Borrowed From Nietzsche Quotes

A stumbling block to the pessimist is a stepping-stone to the optimist. ~ Eleanor Roosevelt

I think the best life would be one that's lived off the grid. No bills, your name in no government databases. No real proof you're even who you say you are, aside from, you know, being who you say you are. I don't mean living in a mountain hut with solar power and drinking well water. I think nature's beautiful and all, but I don't have any desire to live in it. I need to live in a city. I need pay as you go cell phones in fake names, wireless access stolen or borrowed from coffee shops and people using old or no encryption on their home networks. Taking knife fighting classes on the weekend! Learning Cantonese and Hindi and how to pick locks. Getting all sorts of skills so that when your mind starts going, and you're a crazy raving bum, at least you're picking their pockets while raving in a foreign language at smug college kids on the street. At least you're always gonna be able to eat. ~ Joey Comeau

Aureliano Segundo was deep in the reading of a book. Although it had no cover and the title did not appear anywhere, the boy enjoyed the story of a woman who sat at a table and ate nothing but kernels of rice, which she picked up with a pin, and the story of the fisherman who borrowed a weight for his net from a neighbor and when he gave him a fish in payment later it had a diamond in its stomach, and the one about the lamp that fulfilled wishes and about flying carpets. Surprised, he asked Ursula if all that was true and she answered him that it was, that many years ago the gypsies had brought magic lamps and flying mats to Macondo.
"What's happening," she sighed, "is that the world is slowly coming to an end and those things don't come here any more. ~ Gabriel Garcia Marquez

Is a picture really worth a thousand words? What thousand words? A thousand words from a lunatic, or a thousand words from Nietzsche? Actually, Nietzsche was a lunatic, but you see my point. What about a thousand words from a rambler vs. 500 words from Mark Twain? He could say the same thing quicker and with more force than almost any other writer. One thousand words from Ginsberg are not even worth one from Wilde. It's wild to declare the equivalency of any picture with any army of 1,000 words. Words from a writer like Wordsworth make you appreciate what words are worth. ~ Jarod Kintz

I know what those who want to interrupt the beneficent, healthy sleep of the people really want. They constantly cry to the people: 'Wake up! Become conscious! Be smart!' - and even as they pretend that the extraordinary increase in the number of schools, and the creation of a proud class of teachers in consequence, satisfies a powerful need for education, I know their real goal. They are fighting, and this is how they fight, against the natural hierarchy in the empire of the intellect; they seek to destroy the roots of the highest and noblest cultural powers that, bursting forth from the popular unconscious, have a maternal destiny: to give birth to, raise, and nurture genius. ~ Friedrich Nietzsche

see the building after work. It was a perfect night with stars and a full moon just above the trees, which he took to be a sign. 'I felt so happy,' he recalls. 'My dream was coming true.' Naeem and my father invested their entire savings of 60,000 rupees. They borrowed 30,000 rupees more to repaint the building, rented a shack across the road to live in and went from door to door trying to find students. Unfortunately ~ Malala Yousafzai

You have made your way from worm to man, and much in you is still worm. ~ Friedrich Nietzsche

Our most sacred convictions, those which are permanent in us concerning the highest values, are judgments emanating from our muscles. ~ Friedrich Nietzsche

It is not their love for men, rather it is the impotence of their love that hinders Christians of today from burning us. ~ Friedrich Nietzsche

In my fiction, there's a lot that's borrowed from music. It's never like I'm taking a lyric, but more the mood of a particular song. 'The Boy Detective Fails' was like listening to 'Eleanor Rigby' by The Beatles, this very melancholy-but-poppy song. ~ Joe Meno

Every select man strives instinctively for a citadel and a privacy, where he is FREE from the crowd, the many, the majority
where he may forget "men who are the rule," as their exception;
exclusive only of the case in which he is pushed straight to such men by a still stronger instinct, as a discerner in the great and exceptional sense. ~ Friedrich Nietzsche

Time and again the two Jedi Knights attempted to alter their style, but Vader had an answer for every lunge, parry, and riposte. His style borrowed elements from all techniques of combat, even from the highest, most dangerous levels, and his moves were crisp and unpredictable. In addition, his remarkable foresight allowed him to anticipate Forte's and Kulka's strategies and maneuvers, his blade always one step ahead of theirs, notwithstanding the two-handed grip he employed. ~ James Luceno

The public easily confuses him who fishes in troubled waters with him who draws up water from the depths. ~ Friedrich Nietzsche

