"Let the youthful soul look back on life with the question: what have you truly loved up to now, what has elevated your soul, what has mastered it and at the same time delighted it? Place these venerated objects before you in a row, and perhaps they will yield for you, through their nature and their sequence, a law, the fundamental law of your true self. Compare these objects, see how one complements, expands, surpasses, transfigures another, how they form a stepladder upon which you have climbed up to yourself as you are now; for your true nature lies, not hidden deep within you, but immeasurably high above you, or at least above that which you normally take to be yourself."
— Friedrich Nietzsche, Untimely Meditations
(Source: ludimagister)
“What is a thinker worth if he does not know how to escape from his own virtues occasionally? For he ought not to be only a moral being!”
—Daybreak, §509.
(Source: dailynietzsche)
"It is the stillest words that bring on the storm. Thoughts that come on doves’ feet guide the world."
— Friedrich Nietzsche, Thus Spoke Zarathustra
(Source: unephilosophe)
"Every true faith is infallible — it performs what the believing person hopes to find in it, but it does not offer the least support for the establishing of an objective truth. Here, the ways of men divide. If you want to achieve peace of mind and happiness, have faith. If you want to be a disciple of truth, then search."
— Friedrich Nietzsche, in a letter to his sister
"When Silenus at last fell into his hands, the king asked what was the best and most desirable of all things for man. Fixed and immovable, the demigod said not a word, till at last, urged by the king, he gave a shrill laugh and broke out into these words: ‘Oh, wretched ephemeral race, children of chance and misery, why do you compel me to tell you what it would be most expedient for you not to hear? What is best of all is utterly beyond your reach: not to be born, not to be, to be nothing. But the second best for you is — to die soon.’"
— Friedrich Nietzsche - The Birth of Tragedy
"At the very climax of joy there sounds a cry of horror or a yearning lamentation for an irretrievable loss."
— Friedrich Nietzsche - The Birth of Tragedy
"And perhaps many will, like myself, recall how amid the dangers and terrors of dreams they have occasionally said to themselves in self-encouragement, and not without success: ‘It is a dream! I will dream on!’ I have likewise heard of people who were able to continue one and the same dream for three and even more successive nights — acts which indicate clearly how our innermost being, our common ground, experiences dreams with profound delight and a joyous necessity."
— Friedrich Nietzsche - The Birth of Tragedy
"Are the axioms of logic adequate to reality or are they a means and measure for us to create reality, the concept “reality”, for ourselves?"
— Friedrich Nietzsche, The Will to Power
(Source: ludimagister, via philossofos)
"Amor fati: let that be my love from now on! I do not want to wage war against ugliness. I do not want to accuse; I do not even want to accuse the accusers. Let looking away be my only negation! An, all in all and on the whole: some day I want only to be a Yes-sayer!"
— Friedrich Nietzsche - The Gay Science IV
"Deception in Love.— We forget and purposely banish from our minds a good deal of our past. In other words, we wish our picture, that beams at us from the past, to belie us, to flatter our vanity — we are constantly engaged in this self-deception. And you who talk and boast so much of ‘self oblivion in love,’ of the ‘absorption of the ego in the other person’ — you hold that this is something different? So you break the mirror, throw yourselves into another personality that you admire, and enjoy the new portrait of your ego, though calling it by the other person’s name — and this whole proceeding is not to be thought self-deception, self-seeking, you marvellous beings?"
— Friedrich Nietzsche, Human, All Too Human
"The most serious parody I ever heard was this: ‘In the beginning was the nonsense, and the nonsense was with God, and the nonsense was God.’"
— Friedrich Nietzsche - Human, All Too Human
"Truth will have no gods before it. — The belief in truth begins with the doubt of all truths which one has previously believed"
— Friedrich Nietzsche - Human, All Too Human
"If we make it clear to anyone that, strictly, he can never speak of truth, but only of probability and of its degrees, we generally discover, from the undisguised joy of our pupil, how greatly men prefer the uncertainty of their intellectual horizon, and how in their heart of hearts they hate truth because of its definiteness. — Is this due to a secret fear felt by all the that light of truth may at some time be turned too brightly upon themselves?"
— Friedrich Nietzsche - Human, All Too Human
"One should only speak where one cannot remain silent, and only speak of what one has conquered — the rest is all chatter, ‘literature,’ bad breeding."
— Friedrich Nietzsche - Human, All Too Human
"At present, the comedy of existence has not yet ‘become conscious’ of itself; at present, we still live in the age of tragedy, in the age of moralities and religions."
— Friedrich Nietzsche - The Gay Science, Book I
