The Christian resolution to find the world ugly and bad has made the world ugly and bad.

Even the most beautiful scenery is no longer assured of our love after we have lived in it for three months, and some distant coast attracts our avarice: possessions are generally diminished by possession…

Morality is herd instinct in the individual.

Whatever has value in our world now does not have value in itself, according to its nature — nature is always value-less, but has been given value at some time, as a present — and it was we who gave and bestowed it.

For believe me! — the secret for harvesting from existence the greatest fruitfulness and the greatest enjoyment is: to live dangerously! Build your cities on the slopes of Vesuvius!

What is now decisive against Christianity is our taste, no longer our reasons.

God is dead! God remains dead! And we have killed him.

To what extent can truth endure incorporation? That is the question; that is the experiment.

Thoughts are the shadows of our feelings — always darker, emptier, simpler.

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.

Benefiting and hurting others are ways of exercising one's power upon others; that is all one desires in such cases. One hurts those whom one wants to feel one's power, for pain is a much more efficient means to that end than pleasure; pain always raises the question about its origin while pleasure is inclined to stop with itself without looking back. We benefit and show benevolence to those who are already dependent on us in some way (which means that they are used to thinking of us as causes); we want to increase their power because in that way we increase ours, or we want to show them how advantageous it is to be in our power; that way they will become more satisfied with their condition and more hostile to and willing to fight against the enemies of our power.

We are, all of us, growing volcanoes that approach the hour of their eruption; but how near or distant that is, nobody knows — not even God.

What does your conscience say? — "You should become the person you are."

Only those who keep changing remain akin to me.

I would not know what the spirit of a philosopher might wish more to be than a good dancer.

We want to be poets of our life — first of all in the smallest most everyday matters.

We have no dreams at all or interesting ones. We should learn to be awake the same way — not at all or in an interesting manner.

The most perfidious way of harming a cause consists of defending it deliberately with faulty arguments.

We are always in our own company.

To find everything profound — that is an inconvenient trait. It makes one strain one's eyes all the time, and in the end one finds more than one might have wished.

Without art we would be nothing but foreground and live entirely in the spell of that perspective which makes what is closest at hand and most vulgar appear as if it were vast, and reality itself.

Who can attain to anything great if he does not feel in himself the force and will to inflict great pain? The ability to suffer is a small matter: in that line, weak women and even slaves often attain masterliness. But not to perish from internal distress and doubt when one inflicts great suffering and hears the cry of it — that is great, that belongs to greatness.

It is true that there are men who, on the approach of severe pain, hear the very opposite call of command, and never appear more proud, more martial, or more happy than when the storm is brewing; indeed, pain itself provides them with their supreme moments! These are the heroic men, the great pain-bringers of mankind: those few and rare ones who need just the same apology as pain generally — and verily, it should not be denied them. They are forces of the greatest importance for preserving and advancing the species, be it only because they are opposed to smug ease, and do not conceal their disgust at this kind of happiness.

Those who deny chance. — 'No victor believes in chance.'