Troy, Turkey - 2006
1. “A casual stroll through the lunatic asylum shows that faith does not prove anything.”
2. "A friend should be a master of guessing and keeping still."
3. "Against boredom, even the gods struggle in vain."
4. "All things are subject to interpretation whichever interpretation prevails at a given time is a function of power and not truth."
5. "Although the most acute judges of the witches and even the witches themselves, were convinced of the guilt of witchery, the guilt nevertheless was non-existent. It is thus with all guilt."
6. "All truly great thoughts are conceived by walking."
7. "All truth is simple ... is that not doubly a lie?"
8. “All truths are for me soaked in blood.”
9. "And be on thy guard against the good and the just! They would fain curcify those who devise their own virtue -- they hate the lonesome ones."
10. “A person's maturity consists in having found again the seriousness one had as a child, at play.”
11. “...A "scientific" interpretation of the world, as you understand it, might therefore still be one of the most stupid of all possible interpretations of the world, meaning that it would be one of the poorest in meaning...an essentially mechanistic world would be an essentially meaningless world...”
12. “A tablet of the good hangs over every people. Behold, it is the tablet of their overcomings; behold, it is the voice of their will to power...Verily, men gave themselves all their good and evil. Verily, they did not take it, they did not find it, nor did it come to them as a voice from heaven. Only man placed values in things to preserve himself—he alone created a meaning for things, a human meaning. Therefore he calls himself "man," which means: the esteemer. To esteem is to create: hear this, you creators! Esteeming itself is of all esteemed things the most estimable treasure. Through esteeming alone is there value: and without esteeming, the nut of existence would be hollow...Change of values—there is a change of creators. Whoever must be a creator always annihilates...”
13. “A woman may very well form a friendship with a man, but for this to endure, it must be assisted by a little physical antipathy.”
14. "Become who you are."
15. "Believe me! The secret of reaping the greatest fruitfulness and the greatest enjoyment from life is to live dangerously!"
16. “Can you not hear it? Can you not smell it? Now my world is complete. Midnight is also midday. Pain is also joy, curse is also blessing, night is also a sun . . .”
17. “… cast not away the hero in thy soul!”
18. “Character is determined more by the lack of certain experiences than by those one has had.”
19. “Convictions are more dangerous enemies of truth than lies.”
20. “Courageous, untroubled, mocking and violent - that is what Wisdom wants us to be. Wisdom is a woman, and loves only a warrior.”
21. ”Dancing in all its forms cannot be excluded from the curriculum of all noble education; dancing with the feet, with ideas, with words, and, need I add that one must also be able to dance with the pen?”
22. “Did you ever say yes to a pleasure? Oh my friends, then you also said yes to all pain. All things are linked, entwined, in love with one another.”
23. “Discontent is the seed of ethics.”
24. “Distrust all in whom the impulse to punish is powerful.”
25. “Do you believe then that the sciences would ever have arisen and become great if there had not before hand been magicians, alchemists, astrologers and wizards, who thirsted and hungered after abscondite and forbidden powers.”
26. ”Enduring habits I hate.... Yes, at the very bottom of my soul I feel grateful to all my misery and bouts of sickness and everything about me that is imperfect, because this sort of thing leaves me with a hundred backdoors through which I can escape from enduring habits.”
27. “Every extension of knowledge arises from making the conscious the unconscious.”
28. "Every philosophy is the philosophy of some stage of life."
29. “Every profound spirit needs a mask: even more, around every profound spirit a mask is growing continually, owing to the constantly false, namely shallow, interpretation of every word, every step, every sign of life he gives.”
30. “Everything over again, everything eternally, everything linked, threaded, in love, oh, just so did you love this world.”
31. “Every word is a prejudice.”
32. “Existence really is an imperfect tense that never becomes a present.”
33. “Faith is not wanting to know what is true.”
34. “For what purpose humanity is there should not even concern us: why you are there, that you should ask yourself: and if you have no ready answer, then set for yourself goals, high and noble goals, and perish in pursuit of them! I know of no better life purpose than to perish in attempting the great and the impossible...”
35. “Good and evil are two sides of one coin; we can't have one without the other. We could not know goodness without evil, joy without pain, or happiness without sadness.”
36. “Here the ways of men part: if you wish to strive for peace of soul and pleasure, then believe; if you wish to be a devotee of truth, then inquire.”
37. “He who cannot give anything away cannot feel anything either.”
