Quotes to inspire and reflect

How much truth does a spirit endure, how much truth does it dare?

What, then, is truth? A mobile army of metaphors, metonyms, and anthropomorphisms – in short, a sum of human relations, which have been enhanced, transposed, and embellished poetically and rhetorically, and which after long use seem firm, canonical, and obligatory to a people: truths are illusions about which one has forgotten that this is what they are; metaphors which are worn out and without sensuous power; coins which have lost their pictures and now matter only as metal, no longer as coins.

Belief means not wanting to know what is true.

No one dies of fatal truths nowadays: there are too many antidotes.

Convictions are more dangerous foes of truth than lies.

A thinker sees his own actions as experiments and questions--as attempts to find out something. Success and failure are for him answers above all.

The more thoroughly a person understands life, the less he will mock, though in the end he might still mock the "thoroughness of his understanding.

There are no facts, only interpretations.

If one shifts the center of gravity of life out of life into the “Beyond” – into nothingness – one has deprived life as such of its center of gravity. The great lie of personal immortality destroys all rationality, all naturalness of instinct, all that is salutary, all that is life-furthering.

The man consummating his life dies his death triumphantly,surrounded by men filled with hope and making solmn vows, thus one should learn to die.Friedrich Nietzsche - thus spoke zarathustra.

A soul that knows it is loved but does not itself love betrays its sediment: what is at bottom comes up." Epigrams and Interludes, Section 79

Ah, ye brethren, that God whom I created was human work and human madness, like all the Gods!

Popular medicine and popular morality belong together and ought not to be evaluated so differently as they still are: both are the most dangerous pseudo-sciences.

Three metamorphoses of the spirit have I designated to you: how the spirit became a camel, the camel a lion, and the lion at last a child.

All that exists is just and unjust and is equally justified in both respects.

To be incapable of taking one’s enemies, one’s accidents, even one’s misdeeds seriously for very long - that is the sign of strong full natures in whom there is an excess of power to form, to mold, to recuperate and to forget. Mirabeau had no memory for insults and vile actions done to him and was unable to forgive simply because he - forgot. Such a man shakes off with a single shrug the many vermin that eat deep into others.

Excess of strength alone is proof of strength

Your educators can only be your liberators.

One must reach out and try to grasp this astonishing finesse, that the value of lif cannot be estimated.

Business people - Your business - is your greatest prejudice: it ties you to your locality, to the company you keep, to the inclinations you feel. Diligent in business - but indolent in spirit, content with your inadequacy, and with the cloak of duty hung over this contentment: that is how you live, that is how you want your children to live!

Their [philosophers] thinking is, in fact, far less a discovery than a re-recognizing, a remembering, a return and a home-coming to a far-off, ancient common-household of the soul, out of which those ideas formerly grew: philosophizing is so far a kind of atavism of the highest order.

love as a passion—it is our European specialty—must absolutely be of noble origin; as is well known, its invention is due to the Provencal poet-cavaliers, those brilliant, ingenious men of the "gai saber," to whom Europe owes so much, and almost owes itself.

The tragedy is that we cannot believe the dogmas of religion and metaphysics if we have the strict methods of truth in heart and head, but on the other hand, we have become through the development of humanity so tenderly suffering that we need the highest kind of means of salvation and consolation: whence arises the danger that man may bleed to death through the truth that he realises.

All modern philosophizing is political, policed by governments, churches, academics, custom, fashion, and human cowardice, all off which limit it to a fake learnedness.

Those who know that they are profound strive for clarity. Those who would like to seem profound to the crowd strive for obscurity. For the crowd believes that if it cannot see to the bottom of something it must be profound. It is so timid and dislikes going into the water.

You may lie with your mouth, but with the mouth you make as you do so you none the less tell the truth.

A nation is a detour of nature to arrive at five or six great men- yes, and then to get around them.

Try for once to justify the meaning of your existence as it were a posteriori by setting yourself an aim, a goal... an exalted and noble 'to this end.' Perish in pursuit of this and only this

Weariness that wants to reach the ultimate with one leap, with one fatal leap, a poor ignorant weariness that does not want to want any more: this created all gods and afterworlds.

In some remote corner of the universe, poured out and glittering among innumerable solar systems, there once was a star on which clever animals invented knowledge.

One has to take a somewhat bold and dangerous line with this existence: especially as, whatever happens, we are bound to lose it.

Because we have for millenia made moral, aesthetic, religious demands on the world, looked upon it with blind desire, passion or fear, and abandoned ourselves to the bad habits of illogical thinking, this world has gradually become so marvelously variegated, frightful, meaningful, soulful, it has acquired color - but we have been the colorists: it is the human intellect that has made appearances appear and transported its erroneous basic conceptions into things.

The life of the enemy . Whoever lives for the sake of combating an enemy has an interest in the enemy's staying alive.

As soon as a religion comes to dominate it has as its opponents all those who would have been its first disciples.

What then is truth? A movable host of metaphors, metonymies, and anthropomorphisms: in short, a sum of human relations which have been poetically and rhetorically intensified, transferred, and embellished, and which, after long usage, seem to a people to be fixed, canonical, and binding. Truths are illusions which we have forgotten are illusions — they are metaphors that have become worn out and have been drained of sensuous force.

You say, it's dark. And in truth, I did place a cloud before your sun. But do you not see how the edges of the cloud are already glowing and turning light.

If a man has character, he has also his typical experience, which always recurs.

It is a self-deception of philosophers and moralists to imagine that they escape decadence by opposing it. That is beyond their will; and, however little they acknowledge it, one later discovers that they were among the most powerful promoters of decadence.

All great things must first wear terrifying and monstrous masks in order to inscribe themselves on the hearts of humanity.

I am one thing, my writings are another.

Madness is something rare in individuals — but in groups, parties, peoples, and ages, it is the rule.

I assess the power of a will by how much resistance, pain, torture it endures and knows how to turn to its advantage

The true man wants two things: danger and play. For that reason he wants woman, as the most dangerous plaything.

The most perfidious way of harming a cause consists of defending it deliberately with faulty arguments.

When we are tired, we are attacked by ideas we conquered long ago.

I would believe only in a God that knows how to dance.

It is hard enough to remember my opinions, without also remembering my reasons for them!

A joke is an epigram on the death of a feeling.