Friedrich Nietzsche

"In comparison with the spirit of priestly revenge all the remaining spirits are hardly worth considering."

"You have your way. I have my way. As for the right way, the correct way, and the only way, it does not exist."

"The individual has always had to struggle to keep from being overwhelmed by the tribe. If you try it, you will be lonely often, and sometimes frightened. But no price is too high to pay for the privilege of owning yourself."

"To die proudly when it is no longer possible to live proudly. Death of one's own free choice, death at the proper time, with a clear head and with joyfulness, consummated in the midst of children and witnesses: so that an actual leave-taking is possible while he who is leaving is still there"

"A thinker sees his own actions as experiments and questions--as attempts to find out something. Success and failure are for him answers above all."

"God is dead. God remains dead. And we have killed him. How shall we comfort ourselves, the murderers of all murderers? What was holiest and mightiest of all that the world has yet owned has bled to death under our knives: who will wipe this blood off us? What water is there for us to clean ourselves? What festivals of atonement, what sacred games shall we have to invent? Is not the greatness of this deed too great for us? Must we ourselves not become gods simply to appear worthy of it?"

"The craving for equality can express itself either as a desire to pull everyone down to our own level (by belittling them, excluding them, tripping them up) or as a desire to raise ourselves up along with everyone else (by acknowledging them, helping them, and rejoicing in their success)."

"In practice it is death that works soseductively behind the image of its brother, sleep"

"He who fights with monsters might take care lest he thereby becomes a monster."

"All things are subject to interpretation. Whichever interpretation prevails at a given time is a function of power and not truth."

"Let the young soul survey its own life with a view of the following question: ‘What have you truly loved thus far? What has ever uplifted your soul, what has dominated and delighted it at the same time?"

"Your bad love of yourselves makes solitude a prison to you."

"Only those thoughts which come from walking have any value"

"A thought, even a possibility, can shatter and transform us."

"A thought comes when it will, not when I will."

"We have to cease to think, if we refuse to do it in the prison house of language; for we cannot reach further than the doubt which asks whether the limit we see is really a limit."

"Writers whose thoughts are expressed with clarity and precision are assumed by readers to be superficial. Where the meaning is obscured, then readers give more attention and consider the fruit of their labour more valuable"

"He who writes in blood and aphorisms does not want to be read, he wants to be learned by heart."

"Be not virtuous beyond your powers! And seek nothing from yourselves opposed to probability!... Shy, ashamed, awkward, like the tiger whose spring hath failed—thus, ye higher men, have I often seen you slink aside. A cast which ye made had failed... The higher its type, always the seldomer doth a thing succeed. Ye higher men here, have ye not all—been failures?Be of good cheer; what doth it matter? How much is still possible! Learn to laugh at yourselves, as ye ought to laugh!What wonder even that ye have failed and only half-succeeded, ye half-shattered ones! Doth not—man's future strive and struggle in you?Man's furthest, profoundest, star-highest issues, his prodigious powers—do not all these foam through one another in your vessel?What wonder that many a vessel shattereth! Learn to laugh at yourselves, as ye ought to laugh! Ye higher men, Oh, how much is still possible!"

"The end of a melody is not its goal: but nonetheless, had the melody not reached its end it would not have reached its goal either. A parable."