38. “He who cannot obey himself is commanded...The devotion of the greatest is to encounter risk and danger, and play dice for death...And life itself confided this secret to me: "Behold," it said, "I am that which must always overcome itself."...Indeed, the truth was not hit by him who shot at it with the word of the "will to existence": that will does not exist. For, what does not exist cannot will; but what is in existence, how could that still want existence? Only where there is life is there also will: not will to life but—thus I teach you—will to power... And whoever must be a creator in good and evil, verily, he must first be an annihilator and break values. Thus the highest evil belongs to the highest goodness: but this is creative."”
39. ”He who has a why to live can bear almost any how.”
40. ”He who lives by fighting with an enemy has an interest in the preservation of the enemy's life.”
41. "He who seeks may easily get lost himself. It is a crime to go apart and be alone - Thus speaks the herd."
42. ”Hope in reality is the worst of all evils because it prolongs the torments of man.”
43. "Hope is the worst of evils, for it prolongs the torments of man."
44. "How did reason come into the world? As is fitting, in an irrational manner, by accident. One will have to guess at it as at a riddle."
45. “How good bad music and bad reasons sound when we march against an enemy.”
46. “How much truth can a spirit bear, how much truth can a spirit dare? ... that became for me more and more the real measure of value.”
47. "How people keep correcting us when we are young! There is always some bad habit or other they tell us we ought to get over. Yet most bad habits are tools to help us through life."
48. "I cannot believe in a God who wants to be praised all the time."
49. “I caught this insight on the way and quickly seized the rather poor words that were closest to hand to pin it down lest it fly away again. And now it has died of these arid words and shakes and flaps in them - and I hardly know any more when I look at it how I could ever have felt so happy when I caught this bird.”
50. “If a man have a strong faith he can indulge in the luxury of skepticism.”
51. “I fear animals regard man as a creature of their own kind which has in a highly dangerous fashion lost its healthy animal reason -- as the mad animal, as the laughing animal, as the weeping animal, as the unhappy animal.”
52. "If there is something to pardon in everything, there is also something to condemn."
53. “In every real man a child is hidden that wants to play.”
54. “In heaven all the interesting people are missing.”
55. “In individuals, insanity is rare; but in groups, parties, nations, and epochs it is the rule.”
56. “I know my fate. One day my name will be associated with the memory of something tremendous—a crisis without equal on earth, the most profound collision of conscience, a decision that was conjured up against everything that had been believed, demanded, hallowed so far. I am no man, I am dynamite.”
57. "I live in my own place, have never copied anybody even half, and at any master who lacks the grace to laugh at himself--I laugh."
58. ”In music the passions enjoy themselves.”
59. “Insanity in individuals is something rare - but in groups, parties, nations and epochs, it is the rule.”
60. ”In the consciousness of the truth he has perceived, man now sees everywhere only the awfulness or the absurdity of existence... and loathing seizes him.”
61. “Is not life a hundred times too short for us to bore ourselves?”
62. “I teach you the superman. Man is something to be surpassed.”
63. "It is hard enough to remember my opinions, without also remembering my reasons for them!"
64. "It is my ambition to say in ten sentences; what others say in a whole book."
65. “It is not a lack of love, but a lack of friendship that makes unhappy marriages.”
66. “It is not enough for me that lightning no longer does any harm. I do not wish to conduct it away: it shall learn to work for me. My wisdom has long gathered like a cloud; it is becoming stiller and darker. Thus does every wisdom that is yet to give birth to lightning bolts. For these men of today I do not wish to be light, or to be called light. These I wish to blind. Lightning of my wisdom! put out their eyes!”
67. “It is the stillest words that bring on the storm. Thoughts that come on doves' feet guide the world.”
68. “I want to learn more and more to see as beautiful what is necessary in things; then I shall be one of those who make things beautiful. Amor fati: let that be my love henceforth! I do not want to wage war against what is ugly. I do not want to accuse; I do not even want to accuse those who accuse. Looking away shall be my only negation. And all in all and on the whole: some day I wish to be only a Yes-sayer.”
69. “Let us beware of saying that death is the opposite of life. The living being is only a species of the dead, and a very rare species.”
70. “Life always gets harder toward the summit - the cold increases, the responsibility increases.”
71. "Live in danger. Build your cities on the slopes of Vesuvius."
72. ”Love is a state in which a man sees things most decidedly as they are not.”
73. “Love is like racing across the frozen tundra on a snowmobile which flips over, trapping you underneath. At night, the ice-weasels come.”
