Friedrich Nietzsche

“There is no pre-established harmony between the furtherance of truth and the well-being of mankind.”

“Sometimes it is harder to accede to a thing than it is to see its truth.”

“You look up when you wish to be exalted. And I look down because I am exalted.”

“You tell me: 'Life is hard to bear.' But if it were otherwise why should you have your pride in the morning and your resignation in the evening? Life is hard to bear: but do not pretend to b...”

“Poets are shameless with their experiences: they exploit them.”

“We talk so abstractly about poetry because all of us are usually bad poets.”

“Just as in the second part of a verse bad poets seek a thought to fit their rhyme, so in the second half of their lives people tend to become more anxious about finding actions, positions, r...”

“There is a certain right by which we many deprive a man of life, but none by which we may deprive him of death; this is mere cruelty.”

“The final reward of the dead - to die no more”

“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.”

“The Thought of Death. It gives me a melancholy happiness to live in the midst of this confusion of streets, of necessities, of voices: how much enjoyment, impatience and desire, how much thi...”

“But I need solitude--which is to say, recovery, return to myself, the breath of a free, light, playful air.”

“Man does not strive for happiness; only the Englishman does that.”

“Happiness: being able to forget or, to express in a more learned fashion.”

“One thing a man must have: either a naturally light disposition or a disposition lightened by art and knowledge.”

“Hope in reality is the worst of all evils because it prolongs the torments of man.”

“A casual stroll through the lunatic asylum shows that faith does not prove anything.”

“At times one remains faithful to a cause only because its opponents do not cease to be insipid.”

“The desire for a strong faith is not the proof of a strong faith, rather the opposite. If one has it one may permit oneself the beautiful luxury of skepticism: one is secure enough, fixed en...”

“This eternal accusation against Christianity I shall write upon all walls, wherever walls are to be found--I have letters that even the blind will be able to see. . . . I call Christianity t...”