There will always be rocks in the road ahead of us. They will be stumbling blocks or stepping stones; it all depends on how you use them.

Sometimes people don't want to hear the truth because they don't want their illusions destroyed.

I was in darkness, but I took three steps and found myself in paradise. The first step was a good thought, the second, a good word; and the third, a good deed.

There are two different types of people in the world, those who want to know, and those who want to believe.

Nobody is more inferior than those who insist on being equal.

And those who were seen dancing were thought to be insane by those who could not hear the music.

To live is to suffer, to survive is to find some meaning in the suffering.

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

Enjoy life. This is not a dress rehearsal.

I'm not upset that you lied to me, I'm upset that from now on I can't believe you.

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

Whoever fights monsters should see to it that in the process he does not become a monster. And if you gaze long enough into an abyss, the abyss will gaze back into you.

No price is too high to pay for the privilege of owning yourself.

Do you want to have an easy life? Then always stay with the herd and lose yourself in the herd.

That which does not kill us makes us stronger.

The higher we soar the smaller we appear to those who cannot fly.

What is the difference between someone who is convinced and one who is deceived? None, if he is well deceived.

The tree that would grow to heaven must send its roots to hell.

I know of no better life purpose than to perish in attempting the great and the impossible.

In loneliness, the lonely one eats himself; in a crowd, the many eat him. Now choose.

Everything matters. Nothing's important.

Nobody can build the bridge for you to walk across the river of life, no one but you yourself alone. There are, to be sure, countless paths and bridges and demi-gods which would carry you across this river; but only at the cost of yourself; you would pawn yourself and lose. There is in the world only one way, on which nobody can go, except you: where does it lead? Do not ask, go along with it.

Insanity in individuals is something rare - but in groups, parties, nations and epochs, it is the rule.

If you know the why, you can live any how.

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

He who cannot obey himself will be commanded. That is the nature of living creatures.

Be careful who you choose as your enemy because that's who you become most like.

Those who are devoid of purpose will make the void their purpose.

The snake which cannot cast its skin has to die. As well the minds which are prevented from changing their opinions; they cease to be mind.

Man is the only animal that must be encouraged to live.

The secret of reaping the greatest fruitfulness and the greatest enjoyment from life is to live dangerously.

Silence is worse; all truths that are kept silent become poisonous.

There are no facts, only interpretations.

you must be ready to burn yourself in your own flame; how could you rise anew if you have not first become ashes?

It is not a lack of love, but a lack of friendship that makes unhappy marriages.

One can promise actions, but not feelings, for the latter are involuntary. He who promises to love forever or hate forever or be forever faithful to someone is promising something that is not in his power.

Our greatest experiences are our quietest moments.

Be careful when you cast out your demons that you dont throw away the best of yourself.

To predict the behavior of ordinary people in advance, you only have to assume that they will always try to escape a disagreeable situation with the smallest possible expenditure of intelligence.

My solitude doesnt depend on the presence or absence of people; on the contrary, I hate who steals my solitude without, in exchange, offering me true company.

Call me whatever you like; I am who I must be.

They muddy the water, to make it seem deep.

The surest way to corrupt a youth is to instruct him to hold in higher esteem those who think alike than those who think differently.

When marrying, ask yourself this question: Do you believe that you will be able to converse well with this person into your old age? Everything else in marriage is transitory.

Men who think deeply appear to be comedians in their dealings with others because they always have to feign superficiality in order to be understood.

If the all powerful god controls satan he is an accomplice, and if he doesn't, he is not an all powerful god.

The Great Man... is colder, harder, less hesitating, and without fear of 'opinion'; he lacks the virtues that accompany respect and 'respectability,' and altogether everything that is the 'virtue of the herd.' If he cannot lead, he goes alone... He knows he is incommunicable: he finds it tasteless to be familiar... When not speaking to himself, he wears a mask. There is a solitude within him that is inaccessible to praise or blame.

Is it better to out-monster the monster or to be quietly devoured?

The world is beautiful, but has a disease called man.

Solitude makes us tougher towards ourselves and tenderer towards others. In both ways it improves our character.

One should die proudly when it is no longer possible to live proudly.

Only he who is man enough will release the woman in woman.

Love your enemies because they bring out the best in you.

Young people love what is interesting and odd, no matter how true or false it is. More mature minds love what is interesting and odd about truth. Fully mature intellects, finally, love truth, even when it appears plain and simple, boring to the ordinary person; for they have noticed that truth tends to reveal its highest wisdom in the guise of simplicity.

The real question is: How much truth can I stand?

There's no defense against stupidity.

