Friedrich Nietzsche

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

It may be that until now there has been no more potent means for beautifying man himself than piety: it can turn man into so much art, surface, play of colors, graciousness that his sight no longer makes one suffer.---

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.

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

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

Everything the State says is a lie, and everything it has it has stolen.

Memory says, 'I did that.' Pride replies, 'I could not have done that.' Eventually, memory yields.

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

Was aus Liebe getan wird, geschieht immer jenseits von Gut und Böse. (What is done out of love always takes place beyond good and evil.)

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

Man's maturity: to have regained the seriousness that he had as a child at play.

Every talent must unfold itself in fighting.

He who despises himself esteems himself as a self-despiser.

Pardon me, my friends, I have ventured to paint my happiness on the wall.

Alas, where is there still a sea in which one could drown: thus our lament resounds – across shallow swamps.

The earth has a skin and that skin has diseases; one of its diseases is called man.

As long as you still experience the stars as something "above you", you lack the eye of knowledge.

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.

Is man merely a mistake of God's? Or God merely a mistake of man?

Blessed are the sleepy ones: for they shall soon drop off.

The lonely one offers his hand too quickly to whomever he encounters.