Forgetting: that is a divine capacity. And whoever aspires to the heights and wants to fly must cast off much that is heavy and make himself light--I call it a divine capacity for lightness.

Assuming that he believes at all, the everyday Christian is a pitiful figure, a man who really cannot count up to three, and who besides, precisely because of his mental incompetence, would not deserve such a punishment as Christianity promises him.

Give me today, for once, the worst throw of your dice, destiny. Today I transmute everything into gold.

He who knoweth the reader, doeth nothing more for the reader. Another century of readers - and spirit itself will stink.

Go through the moral demands...one by one and you will find that man could not live up to them; the intention is not that he should become more moral, but that he should feel as sinful as possible. If man had failed to find this feeling pleasant - why should he have engendered such an idea and adhered to it for so long?... Man was by every means to be made sinful and thereby become excited, animated, enlivened in general. To excite, animate, enliven at any price.

Dreadful experiences raise the question whether he who experiences them, is not something dreadful also.

Do I advise you to love the neighbor? I suggest rather to escape from the neighbor and to love those who are the farthest away from you. Higher than the love for the neighbor is the love for the man who is distant and has still to come.