I am a forest, and a night of dark trees: but he who is not afraid of my darkness, will find banks full of roses under my cypresses.

So long as men praise you, you can only be sure that you are not yet on your own true path but on someone else's.

Every deep thinker is more afraid of being understood than of being misunderstood.

One must still have chaos in oneself to be able to give birth to a dancing star.

The true man wants two things: danger and play. For that reason he wants woman, as the most dangerous plaything.

I and me are always too deeply in conversation.

Nothing on earth consumes a man more quickly than the passion of resentment.

The discipline of suffering, of great suffering- do you not know that only this discipline has created all enhancements of man so far? That tension of the soul in unhappiness which cultivates its strength, its shudders face to face with great ruin, its inventiveness and courage in enduring, preserving, interpreting, and exploiting suffering, and whatever has been granted to it of profundity, secret, mask, spirit, cunning, greatness- was it not granted to it through suffering, through the discipline of great suffering?

He who has a why to live can bear almost any how.

The 'kingdom of God' is not something one waits for; it has no yesterday or tomorrow, it does not come 'in a thousand years' it is an experience within a heart; it is everywhere, it is nowhere.

There are no beautiful surfaces without a terrible depth.

Few are made for independence, it is the privilege of the strong.

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

There is always some madness in love. But there is also always some reason in madness.

We have art so that we shall not die of reality.

And once you are awake, you shall remain awake eternally.

There are horrible people who, instead of solving a problem, tangle it up and make it harder to solve for anyone who wants to deal with it. Whoever does not know how to hit the nail on the head should be asked not to hit it at all.

What is the truth, but a lie agreed upon.

Do not allow yourselves to be deceived: Great Minds are Skeptical.

You know a moment is important when it is making your mind go numb with beauty.

I cannot believe in a God who wants to be praised all the time.

Invisible threads are the strongest ties.

The demand to be loved is the greatest of all arrogant presumptions.

When a woman has scholarly inclinations there is usually something wrong with her sexuality.

Loneliness is one thing, solitude another.

The most spiritual men, as the strongest, find their happiness where others would find their destruction: in the labyrinth, in hardness against themselves and others, in experiments. Their joy is self-conquest: asceticism becomes in them nature, need, and instinct. Difficult tasks are a privilege to them; to play with burdens that crush others, a recreation. Knowledge-a form of asceticism. They are the most venerable kind of man: that does not preclude their being the most cheerful and the kindliest.

People who live in an age of corruption are witty and slanderous; they know that there are other kinds of murder than by dagger or assault; they also know that whatever is well said is believed.

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.

For what purpose humanity is there should not even concern us: why you are here, that you should ask yourself: and if you have no ready answer, then set for yourself goals, high and noble goals, and perish in pursuit of them!

He who obeys, does not listen to himself!

All things that are truly great are at first thought impossible.

One must be a sea, to receive a polluted stream without becoming impure.

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).

The purpose of criminal law is to punish the enemies of those in power.

In heaven, all the interesting people are missing.

Life is the will to power; our natural desire to dominate and reshape the world to fit our own preferences and assert our personal strength to the fullest degree.

In every real man a child is hidden that wants to play.

And if your friend does evil to you, say to him, ''I forgive you for what you did to me, but how can I forgive you for what you did to yourself?

Who is better, they who promote truth over happiness, or happiness over truth?

Become who you are. Make what only you can make.

I have found strength where one does not look for it: in simple, mild, and pleasant people, without the least desire to rule -- and, conversely, the desire to rule has often appeared to me a sign of inward weakness: they fear their own slave soul and shroud it in a royal cloak (in the end, they still become the slaves of their followers, their fame, etc.)

It is only when we have ceased to be the followers of our followers that we comprehend how meaningless followers are.

All truly great thoughts are conceived by walking.

When we are tired, we are attacked by ideas we conquered long ago.

Amor Fati Love Your Fate, which is in fact your life.

Do not talk about giftedness, inborn talents! One can assume great men of all kinds who were very little gifted. They acquired greatness, became geniuses (as we put it), through qualities the lack of which no one who knew what they were would boast of: they all possessed that seriousness of the efficient workman which first learns to construct the parts properly before it ventures to fashion a great whole; they allowed themselves time for it, because they took more pleasure in making the little, secondary things well than in the effect of a dazzling whole.

One must learn to love oneself with a wholesome and healthy love, so that one can bear to be with oneself and need not roam.

No journey is too great,

when one finds what one seeks.

