The noble caste was in the beginning always the barbarian caste: their superiority lay, not in their physical strength, but primarily in their psychical - they were more complete human beings.
The best of all things is something entirely outside your grasp: not to be born, not to be, to be nothing. But the second-best thing for you - is to die soon.
Not infrequently, we encounter copies of important human beings; and here, too, as in the case of paintings, most people prefer the copies to the originals.
What is originality? To see something that is as yet without a name, that is as yet impossible to designate, even though it staresus in the face. The way it usually is with people, it is a thing's name that makes it perceptible to them in the first place.--For the most part, the original ones have also been the name-givers.
God is Dead; but given the way of men, there may still be caves for thousands of years in which his shadow will be shown. And we - we still have to vanquish his shadow, too.
In the 'in-itself' there is nothing of 'causal connections', of 'necessity', or of 'psychological non-freedom'; there the effect does not follow the cause, there is no rule or 'law'. It is we alone who have devised cause, sequence, for-each-other, relativity, constraint, number, law, freedom, motive, and purpose; and when we project and mix this symbol world into things as if it existed 'in itself', we act once more as we have always acted- mythologically.
The most spiritual human beings, assuming they are the most courageous, also experience by far the most painful tragedies: but it is precisely for this reason that they honor life, because it brings against them its most formidable weapons.
Man, full of emptiness and torn apart with homesickness for the desert has had to create from within himself an adventure, a torture-chamber, an unsafe and hazardous wilderness- this fool, this prisoner consumed with longing and despair, became the inventor of 'bad conscience'.
Those are my enemies: they want to overthrow and to construct nothing themselves. They say: "All that is worthless"--and want to create no value themselves.