How people keep correcting us when we are young! There is always some bad habit or other they tell us we ought to get over. Yet most bad habits are tools to help us through life.

Argument

One often contradicts an opinion when what is uncongenial is really the tone in which it was conveyed.

Bores and Boredom

Only the most acute and active animals are capable of boredom. -- A theme for a great poet would be God's boredom on the seventh day of creation.

Chastity

These people abstain, it is true: but the bitch Sensuality glares enviously out of all they do.

Creativity

The desire to create continually is vulgar and betrays jealousy, envy, ambition. If one is something one really does not need to make anything --and one nonetheless does very much. There exists above the "productive" man a yet higher species.

Death and Dying

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

Education

In large states public education will always be mediocre, for the same reason that in large kitchens the cooking is usually bad.

Enemies

He who lives by fighting with an enemy has an interest in the preservation of the enemy's life.

Existence

Existence really is an imperfect tense that never becomes a present.

Facts

There are no facts, only interpretations.

Fights and Fighting

He who fights with monsters might take care lest he thereby become a monster. And if you gaze for long into an abyss, the abyss gazes also into you.

Free Will

I assess the power of a will by how much resistance, pain, torture it endures and knows how to turn to its advantage.

Friends and Friendship

The lonely one offers his hand too quickly to whomever he encounters.

God

I fear we are not getting rid of God because we still believe in grammar.

Humankind

I teach you the Superman. Man is something that should be overcome.

Image

We operate with nothing but things which do not exist, with lines, planes, bodies, atoms, divisible time, divisible space -- how should explanation even be possible when we first make everything into an image, into our own image!

Insanity

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

Judgment and Judges

Judgments, value judgments concerning life, for or against, can in the last resort never be true: they possess value only as symptoms, they come into consideration only as symptoms -- in themselves such judgments are stupidities.

Laughter

Not by wrath does one kill, but by laughter.

Lies and Lying

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

Life and Living

If you believed more in life you would fling yourself less to the moment.

Memory

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

Mistakes

What then in the last resort are the truths of mankind? They are the irrefutable errors of mankind.

Music

Without music, life would be an error. The German imagines even God singing songs

Opinions

Altered opinions do not alter a man's character (or do so very little); but they do illuminate individual aspects of the constellation of his personality which with a different constellation of opinions had hitherto remained dark and unrecognizable.

Past

Man... cannot learn to forget, but hangs on the past: however far or fast he runs, that chain runs with him.

Philosophers and Philosophy

Every philosophy is the philosophy of some stage of life.

Power

Not necessity, not desire --no, the love of power is the demon of men. Let them have everything --health, food, a place to live, entertainment --they are and remain unhappy and low-spirited: for the demon waits and waits and will be satisfied.

Pride

Nothing has been purchased more dearly than the little bit of reason and sense of freedom which now constitutes our pride.

Purpose

To forget one's purpose is the commonest form of stupidity.

Sincerity

The great man fights the elements in his time that hinder his own greatness, in other words his own freedom and sincerity.

Spirit and Spirituality

Once spirit was God, then it became man, and now it is even becoming mob.

Struggle

As regards the celebrated "struggle for life," it seems to me for the present to have been rather asserted than proved. It does occur, but as the exception; the general aspect of life is not hunger and distress, but rather wealth, luxury, even absurd prodigality -- where there is a struggle it is a struggle for power.

Thoughts and Thinking

Thoughts are the shadows of our sensations -- always darker, emptier, simpler than these.

Truth

The more abstract the truth you want to teach, the more thoroughly you must seduce the senses to accept it.

Value

All sciences are now under the obligation to prepare the ground for the future task of the philosopher, which is to solve the problem of value, to determine the true hierarchy of values.

Walking

All truly great thoughts are conceived by walking.

Wisdom

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

Writers and Writing

Of all that is written, I love only what a person has written with his own blood.