But the worst enemy you can meet will always be yourself; you lie in wait for yourself in caverns and forests. Lonely one, you are going the way to yourself! And your way goes past yourself, and past your seven devils! You will be a heretic to yourself and witch and soothsayer and fool and doubter and unholy one and villain. You must be ready to burn yourself in your own flame: how could you become new, if you had not first become ashes?

Many are stubborn in pursuit of the path they have chosen, few in pursuit of the goal.

We are so fond of being out among nature, because it has no opinions about us.

It is my ambition to say in ten sentences what others say in a whole book.

...lust is only a sweet poison for the weakling, but for those who will with a lion's heart it is the reverently reserved wine of wines.

In the mountains of truth, you never climb in vain.

In revenge and in love, woman is more barbarous than man.

Be careful when you fight the monsters, lest you become one.

What destroys a man more quickly than to work, think and feel without inner necessity, without any deep personal desire, without pleasure - as a mere automaton of duty?

What is the task of higher education? To make a man into a machine. What are the means employed? He is taught how to suffer being bored.

I overcame myself, the sufferer; I carried my own ashes to the mountains; I invented a brighter flame for myself.

Hope in reality is the worst of all evils because it prolongs the torments of man.

We often refuse to accept an idea merely because the tone of voice in which it has been expressed is unsympathetic to us.

Every man has his price. This is not true. But for every man there exists a bait which he cannot resist swallowing. To win over certain people to something, it is only necessary to give it a gloss of love of humanity, nobility, gentleness, self-sacrifice - and there is nothing you cannot get them to swallow. To their souls, these are the icing, the tidbit; other kinds of souls have others.

I am alone again and I want to be so; alone with the pure sky and open sea.

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

For this remains as I have already pointed out the essential difference between the two religions of decadence : Buddhism promises nothing, but actually fulfils; Christianity promises everything, but fulfils nothing.

People are always angry at anyone who chooses very individual standards for his life; because of the extraordinary treatment which that man grants to himself, they feel degraded, like ordinary beings.

But it is the same with man as with the tree. The more he seeketh to rise into the height and light, the more vigorously do his roots struggle earthward, downward, into the dark and deep into the evil.

When we have to change our mind about a person, we hold the inconvenience he causes us very much against him.

Today as always, men fall into two groups: slaves and free men. Whoever does not have two-thirds of his day for himself, is a slave, whatever he may be: a statesman, a businessman, an official, or a scholar.

The great works are produced in such an ecstasy of love that they must always be unworthy of it, however great their worth otherwise.

The deeper minds of all ages have had pity for animals.

Without music, life would be a mistake.

We labour at our daily work more ardently and thoughtlessly than is necessary to sustain our life because it is even more necessary not to have leisure to stop and think. Haste is universal because everyone is in flight from himself.

When you look into an abyss, the abyss also looks into you.

Every profound spirit needs a mask.

Mediocrity is the most effective mask a superior spirit can wear, because to the great majority, which is to say, to the mediocre,it will not suggest a disguise:--and yet it is precisely for their sake that he puts it on--so as not to arouse them, and, indeed, not infrequently to avoid this out of pity and benevolence.

The best weapon against an enemy is another enemy.

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

By losing your goal, You have lost your way.

What, if some day or night a demon were to steal after you into your loneliest loneliness and say to you: 'This life as you now live it and have lived it, you will have to live once more and innumerable times more' ... Would you not throw yourself down and gnash your teeth and curse the demon who spoke thus? Or have you once experienced a tremendous moment when you would have answered him: 'You are a god and never have I heard anything more divine.

The 'kingdom of Heaven' is a condition of the heart - not something that comes 'upon the earth' or 'after death.'

When self control is lacking in small things, the ability to apply it to matters of importance withers away. Every day in which one does not at least deny himself some trifle is badly spent and a threat to the day following.

Morality is the herd-instinct in the individual.

Convictions are more dangerous enemies of truth than lies.Courageous, untroubled, mocking and violent-that is what Wisdom wants us to be. Wisdom is a woman, and loves only a warrior.

Ultimately, it is the desire, not the desired, that we love.

Become who you are!

In truth,there was only one christian and he died on the cross.

It is nobler to declare oneself wrong than to insist on being right --especially when one is right.

What is wrong with Christianity is that it refrains from doing all those things that Christ commanded should be done.

If you want me to believe in your redeemer, you are going to have to look a lot more redeemed.

Convictions are more dangerous foes of truth than lies.

What is evil?-Whatever springs from weakness.

There is not enough love and goodness in the world to permit giving any of it away to imaginary beings.

