Friedrich Nietzsche

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

“It was suffering and incapacity that created all afterworlds - this, and that brief madness of bliss which is experienced only by those who suffer deeply. 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.”

“We no longer have a sufficiently high estimate of ourselves when we communicate. Our true experiences are not garrulous. They could not communicate themselves if they wanted to: they lack words. We have already grown beyond whatever we have words for. In all talking there lies a grain of contempt. Speech, it seems, was devised only for the average medium, communicable. The speaker has already vulgarized himself by speaking.”

“'Evil men have no songs.' How is it that the Russians have songs?”

“Plato was a bore.”

“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 enough for it.”

“Although the most acute judges of the witches and even the witches themselves, were convinced of the guilt of witchery, the guilt nevertheless was non-existent. It is thus with all guilt.”

“The good life is that which succeeds in existing for the moment, without reference to past or future, without condemnation or selection, in a state of absolute lightness, and in the finished conviction that there is no difference therefore between the instant and eternity.”

“Glance into the world just as though time were gone: and everything crooked will become straight to you.”

“Belief means not wanting to know what is true.”

“Love is a state in which a man sees things most decidedly as they are not.”

“As yet hath his knowledge not learned to smile, and to be without jealously ; as yet hath his gushing passion not become calm in beauty.”

“There are no moral phenomena at all, but only a moral interpretation of phenomena.”

“It is disgraceful for a philosopher to say: the good and the beautiful are one; if he adds 'also the true', one ought to beat him. Truth is ugly. We possess art lest we perish of the truth.”

“One may sometimes tell a lie, but the grimace that accompanies it tells the truth.”

“The most common lie is that which one lies to himself; lying to others is relatively an exception.”

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

“Books that teach us to dance: There are writers who, by portraying the impossible as possible, and by speaking of morality and genius as if both were high-spirited freedom, as if man were rising up on tiptoe and simply had to dance out of inner pleasure.”

“It is true: we love life, not because we are used to living but because we are used to loving.There is always a certain madness in love. But also there is always a certain method in madness.”

“One should die proudly when it is no longer possible to live proudly.”