Friedrich Nietzsche

“The thought of suicide is a great consolation: by means of it one gets through many a dark night.”

“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.”

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

“When marrying, ask yourself this question: Do you believe that you will be able to converse well with this person into your old age? Everything else in marriage is transitory.”

“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.”

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

“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 the one great curse, the one great intrinsic depravity, the one great instinct of revenge, for which no means are venomous enough, or secret, subterranean and small enough,--I call it the one immortal blemish upon the human race...”

“Besides this I place another equally obvious confirmation of my view that opera is based on the same principles as our Alexandrian culture. Opera is the birth of the theoretical man, the critical layman, not of the artist: one of the most surprising facts in the history of all the arts. It was the demand of throughly unmusical hearers that before everything else the words must be understood, so that according to them a rebirth of music is to be expected only when some mode of singing has been discovered in which textword lords it over counterpoint like master over servant: For the words, it is argued, are as much nobler than the accompanying harmonic system as the soul is nobler than the body.”

“Deeds need time, even after they are done, in order to be seen or heard.”

“if we possess a why of life we can put up with almost any how.”

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

“There is only a perspective seeing, only a perspective "knowing"; and the more affects we allow to speak about one thing, the more eyes, different eyes, we can use to observe one thing, the more complete will our "concept" of this thing, our "objectivity," be.”

“What do you consider the most humane? - To spare someone shame. What is the seal of liberation? - To no longer be ashamed in front of oneself.”

“The deepest and most sublime hatred is a hatred which creates ideals and transforms values—something whose like has never been seen on earth”

“How good music and bad reasons sound when one marches against an enemy.”

“Does wisdom perhaps appear on the earth as a raven which is inspired by the smell of carrion?”

“Admiration for a quality or an art can be so strong that it deters us from striving to possess it.”

“To him who feels himself preordained to contemplation and not to belief, all believers are too noisy and obtrusive; he guards against them.”

“Insanity in individuals is something rare - but in groups, parties, nations and epochs, it is the rule.”

“Whatever they may think and say about their "egoism", the great majority nonetheless do nothing for their ego their whole life long: what they do is done for the phantom of their ego which has formed itself in the heads of those around them and has been communicated to them.”