Beyond Good and Evil

by Friedrich Nietzsche

The same emotions are in man and woman, but in different tempo, on that account man and woman never cease to misunderstand each other.

To talk much about oneself may also be a means of concealing oneself.

One loves ultimately one’s desires, not the thing desired.

he asks himself whether the woman, when she gives up everything for him, does not perhaps do so for a phantom of him; he wishes first to be thoroughly, indeed, profoundly well known; in order to be loved at all he ventures to let himself be found out. Only then does he feel the beloved one fully in his possession, when she no longer deceives herself about him, when she loves him just as much for the sake of his devilry and concealed insatiability, as for his goodness, patience, and spirituality.

And after all, truth is a woman; one must not use force with her.

German loves “frankness” and “honesty”; it is so convenient to be frank and honest!—This confidingness, this complaisance, this showing-the-cards of German honesty, is probably the most dangerous and most successful disguise which the German is up to nowadays: it is his proper Mephistophelean art; with this he can “still achieve much”!

The Englishman, more gloomy, sensual, headstrong, and brutal than the German—is

There are truths which are best recognized by mediocre minds, because they are best adapted for them, there are truths which only possess charms and seductive power for mediocre spirits:—one

And what else does education and culture try to do nowadays! In our very democratic, or rather, very plebeian age, “education” and “culture” must be essentially the art of deceiving—deceiving with regard to origin, with regard to the inherited plebeianism in body and soul.

A philosopher: that is a man who constantly experiences, sees, hears, suspects, hopes, and dreams extraordinary things; who is struck by his own thoughts as if they came from the outside, from above and below, as a species of events and lightning-flashes peculiar to him;