Friedrich Nietzsche

"Amor Fati – Love Your Fate, which is in fact your life."

"The author must keep his mouth shut when his work starts to speak."

"It is my ambition to say in ten sentences what others say in a whole book."

"You desire to LIVE according to Nature? Oh, you noble Stoics, what fraud of words! Imagine to yourselves a being like Nature, boundlessly extravagant, boundlessly indifferent, without purpose or consideration, without pity or justice, at once fruitful and barren and uncertain: imagine to yourselves INDIFFERENCE as a power—how COULD you live in accordance with such indifference? To live—is not that just endeavouring to be otherwise than this Nature? Is not living valuing, preferring, being unjust, being limited, endeavouring to be different? And granted that your imperative, living according to Nature, means actually the same as living according to life—how could you do DIFFERENTLY? Why should you make a principle out of what you yourselves are, and must be? In reality, however, it is quite otherwise with you: while you pretend to read with rapture the canon of your law in Nature, you want something quite the contrary, you extraordinary stage-players and self-deluders! In your pride you wish to dictate your morals and ideals to Nature, to Nature herself, and to incorporate them therein; you insist that it shall be Nature according to the Stoa, and would like everything to be made after your own image, as a vast, eternal glorification and generalism of Stoicism! With all your love for truth, you have forced yourselves so long, so persistently, and with such hypnotic rigidity to see Nature FALSELY, that is to say, Stoically, that you are no longer able to see it otherwise—and to crown all, some unfathomable superciliousness gives you the Bedlamite hope that BECAUSE you are able to tyrannize over yourselves—Stoicism is self-tyranny—Nature will also allow herself to be tyrannized over: is not the Stoic a PART of Nature?... But this is an old and everlasting story: what happened in old times with the Stoics still happens today, as soon as ever a philosophy begins to believe in itself. It always creates the world in its own image; it cannot do otherwise; philosophy is this tyrannical impulse itself, the most spiritual Will to Power, the will to creation of the world, the will to the causa prima."

"Art is essentially the affirmation, the blessing, and the deification of existence."

"We do not place especial value on the possession of a virtue until we notice its total absence in our opponent."

"It is precisely he who is becoming who cannot endure the state of becoming."

"One must still have chaos in oneself to be able to give birth to a dancing star."

"Psychology has falsified love as surrender and altruism, while it is an appropriation or a bestowal following from a super-abundance of personality. Only the most complete persons can love. The depersonalized and objective are the worst lovers."

"Just as in the second part of a verse bad poets seek a thought to fit their rhyme, so in the second half of their lives people tend to become more anxious about finding actions, positions, relationships that fit those of their earlier lives, so that everything harmonizes quite well on the surface: but their lives are no longer ruled by a strong thought, and instead, in its place, comes the intention of finding a rhyme."

"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."

"Objection, evasion, joyous distrust, and love of irony are signs of health; everything absolute belongs to pathology."

"For truth to tell, dancing in all its forms cannot be excluded from the curriculum of all noble education: dancing with the feet, with ideas, with words, and, need I add that one must also be able to dance with pen- that one must learn how to write"

"“Poets are shameless with their experiences: they exploit them.”"

"Some men are born posthumously."

"All great things must first wear terrifying and monstrous masks in order to inscribe themselves on the hearts of humanity."

"If you know the why, you can live any how."

"For art to exist, for any sort of aesthetic activity or perception to exist, a certain physiological precondition is indispensable: intoxication."

"You look up when you wish to be exalted. And I look down because I am exalted."

"There is a point in the history of society when it becomes so pathologically soft and tender that among other things it sides even with those who harm it, criminals, and does this quite seriously and honestly. Punishing somehow seems unfair to it, and it is certain that imagining punishment and being supposed to punish hurts it, arouses fear in it. Is it not enough to render him undangerous? Why still punish?Punishing itself is terrible. With this question, herd morality, the morality of timidity, draws its ultimate consequence."