Others

My world has just become perfect, midnight is also noonday, pain is also joy, a curse is also a blessing, the night is also a sun – be gone, or you will learn: a wise man is also a fool.

Music heals all forms of misery

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

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.

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

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 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.

All truly great thoughts are conceived while walking.

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

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.

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

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?

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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

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

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.

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.