When good friends praise a gifted person he often appears to be delighted with them out of politeness and goodwill, but in reality he feels indifferent.
The man of the future who will redeem us not only from the hitherto reigning ideal but also from that which was bound to grow out of it, the great nausea, the will to nothingness, nihilism; this bell stroke of noon and of the great decision that liberates the will again and restores its goal to the earth and his hope to man; this Antichrist and anti-nihilist; this victor over God and nothingness - he must come one day.
The unlucky hand dealt to clear and precise writers is that people assume they are superficial and so do not go to any trouble inreading them: and the lucky hand dealt to unclear ones is that the reader does go to some trouble and then attributes the pleasure he experiences in his own zeal to them.
Mathematics would certainly have not come into existence if one had known from the beginning that there was in nature no exactly straight line, no actual circle, no absolute magnitude.
We must beware of one who is in a passion against us as of one who has once sought our life; for the fact that we still live is due to the absence of power to kill, - if looks could kill, we should have been dead long ago.
The beating of drums, which delights young writers who serve a party, sounds to him who does not belong to the party line like a rattling of chains, and excites sympathy rather than admiration.
Really unreflective people are now inwardly without Christianity, and the more moderate and reflective people of the intellectual middle class now possess only an adapted, that is to say marvelously simplified Christianity. A god who in his love arranges everything in a manner that in the end will be best for us; a god who gives to us and takes from us our virtue and our happiness, so that as a whole all is meet and fit and there is no reason for us to take life sadly, let alone exclaim against it; in short, resignation and modest demands elevated to godhead
All that the world most needs today, is combined in the most seductive manner in his art, — the three great stimulants of exhausted people: brutality, artificiality and innocence (idiocy).