The Infinite Library

“Without music, life would be a mistake.”

“It is not a lack of love, but a lack of friendship that makes unhappy marriages.”

“It is hard enough to remember my opinions, without also remembering my reasons for them!”

“The man of knowledge must be able not only to love his enemies but also to hate his friends.”

“I cannot believe in a God who wants to be praised all the time.”

“When we are tired, we are attacked by ideas we conquered long ago.”

“I'm not upset that you lied to me, I'm upset that from now on I can't believe you.”

“There is always some madness in love. But there is also always some reason in madness.”

“There are no facts, only interpretations.”

“He who has a why to live for can bear almost any how.”

“You must have chaos within you to give birth to a dancing star.”

“And those who were seen dancing were thought to be insane by those who could not hear the music.”

“That which does not kill us makes us stronger.”

“The snake which cannot cast its skin has to die. As well the minds which are prevented from changing their opinions; they cease to be mind.”

“Whoever fights monsters should see to it that in the process he does not become a monster. And if you gaze long enough into an abyss, the abyss will gaze back into you.”

“Is man merely a mistake of God's? Or God merely a mistake of man?”

“One ought to hold on to one's heart; for if one lets it go, one soon loses control of the head too.”

“In individuals, insanity is rare; but in groups, parties, nations and epochs, it is the rule.”

“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.”

“Ultimately, it is the desire, not the desired, that we love.”

“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.”

“Love, too, has to be learned.”

“Sometimes people don't want to hear the truth because they don't want their illusions destroyed.”

“In heaven, all the interesting people are missing.”

“Better know nothing than half-know many things.”

“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.”

“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?”

“Necessity is not an established fact, but an interpretation.”

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

“The higher we soar the smaller we appear to those who cannot fly.”

“Because we have for millenia made moral, aesthetic, religious demands on the world, looked upon it with blind desire, passion or fear, and abandoned ourselves to the bad habits of illogical thinking, this world has gradually become so marvelously variegated, frightful, meaningful, soulful, it has acquired color - but we have been the colorists: it is the human intellect that has made appearances appear and transported its erroneous basic conceptions into things.”

“What, if some day or night a demon were to steal after you into your loneliest loneliness and say to you: 'This life as you now live it and have lived it, you will have to live once more and innumerable times more' ... Would you not throw yourself down and gnash your teeth and curse the demon who spoke thus? Or have you once experienced a tremendous moment when you would have answered him: 'You are a god and never have I heard anything more divine.”

“He who would learn to fly one day must first learn to stand and walk and run and climb and dance; one cannot fly into flying.”

“Is life not a thousand times too short for us to bore ourselves?”

“For every man there exists a bait which he cannot resist swallowing.”

“Man is the cruelest animal.”

“To live is to suffer, to survive is to find some meaning in the suffering.”

“The advantage of a bad memory is that one enjoys several times the same good things for the first time.”

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

“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.”

“God is dead. God remains dead. And we have killed him. Yet his shadow still looms. How shall we comfort ourselves, the murderers of all murderers? What was holiest and mightiest of all that the world has yet owned has bled to death under our knives; who will wipe this blood off us? What water is there for us to clean ourselves?”

“Perhaps I know best why it is man alone who laughs; he alone suffers so deeply that he had to invent laughter.”

“No one can construct for you the bridge upon which precisely you must cross the stream of life, no one but you yourself alone.”

“What then is truth? A movable host of metaphors, metonymies, 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.”

“Art is the proper task of life.”

“How much truth does a spirit endure, how much truth does it dare?”

“The spiritualization of sensuality is called love: it is a great triumph over Christianity.”

“What does not destroy me, makes me strong.”