Socialism is the phantastic younger brother of despotism, which it wants to inherit. Socialism wants to have the fullness of state force which before only existed in despotism. ... However, it goes further than anything in the past because it aims at the formal destruction of the individual ... who ... can be used to improve communities by an expedient organ of government.

Beware of spitting against the wind!

No artist tolerates reality.

Deep is the well of truth and long does it take to know what has fallen into its depths.

But thus I counsel you, my friends: Mistrust all in whom the impulse to punish is powerful. They are people of a low sort and stock; the hangmen and the bloodhound look out of their faces. Mistrust all who talk much of their justice! Verily, their souls lack more than honey. And when they call themselves the good and the just, do not forget that they would be pharisees, if only they had-power.

One should steal only where one cannot rob.

The lie is a condition of life.

After coming into contact with a religious man I always feel I must wash my hands.

Deception, flattering, lying, deluding, talking behind the back, putting up a false front, living in borrowed splendor, wearing a mask, hiding behind convention, playing a role for others and for oneself -- in short, a continuous fluttering around the solitary flame of vanity -- is so much the rule and the law among men that there is almost nothing which is less comprehensible than how an honest and pure drive for truth could have arisen among them.

One who is always deeply involved in what he is doing is above all embarrassment.

What we do is never understood, but always merely praised or blamed.

The strong individual loves the earth so much he lusts for recurrence. He can smile in the face of the most terrible thought: meaningless, aimless existence recurring eternally. The second characteristic of such a man is that he has the strength to recognize - and to live with the recognition - that the world is valueless in itself and that all values are human ones. He creates himself by fashioning his own values; he has the pride to live by the values he wills.

Madness is not a consequence of uncertainty but of certainty.

Your soul will be dead even before your body: fear nothing further.

I go in solitude, so as not to drink out of everybody's cistern. When I am among the many I live as the many do, and I do not think I really think; after a time it always seems as if they want to banish myself from myself and rob me of my soul.

To one who is accustomed to thinking a lot, every new thought that he hears or reads about immediately appears as a link in a chain.

We hear only those questions for which we are in a position to find answers.

Fear is the mother of morality.

At the beginning of a marriage ask yourself whether this woman will be interesting to talk to from now until old age. Everything else in marriage is transitory: most of the time is spent in conversation.

But this people has deliberately made itself stupid, for nearly a millennium: nowhere have the two great European narcotics, alcohol and Christianity, been abused more dissolutely.

In a certain state it is indecent to live longer.

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.

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

Belief in truth begins with doubting all that has hitherto been believed to be true.

What convinces is not necessarily true-it is merely convincing: a note for asses.

the voice of beauty speaks softly; it creeps only into the most fully awakened souls

To live alone one must be a beast or a god, says Aristotle. Leaving out the third case: one must be both - a philosopher.

One must renounce the bad taste of wishing to agree with many people.

Two great European narcotics, alcohol and Christianity.

There is nothing more necessary than truth, and in comparison with it everything else has only secondary value. This absolute will to truth: what is it? Is it the will to not allow ourselves to be deceived? Is it the will not to deceive? One does not want to be deceived, under the supposition that it is injurious, dangerous, or fatal to be deceived.

Faith: not wanting to know what is true.

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

The best friend will probably acquire the best wife, because a good marriage is founded on the talent for friendship.

My idea of paradise is a straight line to goal

What was silent in the father speaks in the son, and often I found in the son the unveiled secret of the father.

Every achievement, every step forward in knowledge, is the consequence of courage, of toughness towards oneself, of sincerity to oneself

Ah, women. They make the highs higher and the lows more frequent.

There is one thing one has to have either a soul that is cheerful by nature, or a soul made cheerful by work, love, art, and knowledge.

Those who cannot understand how to put their thoughts on ice should not enter into the heat of debate.

Everyone needs a sense of shame, but no one needs to feel ashamed.

He has drawn back, only in order to have enough room for his leap

On every parable you ride to every truth.

Death is close enough at hand so we do not need to be afraid of life.

The most intelligent men, like the strongest, find their happiness where others would find only disaster: in the labyrinth, in being hard with themselves and with others, in effort; their delight is self-mastery; in them asceticism becomes second nature, a necessity, as instinct.

Sometimes it is harder to accede to a thing than it is to see its truth.

There exists above the "productive" man a yet higher species.

For a tree to become tall it must grow tough roots among the rocks.

Creating-that is the great salvation from suffering.

I love the great despisers because they are the great adorers.

It is not when truth is dirty, but when it is shallow, that the lover of knowledge is reluctant to step into its waters.

The man of knowledge must be able not only to love his enemies but also to hate his friends.