74. “Love matches, so called, have illusion for their father and need for their mother.”
75. “Man is a rope stretched between the animal and the Superman - a rope over an abyss.”
76. “Man is more ape than many of the apes.”
77. “Man is the cruelest animal. At tragedies, bullfights, and crucifixions he has so far felt best on earth; and when he invented hell for himself, behold, that was his very heaven.”
78. “Many a man fails as an original thinker simply because his memory is too good.”
79. "Memory says, `I did that.' Pride replies, `I could have done that.' Eventually, memory yields."
80. “Much that is dreadful and inhuman in history, much that one hardly likes to believe, is mitigated by the reflection that the one who commands and the one who carries out are different people. The former does not behold the sight and does not experience the strong impression on the imagination. The latter obeys a superior and therefore feels no responsibility for the acts.”
81. “My formula for happiness: a Yes, a No, a straight line, a goal.”
82. “New ways I go, a new speech comes to me; weary I grow, like all creators, of the old tongues. My spirit no longer wants to walk on worn soles.”
83. “No, life has not disappointed me. On the contrary, I find it truer, more desirable and mysterious every year – ever since the day when the great liberator came to me: the idea that life could be an experiment of the seeker for knowledge -- and not a duty, not a calamity, not trickery.”
84. “Not by wrath does one kill, but by laughter.”
85. “Not every end is the goal. The end of a melody is not its goal, and yet if a melody has not reached its end, it has not reached its goal. A parable.”
86. "Nothing has been purchased more dearly than the little bit of reason and sense of freedom which now constitutes our pride."
87. “Of all that is written I love only what a man has written with his blood. Write with blood, and you will experience that blood is spirit...True, we love life, not because we are used to living but because we are used to loving. There is always some madness in love. But there is also always some reason in madness...I would believe only in a god who could dance...”
88. “O heaven over me, pure and high! That is what your purity is to me now, that there is no eternal spider or spider web of reason; that you are to me a dance floor for divine accidents, that you are to me a divine table for divine dice and dice players.”
89. “O man, take care!
What does the deep midnight declare?
"I was asleep—
From the deep dream I woke and swear:
The world is deep,
Deeper than day had been aware.
Deep is its woe;
Joy—deeper yet than agony:
Woe implores: Go!
But all joy wants eternity—
Wants deep, wants deep eternity."”
90. “One does not hate as long as one has a low esteem of someone, but only when one esteems him as an equal or a superior.”
91. "One may sometimes tell a lie, but the grimace that accompanies it tells the truth."
92. "One must have chaos in oneself in order to give birth to a dancing star."
93. “One often contradicts an opinion when what is uncongenial is really the tone in which it was conveyed.”
94. ”One should die proudly when it is no longer possible to live proudly.”
95. “One will rarely err if extreme actions be ascribed to vanity, ordinary ctions to habit, and mean actions to fear.”
96. “Only the most acute and active animals are capable of boredom. -- A theme for a great poet would be God's boredom on the seventh day of creation.”
97. "On the mountains of truth you can never climb in vain: either you will reach a point higher up today, or you will be training your powers so that you will be able to climb higher tomorrow."
98. “Our destiny exercises its influence over us even when, as yet, we have not learned its nature: it is our future that lays down the law of our today.”
99. "Out of damp and gloomy days, out of solitude, out of loveless words directed at us, conclusions grow up in us like fungus: one morning they are there, we know not how, and they gaze upon us, morose and gray. Woe to the thinker who is not the gardener but only the soil of the plants that grow in him!"
100. "People demand freedom only when they have no power."
101. “People who have given us their complete confidence believe that they have a right to ours. The inference is false, a gift confers no rights.”
102. ”Perhaps I know best why it is man alone who laughs; he alone suffers so deeply that he had to invent laughter.”
103. ”Precisely the least, the softest, lightest, a lizard's rustling, a breath, a flash, a moment - a little makes the way of the best happiness.”
104. “Science makes godlike -- it is all over with priests and gods when man becomes scientific. Moral: science is the forbidden as such -- it alone is forbidden. Science is the first sin, the original sin. This alone is morality. "Thou shalt not know" -- the rest follows.”
105. “Talking much about oneself can also be a means to conceal oneself.”
106. “The advantage of a bad memory is that one enjoys several times the same good things for the first time.”
107. “The best friend is likely to acquire the best wife, because a good marriage is based on the talent for friendship.”
