Quotes About Progress

To fight upward out of that chaos to this form requires a compulsion: one must be faced with the choice of perishing or prevailing. A dominating race can grow up only out of terrible and violent beginnings.

Always at home. - One day we reach our goal, and now point with pride to the long travels we undertook to reach it. In fact, we were not even aware of traveling. But we got so far because we fancied at every point that we were at home.

With regard to philosophical metaphysics, I always see increasing numbers who have attained to the negative goal, but as yet few who climb a few rungs backwards; one ought to look out, perhaps, over the last steps of the ladder, but not try to stand upon them.

People who go through many spiritual changes retain some views and habits from earlier stages, which then jut out into their new thinking and acting like a bit of inexplicable antiquity and gray stonework, often ornamenting the whole region.

I TEACH YOU THE SUPERMAN. Man is something that is to be surpassed. What have ye done to surpass man? All

The power of gradually losing all feeling of strangeness or astonishment, and finally being pleased at anything, is called the historical sense or historical culture.

That the world is not striving toward a stable condition is the only thing that has been proved. Consequently, one must conceive its climatic conditions in such a way that it is not a condition of equilibrium.

What do you believe in? — In this: that the weight of all things must be determined anew

Man is something that should be overcome.

What is great in man is that he is a bridge and not a goal

Due to its lack of tranquillity, our civilisation is heading toward a new barbarism.

The wasteland grows.

The formation of a herd is a significant victory and advance in the struggle against depression.

All that is good is inherited: whatever is not inherited is imperfect, is a mere beginning.

A people is nature's roundabout way of getting six or seven great men. – Yes: and then of getting around them.

Lighting and thunder require time; the light of the stars requires time; deeds, though done, still require time to be seen and heard.

What surprises me most when surveying the great destinies of man is always seeing before me the opposite of what Darwin and his school see or want to see today: selection in favor of the stronger, in favor of those who have come off better, the progress of the species. The very opposite is quite palpably the case: the elimination of the strokes of luck, the uselessness of the better-constituted types, the inevitable domination achieved by the average, even below-average types.

The better the state is established, the fainter is humanity. To make the individual uncomfortable, that is my task.

That Luther's Reformation succeeded in the North suggests that the north of Europe was retarded compared to the south...

A culture based on the principle of science must perish once it begins to become illogical, i.e. to turn and flee its own consequences.

Two thousand years have come and gone—and not a single new god!

First, one has the difficulty of emancipating oneself from one's chains; and, ultimately, one has to emancipate oneself from this emancipation too.

To educate educators! But the first ones must educate themselves! And for these I write. (VII

I am of today and of the has-been (he said then); but there is something in me that is of tomorrow and of the day-after-tomorrow and of the shall-be.