Friedrich Nietzsche - The Gay Science (1882)

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Narrow souls I cannot abide; There's almost no good or evil inside

Friedrich Nietzsche
I live in my own place - have never copied anyone even half, and at any master who lacks the grace - to laugh at himself - I laugh.

Friedrich Nietzsche
The moral earth, too, is round! The moral earth, too, has its antipodes! The antipodes, too, have their right to exist! There is still another world to be discovered--and more than one! Set sail, you philosophers!

Friedrich Nietzsche
Living in a constant chase after gain compels people to expend their spirit to the point of exhaustion.

Friedrich Nietzsche
I am afraid that old women are more skeptical in their most secret heart of hearts than any man: they believe in the superficiality of existence as in its essence, and all virtue and profundity is to them merely a veil over this "truth," a most welcome veil over a pudendum--and so a matter of decency and modesty, and nothing else.

Friedrich Nietzsche
The living is merely a type of what is dead, and a very rare type.

Friedrich Nietzsche
Different types of dangerous lives-You have no idea what you are living through; you rush through life as if you were drunk and now and then fall down some staircase. But thanks to your drunkenness you never break a limb; your muscles are too relaxed and your brain too benighted for you to find the stones of these stairs as hard as we do.

Friedrich Nietzsche
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.

Friedrich Nietzsche
Preparatory human beings. — I welcome all signs that a more virile, warlike age is about to begin, which will restore honor to courage above all! For this age shall prepare the way for one yet higher, and it shall gather the strength that this higher age will require some day — the age that will carry heroism into the search for knowledge and that will wage wars for the sake of ideas and their consequences.

Friedrich Nietzsche
We are, all of us, growing volcanoes that approach the hour of their eruption; but how near or distant that is, nobody knows — not even God.

Friedrich Nietzsche
To what extent can truth endure incorporation? That is the question; that is the experiment.

Friedrich Nietzsche
Those who deny chance. — 'No victor believes in chance.'

Friedrich Nietzsche
A thinker sees his own actions as experiments and questions — as attempts to find out something. Success and failure are for him answers above all.

Friedrich Nietzsche
Thoughts are the shadows of our feelings — always darker, emptier, simpler.

Friedrich Nietzsche
What is the seal of liberation? — No longer being ashamed in front of oneself.

Friedrich Nietzsche
Whoever is dissatisfied with himself is continually ready for revenge, and we others will be his victims.

Friedrich Nietzsche
For nothing is more democratic than logic; it is no respecter of persons and makes no distinction between crooked and straight noses.

Friedrich Nietzsche
When the gratitude of many to one throws away all shame, we behold fame.

Friedrich Nietzsche
The most perfidious way of harming a cause consists of defending it deliberately with faulty arguments.

Friedrich Nietzsche
God is dead; but given the way of men, there may still be caves for thousands of years in which his shadow will be shown. — And we — we still have to vanquish his shadow, too.

Friedrich Nietzsche
Art furnishes us with eyes and hands and above all the good conscience to be able to turn ourselves into such a phenomenon.

Friedrich Nietzsche
Good prose is written only face to face with poetry.

Friedrich Nietzsche
God is dead! God remains dead! And we have killed him. How shall we comfort ourselves, the murderers of all murderers? What was holiest and mightiest of all that the world has yet owned has bled to death under our knives: who will wipe this blood off us? What water is there for us to clean ourselves? What festivals of atonement, what sacred games shall we have to invent? Is not the greatness of this deed too great for us? Must we ourselves not become gods simply to appear worthy of it?

Friedrich Nietzsche
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.

Friedrich Nietzsche
Could one count such dilettantes and old spinsters as that mawkish apostle of virginity, Mainlander, as a genuine German? In the last analysis he probably was a Jew (all Jews become mawkish when they moralize).

Friedrich Nietzsche
God is dead: but considering the state the species Man is in, there will perhaps be caves, for ages yet, in which his shadow will be shown.

Friedrich Nietzsche
Everything good, fine or great they do is first of all an argument against the skeptic inside them.

Friedrich Nietzsche
Who can attain to anything great if he does not feel in himself the force and will to inflict great pain? The ability to suffer is a small matter: in that line, weak women and even slaves often attain masterliness. But not to perish from internal distress and doubt when one inflicts great suffering and hears the cry of it — that is great, that belongs to greatness.

Friedrich Nietzsche
Pardon me, my friends, I have ventured to paint my happiness on the wall.

Friedrich Nietzsche
Sharp and mild, dull and keen, well known and strange, dirty and clean, where both the fool and wise are seen: All this am I, have ever been, - in me dove, snake and swine convene!

Friedrich Nietzsche