And he who would not languish among men, must learn to drink out of all glasses; and he who would keep clean among men, must know how to wash himself even with dirty water.

— Friedrich Nietzsche

And how does one basically recognize good development? In that a well-developed man does our senses good: that he is carved from wood which is hard, delicate, and sweet-smelling, all at the same time.

— Friedrich Nietzsche

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?

— Friedrich Nietzsche

And that discovery would betray the closely guarded secret of modern culture to the laughter of the world. For we moderns have nothing of our own. We only become worth notice by filling ourselves to overflowing with foreign customs, arts, philosophies, religions and sciences: we are wandering encyclopedias, as an ancient Greek who had strayed into our time would probably call us. But the only value of an encyclopaedia lies in the inside, in the contents, not in what is written outside, in the binding or the wrapper. And so the whole of modern culture is essentially internal; the bookbinder prints something like this on the cover: “Manual of internal culture for external barbarians.” The opposition of inner and outer makes the outer side still more barbarous, as it would naturally be, when the outward growth of a rude people merely developed its primitive inner needs. For what means has nature of repressing too great a luxuriance from without? Only one, —to be affected by it as little as possible, to set it aside and stamp it out at the first opportunity. And so we have the custom of no longer taking real things seriously, we get the feeble personality on which the real and the permanent make so little impression. Men become at last more careless and accommodating in external matters, and the [Pg 34] considerable cleft between substance and form is widened; until they have no longer any feeling for barbarism, if only their memories be kept continually titillated, and there flow a constant stream of new things to be known, that can be neatly packed up in the cupboards of their memory.

— Friedrich Nietzsche

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

— Friedrich Nietzsche

And we should consider every day lost on which we have not danced at least once. And we should call every truth false which was not accompanied by at least one laugh.

— Friedrich Nietzsche

And when he invented his hell, that was his heaven on earth.

— Friedrich Nietzsche

[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.

— Friedrich Nietzsche

A pair of powerful spectacles has sometimes sufficed to cure a person in love.

— Friedrich Nietzsche

A politician divides mankind into two classes: tools and enemies.

— Friedrich Nietzsche