Great Quotes

Some people appear to be more meager in talent than they are, just because the tasks they set themselves are always too great.

In the end things must be as they are and have always been - the great things remain for the great, the abysses for the profound, the delicacies and thrills for the refined, and, to sum up shortly, everything rare for the rare.

Great intellects are skeptical.

I love the great despisers because they are the great adorers.

All great men are play actors of their own ideal.

Oh great star! What would your happiness be if you did not have us to shine for?

Even great spirits have only their five-fingers' breadth of experience - just beyond it their thinking ceases and their endless empty space and stupidity begins.

Mankind must work continually to produce individual great human beings-this and nothing else is the task... for the question is this: How can your life, the individual life, retain the highest value, the deepest significance? Only by living for the good of the rarest and most valuable specimens.

Hope, in its stronger forms, is a great deal more powerful stimulans to life than any sort of realized joy can ever be.

The errors of great men are venerable because they are more fruitful than the truths of little men.

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 governments of the great States have two instruments for keeping the people dependent, in fear and obedience: a coarser, the army; and a more refined, the school.

Giving style to one's character-a great and rare art! It is exercised by those who see all the strengths and weaknesses of their own natures and then comprehend them in an artistic plan until everything appears as art and reason and even weakness delights the eye.

The parasites live where the great have little secret sores.

Species do not grow more perfect: the weaker dominate the strong, again and again-the reason being that they are the great majority, and they are also cleverer. Darwin forgot the mind (- that is English!): the weak possess more mind. ... To acquire mind, one must need mind-one loses it when one no longer needs it.

The distinction that lies in being unhappy (as if to feel happy were a sign of shallowness, lack of ambition, ordinariness) is so great that when someone says, "But how happy you must be!" we usually protest.

I do not want to believe it although it is palpable: the great majority of people lack an intellectual conscience. Indeed, it has often seemed to me as if anyone calling for an intellectual conscience were as lonely in the most densely populated cities as if he were in a desert.

The great majority of people does not consider it contemptible to believe this or that and to live accordingly, without first having given themselves an account of the final and most certain reasons pro and con, and without even troubling themselves about such reasons afterward: the most gifted men and the noblest women still belong to this great majority.

The truly great haters in the world history have always been priests; likewise the most ingenious haters: other kinds of spirit hardly come into consideration when compared with the spirit of priestly vengefulness.

The God that Paul invented for himself, a God who reduced to absurdity the wisdom of this world (especially the two great enemies of superstition, philology and medicine), is in truth only an indication of Paul's resolute determination to accomplish that very thing himself: to give one's own will the name of God, Torah - that is essentially Jewish.