I could say leisure is the source of all great things. The preservation of life is tedious; freedom from its demands is needed for all high science, art, and literature as well, and also all beautiful living, all adventures, all development of your body to the heights of beauty.

Deprived of this drive to development and self-increase he devolves to pointless masturbation, in captivity, where he senses he is in owned space and therefore the futility of all his efforts and all his actions.

even sadness of certain kinds makes life beautiful and can be a spur to great things.

you should distrust any thoughts you’ve had indoors.

monotheism overreached. It made such grand claims… and when these claims were abandoned it left people with the impression that there really is nothing besides “science,” which of course, nobody really understands, because it’s nothing but a method.

If there can be any defense of civilization it is this, that historically it gave a class the full or nearly full benefits of the free life of the steppe and forest and mountain while ridding them of some of its inconveniences—at the price, of course, of misery for the vast majority.

The friends you make are more important, far more important, than the girlfriends or wives you’ll have. And actually your girl will admire you for this—not that you should do it for that reason, but it’s an added benefit: women admire men with great personal projects, and who are not beholden to them. If she’s your “everything” and your “best

what is really interesting is the question of what drives life, what explains animal behavior and what explains the correspondence between organism and environment. This is the question. The mechanism of heredity or the means by which a species is shaped, natural or unnatural selection, which is really Darwin’s only insight, is the least

the Judaizing tendency that promotes facility with words and number, but approaches mental deficiency and even retardation when it comes to anything visual. The Jewish hatred of matter, an ancient prejudice that precedes the Bible, and the hatred also for beauty that they share with other Semitic peoples—and many others besides—all of this comes