Emotions and Feelings

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

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.

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

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

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

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?

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

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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

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

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.

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.

Everyone who has ever built anywhere a new heaven first found the power thereto in his own hell.

Men of profound sadness betray themselves when they are happy: they have a mode of seizing upon happiness as though they would choke and strangle it, out of jealousy--ah, they know only too well that it will flee from them!