Quotes to inspire and reflect

Some men are born posthumously.

All truly great thoughts are conceived while walking.

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.

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

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.

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

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

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

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?

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.

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.

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.

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

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

A thinking man never be a party man.

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

Freedom is the will to be responsible for ourselves.

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.

How good music and bad reasons sound when one marches against an enemy.

Let your peace be a victory!

Most people are far too much occupied with themselves to be malicious.

When we have to change an opinion about any one, we charge heavily to his account the inconvenience he thereby causes us.

Shared joys make a friend, not shared sufferings.

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.

Thus I spoke, more and more softly; for I was afraid of my own thoughts and the thoughts behind my thoughts.

No small art is it to sleep: it is necessary for that purpose to keep awake all day.

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.

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.

Do you love tragedies and everything that breaks the heart?

All good things are powerful stimulants to life, even a good book written against life.

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.

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.

Glance into the world just as though time were gone: and everything crooked will become straight to you.

Deeds need time, even after they are done, in order to be seen or heard.

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.

It is nobler to declare oneself wrong than to insist on being right --especially when one is right.