Friedrich Nietzsche

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

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

“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...”

“I have forgotten my umbrella.”

“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 autobiog...”

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

“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.”

“One has to take a somewhat bold and dangerous line with this existence: especially as, whatever happens, we are bound to lose it.”

“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.”

“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 thi...”

“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 its...”

“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...”

“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 devel...”

“All modern philosophizing is political, policed by governments, churches, academics, custom, fashion, and human cowardice, all off which limit it to a fake learnedness.”

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

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

“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 wh...”

“The satyr, as the Dionysiac chorist, dwells in a reality sanctioned by myth and ritual. That tragedy should begin with him, that the Dionysiac wisdom of tragedy should speak through him, is...”

“It happens more frequently, as has been hinted, that a scientific head is placed on an ape’s body, a fine exceptional understanding in a base soul, an occurrence by no means rare, especially...”

“The maturity of man—that means, to have reacquired the seriousness that one had as a child at play”