake of God's? Or God merely a mistake of man?
9
In truth,there was only one christian and he died on the cross.
18
In heaven, all the interesting people are missing.
8
Twofold misjudgement. - The misfortune suffered by clear-minded and easily understood writers is that they are taken for shallow and thus little effort is expended on reading them: and the good fortune that attends the obscure is that the reader toils at them and ascribes to them the pleasure he has in fact gained from his own zeal.
10
Against the censurers of brevity. - Something said briefly can be the fruit of much long thought: but the reader who is a novice in this field, and has as yet reflected on it not at all, sees in everything said briefly something embryonic, not without censuring the author for having served him up such immature and unripened fare.
10
It is not the strength, but the duration, of great sentiments that makes great men.
10
It is my ambition to say in ten sentences what others say in a whole book.
11
All I need is a sheet of paper and something to write with, and thenI can turn the world upside down.
10
This eternal accusation against Christianity I shall write upon all walls, wherever walls are to be found--I have letters that even the blind will be able to see. . . . I call Christianity the one great curse, the one great intrinsic depravity, the one great instinct of revenge, for which no means are venomous enough, or secret, subterranean and small enough,--I call it the one immortal blemish upon the human race...
9
A good writer possesses not only his own spirit but also the spirit of his friends.
11
At times one remains faithful to a cause only because its opponents do not cease to be insipid.
12
The desire for a strong faith is not the proof of a strong faith, rather the opposite. If one has it one may permit oneself the beautiful luxury of skepticism: one is secure enough, fixed enough for it.
11
A casual stroll through the lunatic asylum shows that faith does not prove anything.
11
Just as in the second part of a verse bad poets seek a thought to fit their rhyme, so in the second half of their lives people tend to become more anxious about finding actions, positions, relationships that fit those of their earlier lives, so that everything harmonizes quite well on the surface: but their lives are no longer ruled by a strong thought, and instead, in its place, comes the intention of finding a rhyme.
9
Poets are shameless with their experiences: they exploit them.
10
We talk so abstractly about poetry because all of us are usually bad poets.
8
Let us beware of saying that death is the opposite of life. The living being is only a species of the dead, and a very rare species.
12
The final reward of the dead - to die no more
9