Wisdom

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.

Species do not grow more perfect: the weaker dominate the strong again and again - the reason being they are the great majority, and they are also cleverer.... Darwin forgot the mind (- that in English): the weak possess more mind. ... To acquire mind one must need mind - one loses it when one no longer needs it. He who possesses strength divests himself of mind.

Objection, evasion, joyous distrust, and love of irony are signs of health; everything absolute belongs to pathology.

If thinking is your fate, revere this fate with divine honour and sacrifice to it the best, the most beloved

And how does one basically recognize good development? In that a well-developed man does our senses good: that he is carved from wood which is hard, delicate, and sweet-smelling, all at the same time.

Blessed are the forgetful, for they get the better even of their blunders.

One must have a good memory to be able to keep the promises one has given. One must have strong powers of imagination to be able to have pity. So closely is morality bound to the quality of the intellect.

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.

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

Success has always been the greatest liar - and the "work" itself is a success; the great statesman, the conqueror, the discoverer is disguised by his creations, often beyond recognition; the "work," whether of the artist or the philosopher, invents the man who has created it, who is supposed to have create it; "great men," as they are venerated, are subsequent pieces of wretched minor fiction

It is not the strength, but the duration, of great sentiments that makes great men.

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.

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.

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.

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.

It is not that I'm so smart. But I stay with the questions much longer.

Angels can fly because they take themselves lightly; devils fall because of their gravity.

There are occasions and causes, why and wherefore in all things.

You've got to love what's loveable and hate what's hateable. It takes brains to see the difference.

You always admire what you really don’t understand.

Affirmation without discipline is the beginning of delusion.

Be of love (a little) more careful than of everything.

Where wisdom reigns, there is no conflict between thinking and feeling.

The whole problem with the world is that fools and fanatics are always so certain of themselves, but wiser people so full of doubts.