Quotes

The reasons for which 'this' world has been characterized as 'apparent' are the very reasons which indicate its reality; any other kind of reality is absolutely indemonstrable.

The literary woman, unsatisfied, agitated, desolate in heart and entrails, listening every minute with painful curiosity to the imperative which whispers from the depths of her organism "aut liberi aut libri [either children or books]."

The aphorism, the apophthegm, in which I am the first master among Germans, are the forms of "eternity"; my ambition is to say in ten sentences what everyone else says in a book-- what everyone else does not say in a book.

How little it takes to make us happy! The sound of a bagpipe. Without music life would be a mistake. The German even imagines God as singing songs.

Species do not grow more perfect: the weaker dominate the strong, again and again--- the reason being that they are the great majority, and they are also cleverer. Darwin forgot the mind (---that is English!): the weak possess more mind. ... To acquire mind, one must need mind---one loses it when one no longer needs it. [Criticism of Darwin's Origin of Species.]

Which is it: is man one of God's blunders, or is God one of man's blunders?

To live alone one must be an animal or a God - says Aristotle. There is yet a third case: one must be both - a philosopher.

First principle: one must need strength, otherwise one will never have it.

Plato is boring.

Idleness is the beginning of all psychology. What? Could it be that psychology is -- a vice?

Where there have been powerful governments, societies, religions, public opinions, in short wherever there has been tyranny, there the solitary philosopher has been hated; for philosophy offers an asylum to a man into which no tyranny can force it way, the inward cave, the labyrinth of the heart.

There is an innocence in admiration; it is found in those to whom it has never yet occurred that they, too, might be admired some day.

The church is precisely that against which Jesus preached -- and against which he taught his disciples to fight.

His world empire is still, as formerly, an under-world empire, a hospital, a subterranean empire, a Ghetto empire ... And he himself so pale, so weak, so décadent ... even the palest of the pale still became master over him.

Freedom is the will to be responsible for ourselves.

To learn to see -- to accustom the eye to calmness, to patience, and to allow things to come up to it; to defer judgment, and to acquire the habit of approaching and grasping an individual case from all sides. This is the first preparatory schooling of intellectuality. One must not respond immediately to a stimulus; one must acquire a command of the obstructing and isolating instincts.

All truly great thoughts are conceived while walking.

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

Idleness is the beginning of all psychology. What? Could it be that psychology is -- a vice?

When stepped on, the worm curls up. That is a clever thing to do. Thus it reduces its chances of being stepped on again. In the language of morality: humility.