"Objection, evasion, joyous distrust, and love of irony are signs of health; everything absolute belongs to pathology."
"A soul that knows it is loved but does not itself love betrays its sediment: what is at bottom comes up."―Epigrams and Interludes, Section 79"
"In the end things must be as they are and have always been--the great things remain for the great, the abysses for the profound, the delicacies and thrills for the refined, and, to sum up shortly, everything rare for the rare."
"A man who wills commands something within himself that renders obedience, or that he believes renders obedience."
"love as a passion—it is our European specialty—must absolutely be of noble origin; as is well known, its invention is due to the Provencal poet-cavaliers, those brilliant, ingenious men of the "gai saber," to whom Europe owes so much, and almost owes itself."
"It may be that until now there has been no more potent means for beautifying man himself than piety: it can turn man into so much art, surface, play of colors, graciousness that his sight no longer makes one suffer.---"
"Success has always been the greatest liar - and the "work" itself is a success; the great statesman, the conqueror, the discoverer is disguised by his creations, often beyond recognition; the "work," whether of the artist or the philosopher, invents the man who has created it, who is supposed to have create it; "great men," as they are venerated, are subsequent pieces of wretched minor fiction"
"When we have to change an opinion about any one, we charge heavily to his account the inconvenience he thereby causes us."
"Men have hitherto treated women like birds which have strayed down to them from the heights; as something more delicate, more fragile, more savage, stranger, sweeter, soulful – but as something which has to be caged up so that it shall not fly away."
"Christianity gave Eros poison to drink; he did not die of it, certainly, but degenerated to Vice."
"To him who feels himself preordained to contemplation and not to belief, all believers are too noisy and obtrusive; he guards against them."
"Every select man strives instinctively for a citadel and a privacy, where he is FREE from the crowd, the many, the majority-- where he may forget "men who are the rule," as their exception;-- exclusive only of the case in which he is pushed straight to such men by a still stronger instinct, as a discerner in the great and exceptional sense."
"One loves ultimately one's desires, not the thing desired."
"The consequences of our actions take hold of us, quite indifferent to our claim that meanwhile we have 'improved."
"One does not hate as long as one disesteems, but only when one esteems equal or superior"
"There is no such thing as moral phenomena, but only a moral interpretation of phenomena"
"[Anything which] is a living thing and not a dying body... will have to be an incarnate will to power, it will strive to grow, spread, seize, become predominant - not from any morality or immorality but because it is living and because life simply is will to power... 'Exploitation'... belongs to the essence of what lives, as a basic organic function; it is a consequence of the will to power, which is after all the will of life."
"That which now calls itself democracy differs from older forms of government solely in that it drives with new horses: the streets are still the same old streets, and the wheels are likewise the same old wheels."
"One should part from life as Ulysses parted from Nausicaa-- blessing it rather than in love with it."
"One is punished most for one’s virtues."
"With hard men intimacy is a thing of shame- and something precious."
"Men of profound sadness betray themselves when they are happy: they have a mode of seizing upon happiness as though they would choke and strangle it, out of jealousy--ah, they know only too well that it will flee from them!"
"When one is young, one venerates and despises without that art of nuances which constitutes the best gain of life, and it is only fair that one has to pay dearly for having assaulted men and things in this manner with Yes and No. Everything is arranged so that the worst of tastes, the taste for the unconditional, should be cruelly fooled and abused until a man learns to put a little art into his feelings and rather to risk trying even what is artificial — as the real artists of life do."
"Solitude is a virtue for us, since it is a sublime inclination and impulse to cleanliness which shows that contact between people, “society”, inevitably makes things unclean. Somewhere, sometime, every community makes people—“base."
"The vanity of others runs counter to our taste only when it runs counter to our vanity."