Man is no longer an artist, he has become a work of art.

Every philosophy is a foreground philosophy — that is a hermit’s judgment: There is something arbitrary in his stopping here to look back and look around, in his not digging deeper here but laying his spade aside; there is also something suspicious about it. Every philosophy also conceals a philosophy; every opinion is also a hideout, every word also a mask.

As the bones, flesh, entrails and blood vessels are enclosed by a skin that renders the aspect of men endurable, so the impulses and passions of the soul are enclosed by vanity: it is the skin of the soul.

Where are we headed? Are we not endlessly plunging —backwards, sideways, forwards, in all directions? Is there an up and a down anymore? Do we not wander as if through an endless nothingness? Do we not feel the breath of empty space? Hasn’t it grown colder?

There is more wisdom in your body than in your deepest philosophy.

Thus the aesthetically sensitive man stands in the same relation tothe reality of dreams as the philosopher does to the reality of existence; he is a close and willing observer, for these images afford himan interpretation of life, and by reflecting on these processes hetrains himself for life.

Three metamorphoses of the spirit have I designated to you: how thespirit became a camel, the camel a lion, and the lion at last a child.

The will to a system: expressed morally, a more refined corruption with philosophers, an illness of character; expressed unmorally, his will to appear stupider than he is. Stupider, that means stronger, simpler, more dominating, less cultured, more commanding, more tyrannical.

To be unable to take his enemies, his misfortunes and even his misdeeds seriously for long – that is the sign of strong, rounded natures with a superabundance of a power which is flexible, formative, healing and can make one forget…A man like this shakes from him, with one shrug, many worms which would have burrowed into another man…

Quiconque lutte contre des monstres devrait prendre garde, dans le combat, à ne pas devenir monstre lui-même. Et quant à celui qui scrute le fond de l’abysse, l’abysse le scrute à son tour.

Excess of strength alone is proof of strength

To be unable to take his enemies, his misfortunes and even his misdeeds seriously for long – that is the sign of strong, rounded natures with a superabundance of a power which is flexible, formative, healing and can make one forget…

In good company one must never want to be entirely and solely right, which is what all pure logic wants […].

There is so much in man that is horrifying!..The world has been a madhouse for too long!…

Representatives of truth. The champions of truth are hardest to find, not when it is dangerous to tell it, but rather when it is boring.

Business people – Your business – is your greatest prejudice: it ties you to your locality, to the company you keep, to the inclinations you feel. Diligent in business – but indolent in spirit, content with your inadequacy, and with the cloak of duty hung over this contentment: that is how you live, that is how you want your children to live!

In some remote corner of the universe, poured out and glittering in innumerable solar systems, there once was a star on which clever animals invented knowledge. That was the haughtiest and most mendacious minute of world history- yet only a minute. After nature had drawn a few breaths the star grew cold, and the clever animals had to die.

The greatest danger that always hovered over humanity, and still hovers over it, is the eruption of madness— which means the eruption of arbitrariness in feeling, seeing, and hearing, the enjoyment of the mind’s lack of discipline, the joy in human unreason.

We know that the destruction of an ideal does not necessarily produce a truth, but only one more piece of ignorance; it is the extension of our ‘empty space,’ an increase in our ‘waste.

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.

The tragedy is that we cannot believe the dogmas of religion and metaphysics if we have the strict methods of truth in heart and head, but on the other hand, we have become through the development of humanity so tenderly suffering that we need the highest kind of means of salvation and consolation: whence arises the danger that man may bleed to death through the truth that he realises.

Every moment of life wants to tell us something, but we do not want to hear what it has to say: when we are alone and quiet we are afraid that something will be whispered into our ear and hence we despise quiet and drug ourselves with sociability.

To recognize untruth as a condition of life–that certainly means resisting accustomed value feelings in a dangerous way; and a philosophy that risks this would by that token alone place itself beyond good and evil.

One must reach out and try to grasp this astonishing finesse, that the value of life cannot be estimated.

Try for once to justify the meaning of your existence as it were a posteriori by setting yourself an aim, a goal… an exalted and noble ‘to this end.’ Perish in pursuit of this and only this

Weariness that wants to reach the ultimate with one leap, with one fatal leap, a poor ignorant weariness that does not want to want any more: this created all gods and afterworlds.

Healthy introspection, without undermining oneself; it is a rare gift to venture into the unexplored depths of the self, without delusions or fictions, but with an uncorrupted gaze.

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

I tell you: one must still have chaos in oneself to give birth to a dancing star. I tell you: you still have chaos in yourselves.

There have been two great narcotics in European civilisation: Christianity and alcohol.

In some remote corner of the universe, poured out and glittering among innumerable solar systems, there once was a star on which clever animals invented knowledge.

You may lie with your mouth, but with the mouth you make as you do so you none the less tell the truth.

A nation is a detour of nature to arrive at five or six great men- yes, and then to get around them.

You say, it’s dark. And in truth, I did place a cloud before your sun. But do you not see how the edges of the cloud are already glowing and turning light.

Man, the bravest of animals, and the one most accustomed to suffering, does not repudiate suffering as such; he desires it, he even seeks it out, provided he is shown a meaning for it, a purpose of suffering. The meaninglessness of suffering, not suffering itself, was the curse that lay over mankind so far.

As soon as a religion comes to dominate it has as its opponents all those who would have been its first disciples.

I have forgotten my umbrella.

I tell you: one must still have chaos in one, to give birth to a dancing star. I tell you: you have still chaos in you.

If a man has character, he has also his typical experience, which always recurs.

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.

Plato was a bore.

I am one thing, my writings are another.

All great things must first wear terrifying and monstrous masks in order to inscribe themselves on the hearts of humanity.

I assess the power of a will by how much resistance, pain, torture it endures and knows how to turn to its advantage

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

I would believe only in a God that knows how to dance.

He who cannot obey himself will be commanded. That is the nature of living creatures.

All that exists is just and unjust and is equally justified in both respects.