Individualism is a modest and still unconscious form of will to power; with it a single human unit seems to think it sufficient to free himself from the preponderating power of society (or of the State or Church). He does not set himself up in opposition as a personality, but merely as a unit; he represents the rights of all other individuals as against the whole. That is to say, he instinctively places himself on a level with every other unit: what he combats he does not combat as a person, but as a representative of units against a mass. [...] When one has reached a certain degree of independence, one always longs for more: separation in proportion to the degree of force; the individual is no longer content to regard himself as equal to everybody, he actually seeks for his peer - he makes himself stand out from others. Individualism is followed by a development in groups and organs; correlative tendencies join up together and become powerfully active: now there arise between these centres of power, friction, war, a reconnoitring of the forces on either side, reciprocity, understandings, and the regulation of mutual services. Finally, there appears an order of rank. ~ Friedrich Nietzsche

I started with capital of about $1,500, a princely sum for a student coming out of college, an amount I borrowed from my father. ~ Sunil Mittal

I counted on sixty days only, but I held out for 133. I didn't go into power, but to get power I borrowed some power from the President and made him sign a number of decrees and give me enough power to create a system capable of handling crisis situations. ~ Aleksandr Lebed

Verily, too early died that Hebrew whom the preachers of slow death honour: and to many hath it proved a calamity that he died too early. As yet had he known only tears, and the melancholy of the Hebrews, together with the hatred of the good and just - the Hebrew Jesus: then was he seized with the longing for death. Had he but remained in the wilderness, and far from the good and just! Then, perhaps, would he have learned to live, and love the earth - and laughter also! Believe it, my brethren! He died too early; he himself would have disavowed his doctrine had he attained to my age! Noble enough was he to disavow! ~ Friedrich Nietzsche

With this effect, however, which he makes upon us he is well content: he wants to keep concealed from us his desire, his pride, his intention of flying above us.-Yes! ~ Friedrich Nietzsche

Your whole idea about yourself is borrowed
borrowed from those who have no idea of who they are themselves. ~ Osho

The balance between literature and philosophy in Schopenhauer and Nietzsche is different from that struck in the novella, but, as Mann clearly pointed out in his writings about both thinkers, both modes are present. ~ Philip Kitcher

The inability to lie is far from the love of truth. ~ Friedrich Nietzsche

Sometimes I fantasize about getting my hands on my library records. . . my recurring bookworm dream is to peruse my personal library history like it's a historical document.

My bookshelves show me the books I've bought or been given. . . But my library books come into my house and go out again, leaving behind only memories and a jotted line in a journal (if I'm lucky). I long for a list that captures these ephemeral reads - all the books I've borrowed in a lifetime of reading, from last week's armful spanning back to when I was a seven-year-old kid with my first library card. I don't need many details - just the titles and dates would be fine - but oh, how I'd love to see them.

Those records preserve what my memory has not. I remember the highlights of my grade-school checkouts, but much is lost to time. How I'd love to see the complete list of what I chose to read in second grade, or sixth, or tenth. ~ Anne Bogel

What is bad? All that proceeds from weakness ~ Friedrich Nietzsche

In those days it was possible for a Greek to flee from an over-abundant reality as though it were but the tricky scheming off the imagination-and to flee, not like Plato into the land of eternal ideas, into the workshop off the world-creator, feasting one's eyes on the unblemished unbreakable archetypes, but into the rigor mortis off the coldest emptiest concept off all, the concept of being. ~ Friedrich Nietzsche

Sitting on Rosa's moth-littered bed, he felt a resurgence of all the aches and inspirations of those days when his life had revolved around nothing but Art, when snow fell like the opening piano notes of the Emperor Concerto, and feeling horny reminded him of a passage from Nietzsche, and a thick red-streaked dollop of crimson paint in an otherwise uninteresting Velazquez made him hungry for a piece of rare meat. ~ Michael Chabon

To the man of science, on his unassuming and laborious travels, which must often enough be journeys through the desert, there appear those glittering mirages called 'philosophical systems'; with bewitching deceptive power they show the solution of all enigmas and the freshest draught of the true water of life to be near at hand; his heart rejoices, and it seems to the weary traveller that his lips already touch the goal of all the perseverance and sorrows of the scientific life... Other natures again, may well grow exceedingly ill-humoured and curse the salty taste which these apparitions leave behind in the mouth and from which arises a raging thirst – without one having been brought so much as a step nearer to any kind of spring. ~ Friedrich Nietzsche

Modern writers are the moons of literature; they shine with reflected light, with light borrowed from the ancients. ~ Samuel Johnson

To understand our faith -- to theologize in the Catholic tradition -- we need philosophy. We must use the philosophical language of God, person, creation, relationship, identity, natural law, virtues, conscience, moral norms if we are to think about religion and defend it. Theology has some terms and methods of its own, but its fundamental tools are borrowed from philosophy.

