Society and the World

Man alone suffers so excruciatingly in the world that he was compelled to invent laughter.

The lie is a condition of life.

Better know nothing than half-know many things.

The more you let yourself go the less others let you go.

Not to he who is offensive to us are we most unfair but to he who does not concern us at all.

The abdomen is the reason why man does not easily take himself for a god.

The errors of great men are venerable because they are more fruitful than the truths of little men.

What is evil? - Whatever springs from weakness.

He who would learn to fly one day must first learn to stand and walk and run and climb and dance one cannot fly into flying.

When a hundred men stand together each of them loses his mind and gets another one.

In architecture the pride of man his triumph over gravitation his will to power assume a visible form. Architecture is a sort of oratory of power by means of forms.

Science and art have that in common that everyday things seem to them new and attractive.

Almost everything we call "higher culture" is based on the spiritualization of cruelty.

And if your friend does evil to you, say to him, ''I forgive you for what you did to me, but how can I forgive you for what you did to yourself?

Generally speaking, punishment makes men hard and cold; it concentrates; it sharpens the feeling of alienation; it strengthens the power of resistance

Every habit makes our hand more witty, and out wit more handy.

In order that there may be institutions, there must be a kind of will, instinct, or imperative, which is anti-liberal to the point of malice: the will to tradition, to authority, to responsibility for centuries to come, to the solidarity of chains of generations, forward and backward ad infinitum.

In order that there may be institutions, there must be a kind of will, instinct, or imperative, which is anti-liberal to the point of malice: the will to tradition, to authority, to responsibility for centuries to come, to the solidarity of chains of generations, forward and backward ad infinitum.

It is certainly not the least charm of a theory that it is refutable; it is precisely thereby that it attracts the more subtle minds. It seems that the hundred-times-refuted theory of the "free will" owes its persistence to this charm alone; some one is always appearing who feels himself strong enough to refute it.

Anarchists are mouthpieces of a declining stratum of society; when they work themselves into a state of righteous indignation demanding 'rights', 'justice', 'equal rights', they are just acting under the pressure of their own lack of culture, which has no way of grasping why they really suffer, or what they lack in life.

Visiting the sick' is an orgasm of superiority in the contemplation of our neighbor's helplessness

Every kind of contempt for sex, every impurification of it by means of the concept "impure", is the crime par excellence against life--is the real sin against the holy spirit of life

Even on this level, it is at bottom not deception [men] hate but the dire, inimical consequences of certain kinds of deception

What does our great historical hunger signify, our clutching about us of countless cultures, our consuming desire for knowledge, if not the loss of myth, of a mythic home, the mythic womb?