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

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

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

One ought to hold on to one's heart; for if one lets it go, one soon loses control of the head too.

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

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

The spiritualization of sensuality is called love: it is a great triumph over Christianity.

Love, too, has to be learned.

Love brings to light a lover's noble and hidden qualities-his rare and exceptional traits: it is thus liable to be deceptive of his normal qualities.

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

Art is the proper task of life.

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

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

There is a certain right by which we many deprive a man of life, but none by which we may deprive him of death; this is mere cruelty.

Without music, life would be a mistake.

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

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

He who would learn to fly one day must first learn to walk and run and climb and dance; one cannot fly into flying.

It is hard enough to remember my opinions, without also remembering my reasons for them!

A joke is an epigram on the death of a feeling.

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

I would believe only in a God that knows how to dance.

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

Madness is something rare in individuals — but in groups, parties, peoples, and ages, it is the rule.

I am one thing, my writings are another.

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

If a man has character, he has also his typical experience, which always recurs.

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

One has to take a somewhat bold and dangerous line with this existence: especially as, whatever happens, we are bound to lose it.

I have forgotten my umbrella.

As soon as a religion comes to dominate it has as its opponents all those who would have been its first disciples.

The maturity of man—that means, to have reacquired the seriousness that one had as a child at play

The most common sort of lie is that by which a man deceives himself: the deception of others is a relatively rare offense.

You say, it's dark. And in truth, I did place a cloud before your sun. But do you not see how the edges of the cloud are already glowing and turning light.

A nation is a detour of nature to arrive at five or six great men- yes, and then to get around them.

You may lie with your mouth, but with the mouth you make as you do so you none the less tell the truth.

There have been two great narcotics in European civilisation: Christianity and alcohol.

In some remote corner of the universe, poured out and glittering among innumerable solar systems, there once was a star on which clever animals invented knowledge.

I tell you: one must still have chaos in oneself to give birth to a dancing star. I tell you: you still have chaos in yourselves.

The good men of every age are those who go to the roots of the old thoughts and bear fruit with them.

Man is no longer an artist, he has become a work of art.

It was a subtle refinement of God to learn Greek when he wished to write a book – and that he did not learn it better.

The Church today is more likely to alienate than to seduce...

There are no facts, only interpretations.

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.

No one dies of fatal truths nowadays: there are too many antidotes.

How much truth does a spirit endure, how much truth does it dare?

Belief means not wanting to know what is true.

What are man's truths ultimately? Merely his irrefutable errors.

There is no pre-established harmony between the furtherance of truth and the well-being of mankind.

This workshop where ideals are manufactured--it seems to me it stinks of so many lies

Representatives of truth. The champions of truth are hardest to find, not when it is dangerous to tell it, but rather when it is boring.

You look up when you wish to be exalted. And I look down because I am exalted.

Sensuality often hastens the "Growth of Love" so much that the roots remain weak and are easily torn up.

Poets are shameless with their experiences: they exploit them.

We talk so abstractly about poetry because all of us are usually bad poets.

The minds of others I know well;But who I am I cannot tell

Let us beware of saying that death is the opposite of life. The living being is only a species of the dead, and a very rare species.

The advantage of a bad memory is that one enjoys several times the same good things for the first time.

But I need solitude--which is to say, recovery, return to myself, the breath of a free, light, playful air.

Man does not strive for happiness; only the Englishman does that.

One thing a man must have: either a naturally light disposition or a disposition lightened by art and knowledge.

Happiness: being able to forget or, to express in a more learned fashion.

Since I grew weary of the searchI taught myself to find insteadSince cross winds caused my ship to lurchI sail with all winds straight ahead.

To what end do the trees of a virgin forest contend with each other? "For happiness"? - For power! ...

Morality is just a fiction used by the herd of inferior human beings to hold back the few superior men.

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

A casual stroll through the lunatic asylum shows that faith does not prove anything.

At times one remains faithful to a cause only because its opponents do not cease to be insipid.

Every characteristic absence of spirituality, every piece of common vulgarity, is due to an inability to resist a stimulus - you have to react, you follow every impulse.

In heaven, all the interesting people are missing.

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

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

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

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

Two great European narcotics, alcohol and Christianity.

The believer in magic and miracles reflects on how to impose a law on nature--: and, in brief, the religious cult is the outcome of this reflection.

Fanatics are picturesque, mankind would rather see gestures than listen to reasons.

The main concern of all great religions has been to fight a certain weariness and heaviness grown to epidemic proportions.

What good is all this free-thinking, modernity, and turncoat flexibility if at some gut level you are still a Christian, a Catholic, and even a priest!

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

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

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

one does not only wish to be understood when one writes; one wishes just as surely not to be understood.

It is not the strength, but the duration, of great sentiments that makes great men.

Glance into the world just as though time were gone: and everything crooked will become straight to you.

Deeds need time, even after they are done, in order to be seen or heard.

None of the people have any real interest in a science, who only begin to be enthusiastic about it when they themselves have made discoveries in it.

It is not the victory of science that distinguishes our nineteenth century, but the victory of scientific method over science.

As for these celebrated victories of science, there is no doubt that they are victories. But victories over what?

Knowledge kills action; action requires the veils of illusion.

Against positivism, which halts at phenomena—"There are only facts"—I would say: No, facts is precisely what there is not, only interpretations.

One no longer loves one's knowledge sufficiently after one has communicated it.