"Marriage as a long conversation. - When entering into a marriage one ought to ask oneself: do you believe you are going to enjoy talking with this woman up into your old age? Everything else in marriage is transitory, but most of the time you are together will be devoted to conversation."

"Doing is everything."

"A joke is an epigram on the death of a feeling."

"The best author will be the one who is ashamed to become a writer."

"All things are subject to interpretation whichever interpretation prevails at a given time is a function of power and not truth."

"Whenever I climb I am followed by a dog called 'Ego'."

"It is a common blindness to be unaware of the dark sides of things. But to be unaware of their bright sides is even worse."

"Reading is merely a surrogate for thinking for yourself; it means letting someone else direct your thoughts."

"He who fights with monsters might take care lest he thereby become a monster. And if you gaze for long into an abyss, the abyss gazes also into you."

"There is always some madness in love. But there is also always some reason in madness."

"The snake which cannot cast its skin has to die. As well the minds which are prevented from changing their opinions; they cease to be mind."

"We are franker towards others than towards ourselves."

"A thinker sees his own actions as experiments and questions—as attempts to find out something. Success and failure are for him answers above all."

"The mother of excess is not joy but joylessness."

"He who has a why to live can bear almost any how."

"It is not when truth is dirty, but when it is shallow, that the lover of knowledge is reluctant to step into its waters."

"Human, All Too Human: A Book for Free Spirits" is a work by Friedrich Nietzsche, consisting of a collection of aphorisms and reflections that delve into the depths of human nature, ethics, society, and knowledge.

Written after Nietzsche had ended his friendship with Richard Wagner and had been forced to leave academic life through ill health, Human, All Too Human (1878) can be read as a monument to his personal crisis. It also marks the point when he matured as a philosopher, rejecting the German romanticism espoused by Wagner and Schopenhauer and instead returning to sources in the French Enlightenment. Here he sets out his unsettling views in a series of 638 stunning aphorisms - assessing subjects ranging from art to arrogance, boredom to passion, science to vanity and women to youth. This work also contains the seeds of concepts crucial to Nietzsche's later philosophy, such as the will to power and the need to transcend conventional Christian morality. The result is one of the cornerstones of his life's work.

FRIEDRICH NIETZSCHE

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