Friedrich Nietzsche - The Gay Science (1882)

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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
What was silent in the father speaks in the son, and often I found in the son the unveiled secret of the father.

Friedrich Nietzsche
Pity is the most agreeable feeling among those who have little pride and no prospects of great conquests.

Friedrich Nietzsche
Oh, those Greeks! They knew how to live. What is required for that is to stop courageously at the surface, the fold, the skin, to adore appearance, to believe in forms, tones, words, in the whole Olympus of appearance. Those Greeks were superficial—out of profundity.

Friedrich Nietzsche
What is new, however, is always evil, being that which wants to conquer and overthrow the old boundary markers and the old pieties; and only what is old is good. The good men are in all ages those who dig the old thoughts, digging deep and getting them to bear fruit - the farmers of the spirit. But eventually all land is depleted, and the ploughshare of evil must come again and again.

Friedrich Nietzsche
Perhaps man will rise ever higher as soon as he ceases to flow out into a god.

Friedrich Nietzsche
Is it not clear that with all this we are bound to feel ill at ease in an age that likes to claim the distinction of being the most humane, the mildest, and the most righteous age that the sun has ever seen? It is bad enough that precisely when we hear these beautiful words we have the ugliest suspicions. What we find in them is merely an expression — and a masquerade — of a profound weakening, of weariness, of old age, of declining energies. What can it matter to us what tinsel the sick may use to cover up their weakness? Let them parade it as their virtue; after all, there is no doubt that weakness makes one mild, oh so mild, so righteous, so inoffensive, so "humane"!

Friedrich Nietzsche
We "conserve" nothing; neither do we want to return to any past periods; we are not by any means "liberal"; we do not work for "progress"; we do not need to plug up our ears against the sirens who in the market place sing of the future: their song about "equal rights," "a free society," "no more masters and no servants" has no allure for us.

Friedrich Nietzsche
The secret of reaping the greatest fruitfulness and the greatest enjoyment from life is to live dangerously!

Friedrich Nietzsche
Without art we would be nothing but foreground and live entirely in the spell of that perspective which makes what is closest at hand and most vulgar appear as if it were vast, and reality itself.

Friedrich Nietzsche
One does not only wish to be understood when one writes; one wishes just as surely not to be understood.

Friedrich Nietzsche
We want to be poets of our life — first of all in the smallest most everyday matters.

Friedrich Nietzsche
In magnanimity there is the same amount of egoism as in revenge, but egoism of a different quality.

Friedrich Nietzsche
Whatever has value in our world now does not have value in itself, according to its nature — nature is always value-less, but has been given value at some time, as a present — and it was we who gave and bestowed it.

Friedrich Nietzsche
Even the most beautiful scenery is no longer assured of our love after we have lived in it for three months, and some distant coast attracts our avarice: possessions are generally diminished by possession…

Friedrich Nietzsche
In the end we are always rewarded for our good will, our patience, fair-mindedness, and gentleness with what is strange.

Friedrich Nietzsche