The growth of wisdom may be gauged exactly by the diminution of ill-temper.

Extreme positions are not succeeded by moderate ones but by extreme positions of the opposite kind.

I know my fate. One day my name will be associated with the memory of something tremendous a crisis without equal on earth, the most profound collision of conscience, a decision that was conjured up against everything that had been believed, demanded, hallowed so far. I am no man, I am dynamite.

Success has always been a great liar.

Most people are too stupid to act in their own interest

A very popular error: having the courage of one's convictions; rather it is a matter of having the courage for an attack on one's convictions.

What is the seal of liberation? Not to be ashamed in front of oneself.

The man who does not wish to be one of the mass only needs to cease to be easy on himself.

"Belief in the truth commences with the doubting of all those "truths" we once believed."

One man runs to his neighbor because he is looking for himself, and another because he wants to loose himself. Your bad love of yourselves makes solitude a prison for you.

But he who is hated by the people, as the wolf by the dogs - is the free spirit, the enemy of fetters, the non-adorer, the dweller in the woods.

The visionary lies to himself, the liar only to others.

Cynicism is the only form in which base souls approach honesty.

Most thinkers write badly, because they communicate not only their thoughts, but also the thinking of them.

It is the business of the very few to be independent; it is a privilege of the strong.

A moral system valid for all is basically immoral.

I am opposed to socialism because it dreams ingenuously of good, truth, beauty, and equal rights.

Cows sometimes wear an expression resembling wonderment arrested on its way to becoming a question. In the eye of superior intelligence, on the other hand, lies the nil admirari spread out like the monotony of a cloudless sky.

Perhaps I know best why it is man alone who laughs; he alone suffers so deeply that he had to invent laughter.

Freedom is the will to be responsible for ourselves. It is to preserve the distance which separates us from other men. To grow more indifferent to hardship, to severity, to privation, and even to life itself.

Sit as little as possible. Give no credence to any thought that

was not born outdoors while moving about freely.

Morality is neither rational nor absolute nor natural. World has known many moral systems, each of which advances claims universality; all moral systems are therefore particular, serving a specific purpose for their propagators or creators, and enforcing a certain regime that disciplines human beings for social life by narrowing our perspectives and limiting our horizons.

I hate who steals my solitude, without really offer me in exchange company.

There is an old illusion. It is called good and evil.

A woman may very well form a friendship with a man, but for this to endure, it must be assisted by a little physical antipathy.

Untroubled, scornful, outrageous - that is how wisdom wants us to be: she is a woman and never loves anyone but a warrior.

Error has made man so deep, sensitive, and inventive that he has put forth such blossoms as religions and arts. Pure knowledge could not have been capable of it.

I climb upon the highest mountains, laughing at all tragedies - whether real or imaginary.

The man loves danger and sport. That is why he loves woman, the most dangerous of all sports.

To have and to want more that is life.

Original minds are not distinguished by being the first to see a new thing, but instead by seeing the old, familiar thing that is over-looked as something new.

When a hundred men stand together, each of them loses his mind and gets another one.

Our faith in others betrays that we would rather have faith in ourselves. Our longing for a friend is our betrayer. And often with our love we want merely to overcome envy. And often we attack and make ourselves enemies, to conceal that we are vulnerable.

Our salvation lies not in knowing, but in creating!

We do not hate as long as we still attach a lesser value, but only when we attach an equal or a greater value.

Marriage was contrived for ordinary people, for people who are capable of neither great love nor great friendship, which is to say, for most people--but also for those exceptionally rare ones who are capable of love as well as of friendship.

Every step forward is made at the cost of mental and physical pain to someone.

... art approaches as a saving sorceress, expert at healing. She alone knows how to turn these nauseous thoughts about the horror or absurdity of existence into notions with which one can live.

My formula for greatness in a human being is amor fati: that one wants nothing to be other than it is, not in the future, not in the past, not in all eternity.

You must climb above yourself-up and beyond, until you have even your stars under you.

You lack the courage to be consumed in flames and to become ashes: so you will never become new, and never young again!

Shared joys make a friend, not shared sufferings.

The more you let yourself go, the less others let you go.

Every man has his price. This is not true. But for every man there exists a bait which he cannot resist swallowing.

Whatever harm the evil may do, the harm done by the good is the most harmful harm.

Profundity of thought belongs to youth, clarity of thought to old age.

Even truthfulness is but one means to knowledge, a ladder--but not the ladder.

Is life not a thousand times too short for us to bore ourselves?

What makes us heroic?--Confronting simultaneously our supreme suffering and our supreme hope.