Society and the World

And as long as you are in any way ashamed before yourself, you do not yet belong with us.

Should not the giver be thankful that the receiver received? Is not giving a need? Is not receiving mercy?

I am a wanderer and mountain-climber, said he to his heart, I love not the plains, and it seemeth I cannot long sit still.And whatever may still overtake me as fate and experience—a wandering will be therein, and a mountain-climbing: in the end one experienceth only oneself.

Oh, my friends, that your self be in your deed as the mother is in her child - let that be your word concerning virtue!

And he who would not languish among men, must learn to drink out of all glasses; and he who would keep clean among men, must know how to wash himself even with dirty water.

When virtue has slept, it will arise again all the fresher.

One is punished most for one’s virtues.

We do not place especial value on the possession of a virtue until we notice its total absence in our opponent.

When virtue has slept it will arise more vigorous.

A bad conscience is easier to cope with than a bad reputation.

Genius too does nothing but learn first how to lay bricks then how to build, and continually seek for material and continually form itself around it.Every activity of man is amazingly complicated, not only that of the genius: but none is a ‘miracle.

The man who fights too long against dragons becomes a dragon himself.

I praise, I do not reproach, [nihilism's] arrival. I believe it is one of the greatest crises, a moment of the deepest self-reflection of humanity. Whether man recovers from it, whether he becomes master of this crisis, is a question of his strength.

Pure logic is the impossibility by means of which science is maintained.

Pure logic is the impossibility by means of which science is maintained.

I mistrust all systematizers and avoid them. the will to a system is a lack of integrity.

One must not let oneself be misled: they say 'Judge not!' but they send to Hell everything that stands in their way.

One repays a teacher badly if one always remains nothing but a pupil.

No shepherd and one herd! Everybody wants the same, everybody is the same: whoever feels different goes voluntarily into a madhouse.

What destroys a man more quickly than to work, think and feel without inner necessity, without any deep personal desire, without pleasure - as a mere automaton of duty?

The good men of every age are those who go to the roots of the old thoughts and bear fruit with them.

This is the hardest of all: to close the open hand out of love, and keep modest as a giver.

Every culture that has lost myth has lost, by the same token, its natural healthy creativity. Only a horizon ringed about with myths can unify a culture. The forces of imagination and the Apollonian dream are saved only by myth from indiscriminate rambling. The images of myth must be the daemonic guardians, ubiquitous but unnoticed, presiding over the growth of the child's mind and interpreting to the mature man his life and struggles.

This is the age of the individual and there is no reason to believe that this focus of mankind is likely to change in the foreseeable future. Hence, the mission is to put individualism inside a wide context and to give it meaning and a sense of direction; to empower it – but authentically this time.