Friedrich Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil

"Almost everything we call "higher culture" is based on the spiritualization of cruelty."

"With hard men intimacy is a thing of shame- and something precious."

"To vigorous men intimacy is a matter of shame--and something precious."

"It is the business of the very few to be independent; it is a privilege of the strong. And whoever attempts it, even with the best right, but without being OBLIGED to do so, proves that he is probably not only strong, but also daring beyond measure. He enters into a labyrinth, he multiplies a thousandfold the dangers which life in itself already brings with it; not the least of which is that no one can see how and where he loses his way, becomes isolated, and is torn piecemeal by some minotaur of conscience. Supposing such a one comes to grief, it is so far from the comprehension of men that they neither feel it, nor sympathize with it. And he cannot any longer go back! He cannot even go back again to the sympathy of men!"

"Perhaps he even needs to have been a critic and a sceptic and a dogmatist and an historian, and in addition a poet and collector and traveller and puzzle-solver and moralist and seer and ‘free spirit’ and nearly all things, so that he can traverse the range of human values and value-feelings and be able to look with many kinds of eyes and consciences from the heights into every distance, from the depths into every height, from the corners into every wide expanse."

"One is punished most for one’s virtues."

"Youth's longing misconceived inconsistency. Those whom I deemed Changed to my kin, the friends of whom I dreamed,Have aged and lost our old affinity:One has to change to stay akin to me."

"One should part from life as Ulysses parted from Nausicaa-- blessing it rather than in love with it."

"I obviously do everything to be "hard to understand" myself"

"One must shed the bad taste of wanting to agree with many. "Good" is no longer good when one's neighbor mouths it. And how should there be a "common good"! The term contradicts itself: whatever can be common always has little value. In the end it must be as it is and always has been: great things remain for the great, abysses for the profound, nuances and shudders for the refined, and, in brief, all that is rare for the rare."

"A man who wills commands something within himself that renders obedience, or that he believes renders obedience."

"The vanity of others runs counter to our taste only when it runs counter to our vanity."

"Solitude is a virtue for us, since it is a sublime inclination and impulse to cleanliness which shows that contact between people, “society”, inevitably makes things unclean. Somewhere, sometime, every community makes people—“base."

"When one is young, one venerates and despises without that art of nuances which constitutes the best gain of life, and it is only fair that one has to pay dearly for having assaulted men and things in this manner with Yes and No. Everything is arranged so that the worst of tastes, the taste for the unconditional, should be cruelly fooled and abused until a man learns to put a little art into his feelings and rather to risk trying even what is artificial — as the real artists of life do."

"Men of profound sadness betray themselves when they are happy: they have a mode of seizing upon happiness as though they would choke and strangle it, out of jealousy--ah, they know only too well that it will flee from them!"

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

"That which now calls itself democracy differs from older forms of government solely in that it drives with new horses: the streets are still the same old streets, and the wheels are likewise the same old wheels."

"[Anything which] is a living thing and not a dying body... will have to be an incarnate will to power, it will strive to grow, spread, seize, become predominant - not from any morality or immorality but because it is living and because life simply is will to power... 'Exploitation'... belongs to the essence of what lives, as a basic organic function; it is a consequence of the will to power, which is after all the will of life."

"There is no such thing as moral phenomena, but only a moral interpretation of phenomena"

"One does not hate as long as one disesteems, but only when one esteems equal or superior"