This accident is not a misfortune, but bearing it well turns it to an advantage.
Collections
The German Mind
Goethe, Schopenhauer, Nietzsche, Heine, Kant — formation, will, and the long sentence.
What is important in life is life, and not the result of life.
One lives but once in the world.
Art is long, life short; judgment difficult, opportunity transient.
If you assign people duties without granting them any rights, you must pay them well.
One never goes so far as when one doesn't know where one is going.
Whatever you can do or dream you can, begin it. Boldness has genius, power and magic in it.
Knowing is not enough; we must apply. Willing is not enough; we must do.
Girls we love for what they are; young men for what they promise to be.
The human race is a monotonous affair. Most people spend the greatest part of their time working in order to live, and what little freedom remains so fills them with fear that they seek out any and every means to be rid of it.
The world is so empty if one thinks only of mountains, rivers and cities; but to know someone here and there who thinks and feels with us, and though distant, is close to us in spirit — this makes the earth for us an inhabited garden.
A man sees in the world what he carries in his heart.
None are more hopelessly enslaved than those who falsely believe they are free.
If your abilities are only mediocre, modesty is mere honesty; but if you possess great talents, it is hypocrisy.
Because people have no thoughts to deal in, they deal cards, and try to win one another's money. Idiots!
Each day is a little life: every waking and rising a little birth, every fresh morning a little youth, every going to rest and sleep a little death.
Sleep is the interest we have to pay on the capital which is called in at death; and the higher the rate of interest and the more regularly it is paid, the further the date of redemption is postponed.
Every person takes the limits of their own field of vision for the limits of the world.
The wise have always said the same things, and fools, who are the majority, have always done just the opposite.
Books are like a mirror. If an ass looks in, you can't expect an angel to look out.
No rose without a thorn. But many a thorn without a rose.
No man ought to expect much from others, or, in general, from the external world. What one human being can be to another is not a very great deal: in the end everyone stands alone, and the important thing is who it is that stands alone.
You are free to do what you want, but you are not free to want what you want.
A man can be himself only so long as he is alone; and if he does not love solitude, he will not love freedom; for it is only when he is alone that he is really free.
Compassion is the basis of morality.
One must still have chaos in oneself to be able to give birth to a dancing star.
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.
People in those old times had convictions; we moderns only have opinions. And it needs more than a mere opinion to erect a Gothic cathedral.
Science is organized knowledge. Wisdom is organized life.
Act only according to that maxim whereby you can at the same time will that it should become a universal law.
Two things fill the mind with ever new and increasing admiration and awe: the starry heavens above me and the moral law within me.
Dare to know! Have the courage to use your own understanding.
The amount of noise that anyone can bear undisturbed stands in inverse proportion to his mental capacity.
Time is that in which all things pass away.
Men are the devils of the earth, and the animals are the tormented souls.