8 Quotes by Nietszche

After coming into contact with a religious man I always feel I must wash my hands.

What the sense feels, what the spirit perceives, is never an end in itself. But sense and spirit would like to persuade you that they are the end of all things: they are as vain as that.

One chooses logical argument only when one has no other means. One knows that one arouses mistrust with it, that it is not very persuasive. Nothing is easier to nullify than a logical argument: the tedium of long speeches proves this. It is a kind of self-defense for those who no longer have other weapons. Unless one has to insist on what is already one's right, there is no use for it. The Jews were argumentative for that reason; Reynard the Fox also — and Socrates too?

There is no more insidious error than mistaking the effect for the cause: I call it the real corruption of reason. Yet this error is one of the most unchanging habits of mankind: we even worship it under the name of "religion" or "morality." Every single principle from religion or morality contains it;

Might it not be the case that that extremely foolhardy and fateful philosophical invention, first devised for Europe, of the ‘free will’, of man’s absolute freedom [Spontaneität] to do good or evil, was chiefly thought up to justify the idea that the interest of the gods in man, in man’s virtue, could never be exhausted?

I tell you: one must still have chaos in one, to give birth to a dancing star. I tell you: ye have still chaos in you.

What actually arouses indignation over suffering is not the suffering itself, but the senselessness of suffering:

I do not like the New Testament, you have worked that out by now; it almost disturbs me to be so very isolated in my taste regarding this most valued, over-valued work (the taste of two millenia is against me): but it is no use! ‘Here I stand, I can do no other’, – I have the courage of my bad taste. The Old Testament – well, that is something quite different: every respect for the Old Testament!