Pity is the most pleasant feeling in those who have not much pride and have no prospect of great conquests; for them the easy prey - and that is what all who suffer are - is enchanting.
The strength required for the vision of the most powerful reality is not only compatible with the most powerful strength for action, for monstrous action, for crime - it even presupposes it.
Instruments and playthings are sense and spirit: behind them there is still the Self. The Self seeketh with the eyes of the senses, it hearkeneth also with the ears of the spirit.
There are no limits to God's compassion with Paradises over their one universally felt want: he immediately created other animals besides. God's first blunder: Man didn't find the animals amusing, - he dominated them and didn't even want to be an 'animal.'
I too have been in the underworld, as was Odysseus, and I will often be there again; not only sheep have I sacrificed so as to beable to speak with a few dead souls, but neither have I spared my own blood as well.
Christianity in particular should be dubbed a great treasure-chamber of ingenious consolations, such a store of refreshing, soothing, deadening drugs has it accumulated within itself.
I do not know what the spirit of a philosopher could more wish to be than a good dancer. For the dance is his ideal, also his fine art, finally also the only kind of piety he knows, his 'divine service.'