We want to be poets of our life first of all in the smallest most everyday matters.
Everyone nowadays lives through too much and thinks through too little: they have a ravenous appetite and colic at the same time so that they keep getting thinner and thinner no matter how much they eat.--Whoever says nowadays, "I have not experienced anything"--is a simpleton.
What does it matter whether I am shown to be right! I am right too much!--And he who laughs best today will also laugh last.
Whether in conversation we generally agree or disagree with others is largely a matter of habit: the one tendency makes as much sense as the other.
But eternal liveliness is what counts: what does "eternal life" matter, or life at all?
The hour when you say, "What does my happiness matter? It is poverty and filth, and a wretched complacency. Yet my happiness should justify existence itself!
A physician who treated me as a nervous case for a while said in the end "No! It is not a matter of your nerves; it is I who am nervous".
It is a terrible thought, to contemplate that an immense number of mediocre thinkers are occupied with really influential matters.
Unexplained, obscure matters are regarded as more important than explained, clear ones.
Even today a crude sort of persecution is all that is required to create an honorable name for any sect, no matter how indifferent in itself.
When self control is lacking in small things, the ability to apply it to matters of importance withers away. Every day in which one does not at least deny himself some trifle is badly spent and a threat to the day following.
He who denies himself much in great matters will readily indulge himself in small things.
Everything matters. Nothing's important.
A very popular error: having the courage of one's convictions; rather it is a matter of having the courage for an attack on one's convictions.
A matter that becomes clear ceases to concern us.
In the knowledge of truth, what really matters is the possession of it, not the impulse under which it was sought.
Free will without fate is no more conceivable than spirit without matter, good without evil.
Free from what? What does that matter to Zarathustra! Clearly, however, shall your eye show to me: free for what?
Conversation with a friend will only bear good fruit of knowledge when both think only of the matter under consideration and forget that they are friends.