It has gradually become clear to me what every great philosophy up till now has consisted of – namely, the confession of its originator, and a species of involuntary and unconscious autobiography; and moreover that the moral (or immoral) purpose in every philosophy has constituted the true vital germ out of which the entire plant has always grown.
I consist of body and soul – in the worlds of a child. And why shouldn’t we speak like children? But the enlightened, the knowledgealbe would say: I am body through and through, nothing more; and the soul is just a word for something on the body.
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.
One ought to hold on to one’s heart; for if one lets it go, one soon loses control of the head too.
I have gradually come to understand what every great philosophy until now has been: the confession of its author and a kind of involuntarily unconscious memoir.
The true man wants two things: danger and play. For that reason he wants woman, as the most dangerous plaything.
Perhaps I know best why it is man alone who laughs; he alone suffers so deeply that he had to invent laughter.
The maturity of man—that means, to have reacquired the seriousness that one had as a child at play
If one shifts the center of gravity of life out of life into the “Beyond” – into nothingness – one has deprived life as such of its center of gravity. The great lie of personal immortality destroys all rationality, all naturalness of instinct, all that is salutary, all that is life-furthering.
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.
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.
We love life, not because we are used to living but because we are used to loving.
The life of the enemy . Whoever lives for the sake of combating an enemy has an interest in the enemy’s staying alive.
When we are tired, we are attacked by ideas we conquered long ago.
All beings so far have created something beyond themselves; and do you want to be the ebb of this great flood and even go back to the beasts rather than overcome man? What is the ape to man? A laughingstock or a painful embarrassment. And man shall be just that for the overman: a laughingstock or a painful embarrassment…
There are some who, from obtuseness or lack of experience, turn away from such phenomena as from ‘folk-diseases,’ with contempt or pity born of the consciousness of their own “healthy- mindedness.’ But of course such poor wretches have no idea how corpselike and ghostly their so-called ‘healthy-mindedness’ looks when the glowing life of the Dionysian revelers roars past them.
Glance into the world just as though time were gone: and everything crooked will become straight to you.
And a people – or, for that matter, a human being – only has value to the extent that it is able to put the stamp of the eternal on its experiences; for in doing so it sheds, one might say, its worldliness and reveals its unconscious, inner conviction that time is relative and that the true meaning oflife is metaphysical.
Ah, ye brethren, that God whom I created was human work and human madness, like all the Gods!
One has to take a somewhat bold and dangerous line with this existence: especially as, whatever happens, we are bound to lose it.
As for these celebrated victories of science, there is no doubt that they are victories. But victories over what?
Madness is something rare in individuals — but in groups, parties, peoples, and ages, it is the rule.
The most common sort of lie is that by which a man deceives himself: the deception of others is a relatively rare offense.
Plus d’un qui n’a pu liberer ses propres chaines a su pourtant en liberer son ami.
Is the world really beautified by the fact that man thinks it beautiful? He has humanized it, that is all.
To those human beings who are of any concern to me I wish suffering, desolation, sickness, ill-treatment, indignities—I wish that they should not remain unfamiliar with profound self-contempt, the torture of self-mistrust, the wretchedness of the vanquished: I have no pity for them, because I wish them the only thing that can prove today whether one is worth anything or not—that one endures.
All modern philosophizing is political, policed by governments, churches, academics, custom, fashion, and human cowardice, all of which limit it to a fake learnedness.
Deeds need time, even after they are done, in order to be seen or heard.
There are some who, from obtuseness or lack of experience, turn away from such phenomena as from ‘folk-diseases,’ with contempt or pity born of the consciousness of their own ‘healthy- mindedness.’ But of course such poor wretches have no idea how corpselike and ghostly their so-called ‘healthy-mindedness’ looks when the glowing life of the Dionysian revelers roars past them.
It is not the victory of science that distinguishes our nineteenth century, but the victory of scientific method over science.
Love is a state in which a man sees things most decidedly as they are not.
None of the people have any real interest in a science, who only begin to be enthusiastic about it when they themselves have made discoveries in it.
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.
Arrogance on the part of the meritorious is even more offensive to us than the arrogance of those without merit: for merit itself is offensive.
What is familiar is what we are used to; and what we are used to is most difficult to ‘Know’ – that is, to see as a problem; that is, to see as strange, as distant, as ‘outside us’.
Popular medicine and popular morality belong together and ought not to be evaluated so differently as they still are: both are the most dangerous pseudo-sciences.
These wisest men of all ages should be scrutinized closely. Were they all perhaps shaky on their legs? Tottery? Decadent? Late? Could it be that wisdom appears on earth as a Raven, attracted by a little whiff of carrion?