Quotes from Walter Kaufmann

Spirit is not opposed to life altogether, but directed only against one level of it. Its mission is not to destroy but to fulfill, to sublimate or—to use the expressions of the Meditations—to transfigure and perfect man's nature.

The Übermensch at any rate cannot be dissociated from the conception of Überwindung, of overcoming. "Man is something that should be overcome"—and the man who has overcome himself has become an overman.

There is apparently, here and there on earth, a kind of continuation of love where this greedy desire of two persons for each other has given way to a new craving and greed, a common higher thirst for an ideal that stands above [über] them: but who knows this love? who has experienced it? Its true name is friendship [FW 14].

For Nietzsche, the overman does not have instrumental value for the maintenance of society: he is valuable in himself because he embodies the state of being that has the only ultimate value there is; and society is censured insofar as it insists on conformity and impedes his development (cf. G. IX 44).

The love of those who have not learned to stand solitude, or who "invite a witness when [they] wish to speak well of" themselves is not a virtue but simply a weakness; nor do they profit their neighbors.

When Hegel later became a man of influence' he insisted that the Jews should be granted equal rights because civic rights belong to man because he is a man and not on account of his ethnic origins or his religion.

To try to fashion something from suffering, to relish our triumphs, and to endure defeats without resentment: all that is compatible with the faith of a heretic.