The growth of religious fundamentalism and the collapse of religious education mean theology is more urgently needed in universities -- especially Catholic ones -- than ever before. ~ George Cardinal Pell

Meditation is just a courage to be silent and alone. Slowly slowly, you start feeling a new quality to yourself, a new aliveness, a new beauty, a new intelligence - which is not borrowed from anybody, which is growing within you. It has roots in your existence. ~ Rajneesh

He enters a labyrinth, he multiplies by a thousand the dangers already inherent in the very act of living, not the least of which is the fact that no one with eyes will see how and where he gets lost and lonely and is torn limb from limb by some cave-Minotaur of conscience. ~ Friedrich Nietzsche

How well Shakespeare knew how to improve and exalt little circumstances, when he borrowed them from circumstantial or vulgar historians. ~ Horace Walpole

It wasn't Glen's jealousy that surprised him. "You owe Roy money?"
"Yep. Borrowed it to get my truck painted."
"Roy's a loan shark, too?"
"You ever see JAWS?" Snakebite asked.
Glen said he had.
"How 'bout THE GODFATHER?"
"Yeah."
"Well, if Michael Corleone waded out in the ocean and fucked that shark, then you'd have old Roy."
from the Tom Franklin short story "Grit" (page 31) from POACHERS:STORIES ~ Tom Franklin

In belief in what? In love with what? In hope for what? - There's no doubt that these weak people - at some time or another they also want to be the strong people, some day their "kingdom" is to arrive - they call it simply "the kingdom of God" as I mentioned. People are indeed so humble about everything! Only to experience that, one has to live a long time, beyond death - in fact, people must have an eternal life, so they can also win eternal recompense in the "kingdom of God" for that earthly life "in faith, in love, in hope." Recompense for what? Recompense through what? In my view, Dante was grossly in error when, with an ingenuity inspiring terror, he set that inscription over the gateway into his hell:"Eternal love also created me." Over the gateway into the Christian paradise and its "eternal blessedness" it would, in any event, be more fitting to let the inscription stand "Eternal hate also created me" - provided it's all right to set a truth over the gateway to a lie! For what is the bliss of that paradise? Perhaps we might have guessed that already, but it is better for it to be expressly described for us by an authority we cannot underestimate in such matters, Thomas Aquinas, the great teacher and saint: "In the kingdom of heaven" he says as gently as a lamb, "the blessed will see the punishment of the damned, so that they will derive all the more pleasure from their heavenly bliss. ~ Friedrich Nietzsche

All that philosophers have handled for millennia has been conceptual mummies; nothing actual has ever escaped from their hands alive. ~ Friedrich Nietzsche

All living things need an atmosphere around them, a secret circle of darkness. If this veil is taken from them, if people condemn a religion, an art, a genius to orbit like a star without an atmosphere, then we should no longer wonder about their rapid decay and the way they become hard and barren. That is the way it is now with all great things which never succeed without some delusion.

But every people, indeed every person, who wishes to become mature needs such an enveloping delusion, such a protecting and veiling cloud. But today people generally despise becoming mature, because they honour history more than living. Indeed, people exult over the fact that now 'science is beginning to rule over living'. It is possible that people will attain that goal but it is certain that a life so governed is not worth much, because it is much less living and it establishes a life for the future far less than does the previous life governed not by knowledge but by instinct and powerful illusory images. But, as stated, it is clearly not to be the era of fully developed and mature people, of harmonious personalities, but the era of common work which is as useful as possible. That, however, amounts only to the fact that people are to be trained for the purposes of the time, in order to get to work with their hands as promptly as possible. They are to labour in the factories of the universal utilities before they are mature, that is, so that they really no longer become mature, ~ Friedrich Nietzsche

Of two quite lofty things, measure and moderation, it is best never to speak. A few know their force and significance, from the mysterious paths of inner experiences and conversions: they honor in them something quite godlike, and are afraid to speak aloud. All the rest hardly listen when they are spoken about, and think the subjects under discussion are tedium and mediocrity. ~ Friedrich Nietzsche