108. “The broad effects which can be obtained by punishment in man and beast are the increase of fear, the sharpening of the sense of cunning, the mastery of the desires; so it is that punishment tames man, but does not make him "better."”
109. “The conditions under which I am understood, and then of necessity—I know them only too well. One must be honest in matters of the spirit to the point of hardness before one can even endure my seriousness and my passion. One must be skilled in living on mountains—seeing the wretched ephemeral babble of politics and national self-seeking beneath oneself. One must have become indifferent; one must never ask if the truth is useful or if it may prove our undoing. The predilection of strength for questions for which no one today has the courage; the courage for the forbidden...a new conscience for truths that have so far remained mute...Reverence for oneself; love of oneself; unconditional freedom before oneself...”
110. “The cure for love is still in most cases that ancient radical medicine: love in return.”
111. "The formula for my happiness: a Yes, a No, a straight line, a goal."
112. “The greatest thoughts are grasped last. (…) The light of the most distant star reaches man last and before it has arrived every person denies that there is such a star.”
113. “The higher we soar, the smaller we appear to those who cannot fly.”
114. “The thousand mysteries around us would not trouble but interest us, if only we had cheerful, healthy hearts.”
115. ”The future influences the present just as much as the past.”
116. “The growing consciousness is a danger and a disease.”
117. “The individual has always had to struggle to keep from being overwhelmed by the tribe. If you try it, you will be lonely often, and sometimes frightened. But no price is too high to pay for the privilege of owning yourself.”
118. "The man of knowledge must be able not only to love his enemies but also to hate his friends."
119. "The more abstract the truth you wish to teach, the more you must allure the senses to it."
120. “The more mistrust, the more philosophy.”
121. “The noble soul has reverence for itself.”
122. "Then what is freedom? It is the will to be responsible to ourselves."
123. “There are many kinds of eyes. Even the sphinx has eyes—and consequently there are many kinds of "truths," and consequently there is no truth.”
124. "There are no eternal facts, as there are no absolute truths."
125. "There are no facts, only interpretations."
126. “There are no moral phenomena at all, but only a moral interpretation of phenomena”
127. “There is always some madness in love. But there is also always some reason in madness.”
128. “There is an innocence in admiration; it is found in those to whom it has not yet occurred that they, too, might be admired some day.”
129. "There is master-morality and slave-morality."
130. "There is not enough religion in the world to destroy the world's religions."
131. “The same passions in man and woman nonetheless differ in tempo; hence man and woman do not cease misunderstanding one another.”
132. “...the source of the concept "good" has been sought and established in the wrong place: the judgment "good" did not originate with those to whom "goodness" was shown! Rather it was "the good" themselves, that is to say, the noble, powerful, high-stationed and high-minded, who felt and established themselves and their actions as good...It was out of this pathos of distance that they first seized the right to create values and to coin names for values...the protracted and domineering fundamental total feeling on the part of a higher ruling order in relation to a lower order, to a "below"—that is the origin of the antithesis "good" and "bad."”
133. "The surest way to corrupt a young person is to teach them to esteem more highly those who think alike than those who think differently."
134. "The value of many men and books rests solely on their faculty for compelling all to speak out the most hidden and intimate things."
135. “The worst readers are those who behave like plundering troops: they take away a few things they can use, dirty and confound the remainder, and revile the whole.”
136. “"This is my way; where is yours?"—thus I answered those who asked me "the way." For the way—that does not exist.”
137. ”This is what is hardest: to close the open hand because one loves.”
138. "This secret spoke Life herself unto me: 'Behold,' said she, 'I am that which must ever surpass itself.'"
139. "Thoughts are the shadows of our sensations--always darker, emptier, simpler than these."
140. "True, we love life, not because we are used to living, but because we are used to loving. There is always some madness in love, but there is also always some reason in madness."
141. “To demand of strength that it should not express itself as strength, that it should not be a desire to overcome, a desire to throw down, a desire to become master, a thirst for enemies and resistances and triumphs, is just as absurd as to demand of weakness that it should express itself as strength. A quantum of force is equivalent to a quantum of drive, will, effect—more, it is nothing other than precisely this very driving, willing, effecting, and only owing to the seduction of language (and of the fundamental errors of reason that petrified in it) which conceives and misconceives all effects as conditioned by something that causes effects, by a "subject," can it appear otherwise. For just as the popular mind separates the lightning from its flash and takes the latter for an action, for the operation of a subject called lightning, so popular morality also separates strength from expressions of strength, as if there were a neutral substratum behind the strong man, which was free to express strength or not to do so. But there is no such substratum; there is no "being" behind doing, effecting, becoming; "the doer" is merely a fiction added to the deed—the deed is everything.”
