When Zarathustra was alone . . . he said to his heart: "Could it be possible! This old saint in the forest hath not yet heard of it, that God is dead!"
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.
Buddha says: "Do not flatter your benefactor!". Let one repeat this saying in a Christian church : it immediately purifies the air of everything Christian.
One must never have spared oneself, one must have acquired hardness as a habit to be cheerful and in good spirits in the midst of nothing but hard truths.
On all the walls, wherever walls exist, I will inscribe this eternal indictment of Christianity--I have letters to make even blindmen see.... I call Christianity the single great curse, the single great innermost depravity, the single great instinct of revenge, for which no means is poisonous, secretive, subterranean, small enough--I call it mankind's single immortal blemish.... And we reckon time from the dies nefastus with which this calamity arose--following Christianity's first day!--Why not following its last day, instead?--Following today?--Transvaluation of all values!
Intoxicating joy is it for the sufferer to look away from his suffering and forget himself. Intoxicating joy and self-forgetting, did the world once seem to me.