Quotes About Spirit

Tethered heart, free spirit.--If one tethers one's heart severely and imprisons it, one can give one's spirit many liberties.

Three metamorphoses of the spirit have I designated to you: how the spirit became a camel, the camel a lion, and the lion at last a child.

Write with blood, and you will find that blood is spirit.

Only great pain is the ultimate liberator of the spirit….I doubt that such pain makes us 'better'; but I know that it makes us more profound.

Business people - Your business - is your greatest prejudice: it ties you to your locality, to the company you keep, to the inclinations you feel. Diligent in business - but indolent in spirit, content with your inadequacy, and with the cloak of duty hung over this contentment: that is how you live, that is how you want your children to live!

The sedentary life...is the real sin against the holy spirit.

Of all that is written, I love only what a person hath written with his blood. Write with blood, and thou wilt find that blood is spirit. It is no easy task to understand unfamiliar blood; I hate the reading idlers. He who knoweth the reader, doeth nothing more for the reader. Another century of readers—and spirit itself will stink.

When the Christian crusaders in the Orient came across that invincible order of Assassins – that order of free spirits par excellence whose lowest order received, through some channel or other, a hint about that symbol and spell reserved for the uppermost echelons alone, as their secret: nothing is true, everything is permitted. Now that was freedom of the spirit, with that, belief in truth itself was renounced.

And he will also find the little god whom girls like best: beside the well he lies, still, with his eyes shut. Verily, in bright daylight he fell asleep, the sluggard! Did he chase after the butterflies too much?... He may cry and weep - but he is laughable even when he weeps. And with tears in his eyes he shall ask you for a dance and I myself will sing a song for his dance: a dancing and mocking song on the spirit of gravity... (p.108 - The Dancing Song)

On a political sickbed a people is usually rejuvenated and rediscovers its spirit, after having gradually lost it in seeking and preserving power. Culture owes its peaks to politically weak ages.

But a spirit who is sure of himself speaks softly; he seeks secrecy, he lets himself be awaited.

Even now it is ceasing to be art of the nobleman, and it is quite possible that some day one may find it so common and even vulgar that, along with all party literature and journalism, one would classify it as prostitution of the spirit.

The strongest and most evil spirits have so far done the most to advance humanity: again and again they relumed the passions that were going to sleep—all ordered society puts the passions to sleep—and they reawakened again and again the sense of comparison, of contradiction, of the pleasure in what is new, daring, untried; they compelled men to pit opinion against opinion, model against model.

spirit and his solitude, and for ten years did not weary of it. But finally he had a change of heart

Insight into the origin of a work concerns the physiologists and vivisectionists of the spirit; never the aesthetic man, the artist!

Do not let yourself be deceived: great spirits are sceptical. Zarathustra is a sceptic. The power, the freedom that comes from the strength and super-strength of spirit, proves itself through scepticism.

What language will such a spirit speak when it talks to itself alone?

WHEN Zarathustra was thirty years old, he left his home and the lake of his home, and went into the mountains. There he enjoyed his spirit and his solitude, and for ten years did not weary of it. But finally he had a change of heart - and rising one morning with the dawn, he went before the sun, and spoke thus to it:

Something might be true, even if it were also harmful and dangerous in the highest degree; indeed, it might be part of the essential nature of existence that to understand it completely would lead to our own destruction. The strength of a person's spirit would then be measured by how much truth he could tolerate, or more precisely, to what extent he 'needs' to have it diluted, disguised, sweetened, muted, falsified.

The degree and type of the sexuality of a man extend all the way to the ultimate peak of his spirit.

Behind thy thoughts and feelings, my brother, there is a mighty lord, an unknown sage—it is called Self; it dwelleth in thy body, it is thy body.

Nihilism. It is ambiguous: A. Nihilism as a sign of increased power of the spirit: as active nihilism. B. Nihilism as decline and recession of the power of the spirit: as passive nihilism.

Our age, as much as it speaks of economics, is in fact a squanderer: it squanders the most precious thing there is, the spirit.

And we had made a nice misuse of that 'empiricism', we had created the world on the basis of it as a world of causes, as a world of will, as a world of spirit.