142. ”To die proudly when it is no longer possible to live proudly. Death of one's own free choice, death at the proper time, with a clear head and with joyfulness, consummated in the midst of children and witnesses: so that an actual leave-taking is possible while he who is leaving is still there.”
143. “To live alone one must be a beast or a god, says Aristotle. Leaving out the third case: one must be both—a philosopher.”
144. “To make the individual uncomfortable, that is my task.”
145. “To use the same words is not a sufficient guarantee of understanding; one must use the same words for the same genus of inward experience; ultimately one must have one's experiences in common.”
146. ”True, we love life, not because we are used to living, but because we are used to loving. There is always some madness in love, but there is also always some reason in madness.”
147. "Under peaceful conditions the militant man attacks himself."
148. “We can destroy only as creators.”
149. “We have art in order not to die of the truth.”
150. “We should consider every day lost on which we have not danced at least once. And we should call every truth false which was not accompanied by at least one laugh.”
151. "What actually fills you with indignation as regards suffering is not suffering in itself but the pointlessness of suffering."
152. "What does not destroy me, makes me strong."
153. “What is the difference between someone who is convinced and one who is deceived? None, if he is well deceived.”
154. “What then in the last resort are the truths of mankind? They are the irrefutable errors of mankind.”
155. “Whatever is done from love always occurs beyond good and evil.”
156. “What if a demon were to creep after you one night, in your loneliest loneliness, and say, 'This life which you live must be lived by you once again and innumerable times more; and every pain and joy and thought and sigh must come again to you, all in the same sequence. The eternal hourglass will again and again be turned and you with it, dust of the dust!' Would you throw yourself down and gnash your teeth and curse that demon? Or would you answer, 'Never have I heard anything more divine'?”
157. “What is evil? Whatever springs from weakness.”
158. “...what is good and evil no one knows yet, unless it be he who creates. He, however, creates man's goal and gives the earth its meaning and its future. That anything at all is good and evil—that is his creation.”
159. "What someone is, begins to be revealed when his talent abates, when he stops showing us what he can do."
160. “What? You search? You would multiply yourself by ten, by a hundred? You seek followers? Seek zeros!”
161. “When a hundred men stand together, each of them loses his mind and gets another one.”
162. “When marrying, one should ask oneself this question: Do you believe that you will be able to converse well with this woman into your old age?”
163. “When one has finished building one's house, one suddenly realizes that in the process one has learned something that one really needed to know in the worst way--before one began.”
164. ”When you look into an abyss, the abyss also looks into you.”
165. “Whoever despises himself still respects himself as one who despises.”
166. “Wisdom—seems to the rabble a kind of escape, a means and a trick for getting well out of a wicked game. But the genuine philosopher—as it seems to us, my friends?—lives "unphilosophically" and "unwisely," above all imprudently, and feels the burden and the duty of a hundred attempts and temptations of life—he risks himself constantly, he plays the wicked game.”
167. “Wisdom sets bounds even to knowledge.”
168. “Without music, life would be a mistake.”
169. "You cannot learn to fly by flying. First you must learn to walk, to run, to climb, to dance."
170. “We love life, not because we are used to living but because we are used to loving.”
171. "We should consider every day lost on which we have not danced at least once. And we should call every truth false which was not accompanied by at least one laugh."
172. “What then is truth? A mobile army of metaphors, metonyms, and anthropomorphisms: in short, a sum of human relations which have been poetically and rhetorically intensified, transferred, and embellished, and which, after long usage, seem to a people to be fixed, canonical, and binding. Truths are illusions which we have forgotten are illusions—they are metaphors that have become worn out and have been drained of sensuous force, coins which have lost their embossing and are now considered as metal and no longer as coins.”
173. “What upsets me is not that you lied to me, but that from now on I can no longer believe you.”
174. “When one speaks of humanity, the idea is fundamental that this is something which separates and distinguishes man from nature. In reality, however, there is no such separation: "natural" qualities and those called truly "human" are inseparably grown together. Man, in his highest and noblest capacities, is wholly nature and embodies its uncanny dual character. Those of his abilities which are terrifying and considered inhuman may even be the fertile soil out of which alone all humanity can grow in impulse, deed, and work.”
175. "Whoever fights monsters should see to it that in the process he does not become a monster. An when you look long into an abyss, the abyss also looks into you."
