One must still have chaos in oneself to be able to give birth to a dancing star.
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Against the Crowd
The minority report: Kierkegaard, Mencken, Tocqueville, Ibsen's cousins in spirit.
I do not want to wage war against what is ugly. I do not want to accuse; I do not even want to accuse those who accuse. Looking away shall be my only negation. And all in all and on the whole: some day I wish only to be a Yes-sayer.
Mature manhood: that means to have rediscovered the seriousness one had as a child at play.
There are no moral phenomena at all, only a moral interpretation of phenomena.
The higher we soar the smaller we appear to those who cannot fly.
Hope in reality is the worst of all evils because it prolongs the torments of man.
Is not life a hundred times too short for us to bore ourselves?
That which is done out of love always takes place beyond good and evil.
What does your conscience say? — You shall become the person you are.
What makes one heroic? — Going out to meet at the same time one's highest suffering and one's highest hope.
The secret of realizing the greatest fruitfulness and the greatest enjoyment of existence is: to live dangerously!
He who has a why to live can bear almost any how.
The state has never any concern with truth, but only with the truth useful to it, or rather, with anything that is useful to it, be it truth, half-truth, or error.
I live in my own place, have never copied nobody even half, and at any master who lacks the grace to laugh at himself — I laugh.
What is good? All that heightens the feeling of power, the will to power, power itself in man.
Without music, life would be a mistake.
The individual has always had to struggle to keep from being overwhelmed by the tribe.
In individuals, insanity is rare; but in groups, parties, nations and epochs, it is the rule.
We are in great haste to construct a magnetic telegraph from Maine to Texas; but Maine and Texas, it may be, have nothing important to communicate.
Men are born to succeed, not to fail.
Be true to your work, your word, and your friend.
Dreams are the touchstones of our character.
Go confidently in the direction of your dreams. Live the life you have imagined.
I love to be alone. I have never found a companion that was so companionable as solitude.
A man is rich in proportion to the number of things he can afford to let alone.
To a philosopher all news, as it is called, is gossip, and they who edit and read it are old women over their tea.
The man who goes alone can start today; but he who travels with another must wait till that other is ready.
If a man does not keep pace with his companions, perhaps it is because he hears a different drummer. Let him step to the music which he hears, however measured or far away.
Men have become the tools of their tools.
The price of anything is the amount of life you exchange for it.
It's not what you look at that matters, it's what you see.
The mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation.
Rather than love, than money, than fame, give me truth.
Every decent man is ashamed of the government he lives under.
Every normal man must be tempted, at times, to spit on his hands, hoist the black flag, and begin slitting throats.
The most dangerous man to any government is the man who is able to think things out for himself, without regard to the prevailing superstitions and taboos.
The urge to save humanity is almost always a false front for the urge to rule.
For every complex problem there is an answer that is clear, simple, and wrong.
Government is actually the worst failure of civilized man. There has never been a really good one, and even those that are most tolerable are arbitrary, cruel, grasping, and unintelligent.
The whole aim of practical politics is to keep the populace alarmed (and hence clamorous to be led to safety) by menacing it with an endless series of hobgoblins, most of them imaginary.
The average man doesn't want to be free. He simply wants to be safe.
Democracy is a pathetic belief in the collective wisdom of individual ignorance.
The penalty for laughing in a courtroom is six months in jail; if it were not for this penalty, the jury would never hear the evidence.
Life can only be understood backwards; but it must be lived forwards.
Life is not a problem to be solved, but a reality to be experienced.
Above all, do not lose your desire to walk. Every day I walk myself into a state of well-being and walk away from every illness. I have walked myself into my best thoughts.
The function of prayer is not to influence God, but rather to change the nature of the one who prays.
The only intelligent tactical response to life's horror is to laugh defiantly at it.
Marry, and you will regret it; don't marry, you will also regret it; marry or don't marry, you will regret it either way.
A fire broke out backstage in a theatre. The clown came out to warn the public; they thought it was a joke and applauded. He repeated it; the acclaim was even greater. I think that's just how the world will come to an end: to general applause from wits who believe it's a joke.
If I were a father and had a daughter who became a prostitute, I should not despair over her; I would continue to hope for her salvation. But if I had a son who became a journalist and continued to be one for five years, I would give him up.
Anxiety is the dizziness of freedom.
The most common form of despair is not being who you are.
People demand freedom of speech as a compensation for the freedom of thought which they seldom use.
I know of no country in which there is so little independence of mind and real freedom of discussion as in America.
The majority possesses a power that is physical and moral at the same time, which acts upon the will as well as upon the actions, and represses not only all contest, but all controversy.
Americans are so enamored of equality that they would rather be equal in slavery than unequal in freedom.
The health of a democratic society may be measured by the quality of functions performed by private citizens.
All zoos actually offer to the public is a form of idle and witless amusement, compared to which a visit to a penitentiary, or even to a State legislature in session, is informing, stimulating and ennobling.