121. Life is not an argument. We have arranged for ourselves a world in which we are able to live - by positing bodies, lines, planes, causes and effects, motion and rest, form and content; without these articles of faith no one could endure living! But that does not prove them. Life is not an argument; the conditions of life might include error.
155. What we lack. We love what is great in nature and have discovered it - because in our heads, great human beings are lacking. It was the other way around for the Greeks; their feeling for nature was different from ours.
224. Animals' criticism. I fear that the animals see man as a being like them who in a most dangerous manner has lost his animal common sense - as the insane animal, the laughing animal, the weeping animal, the miserable animal.
236. In order to move the crowd. Must not he who wants to move the crowd be an actor playing the role of himself? Must he not first translate himself into the grotesquely obvious and present his entire person and cause in this coarsened and simplified version?
251. Misunderstood sufferers. Great natures suffer differently from what their admirers imagine: they suffer most severely from the ignoble, petty agitations of some evil moments - in short, from their doubts about their own greatness - and not from the sacrifices and martyrdoms that their task demands from them. As long as Prometheus has pity for men and sacrifices himself for them, he is happy and great; but when he is envious of Zeus and the homage paid to him by mortals, then he suffers!
Taken From: The Gay Science
Friedrich Nietzsche
