Friedrich Nietzsche on Books

"The worst readers are those who behave like plundering troops: they take away a few things they can use, dirty and confound the remainder, and revile the whole."

"The value of many men and books rests solely on their faculty for compelling all to speak out the most hidden and intimate things."

"It is my ambition to say in ten sentences what everyone else says in a whole book — what everyone else does not say in a whole book."

"The whole disaster was only made possible by the fact that there already existed in the world a similar megalomania, allied to this one in race, to wit, the Jewish."

"We have already gone beyond whatever we have words for. In all talk there is a grain of contempt."

"Good prose is written only face to face with poetry."

"What follows, then? That one had better put on gloves before reading the New Testament. The presence of so much filth makes it very advisable. One would as little choose early Christians for companions as Polish Jews: not that one need seek out an objection to them — neither has a pleasant smell."

"One common false conclusion is that because someone is truthful and upright towards us he is spreading the truth. Thus the child believes his parents' judgements, the Christian believes the claims of the church's founders. Likewise, people do not want to admit that all those things which men defended with the sacrifice of their lives and happiness in earlier centuries were nothing but errors."