Friedrich Nietzsche

"When a hundred men stand together each of them loses his mind and gets another one."

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

"Speaking generally punishment hardens and numbs it produces concentration it sharpens the consciousness of alienation it strengthens the power of resistance."

"Convictions are more dangerous enemies of truth than lies."

"Courage is the best slayer-courage which attacketh for in every attack there is the sound of triumph."

"Either you reach a higher point today or you exercise your strength in order to be able to climb higher tomorrow."

"Is not life a hundred times too short for us to bore ourselves?"

"In architecture the pride of man his triumph over gravitation his will to power assume a visible form. Architecture is a sort of oratory of power by means of forms."

"Let that day be lost to us on which we did not dance once I"

"Science and art have that in common that everyday things seem to them new and attractive."

"We are terrified by the idea of being terrified."

"What does not destroy me makes me strong."

"I keep having the same experience and keep resisting it every time. I do not want to believe it although it is palpable: the great majority of people lacks an intellectual conscience. Indeed, it has often seemed to me as if anyone calling for an intellectual conscience were as lonely in the most densely populated cities as if he were in a desert. Everybody looks at you with strange eyes and goes right on handling his scales, calling this good and that evil. Nobody even blushes when you intimate that their weights are underweight; nor do people feel outraged; they merely laugh at your doubts. I mean: the great majority of people does not consider it contemptible to believe this or that and to live accordingly, without first having given themselves an account of the final and most certain reasons pro and con, and without even troubling themselves about such reasons afterward: the most gifted men and the noblest women still belong to this "great majority." But what is goodheartedness, refinement, or genius to me, when the person who has these virtues tolerates slack feelings in his faith and judgments and when he does not account the desire for certainty as his inmost craving and deepest distress—as that which separates the higher human beings from the lower. Among some pious people I found a hatred of reason and was well disposed to them for that; for this at least betrayed their bad intellectual conscience. But to stand in the midst of this rerum concordia discors and of this whole marvelous uncertainty and rich ambiguity of existence without questioning, without trembling with the craving and the rapture of such questioning, without at least hating the person who questions, perhaps even finding him faintly amusing—that is what I feel to be contemptible, and this is the feeling for which I look first in everybody. Some folly keeps persuading me that every human being has this feeling, simply because he is human. This is my type of injustice."

"Every habit makes our hand more witty, and out wit more handy."

"It is certainly not the least charm of a theory that it is refutable; it is precisely thereby that it attracts the more subtle minds. It seems that the hundred-times-refuted theory of the "free will" owes its persistence to this charm alone; some one is always appearing who feels himself strong enough to refute it."

"There is an innocence in admiration: it occurs in one who has not yet realized that they might one day be admired."

"Anarchists are mouthpieces of a declining stratum of society; when they work themselves into a state of righteous indignation demanding 'rights', 'justice', 'equal rights', they are just acting under the pressure of their own lack of culture, which has no way of grasping why they really suffer, or what they lack in life."

"What? A great man? I only ever see the ape of his own ideal."

"Invisible threads are the strongest ties."

"All I need is a sheet of paperand something to write with, and then I can turn the world upside down."