Friedrich Nietzsche Quotes & Sayings

There are few pains so grievous as to have seen, divined, or experienced how an exceptional man has missed his way and deteriorated — Friedrich Nietzsche

Feel a pleasurable superiority, and are full of secret insight and penetration,-it — Friedrich Nietzsche

To have to fight the instincts - that is the definition of decadence: as long as life is ascending, happiness equals instinct. — Friedrich Nietzsche

Does wisdom perhaps appear on the earth as a raven which is inspired by the smell of carrion? — Friedrich Nietzsche

What the philosopher is seeking is not truth, but rather the metamorphosis of the world into man. — Friedrich Nietzsche

To learn to see- to accustom the eye to calmness, to patience, and to allow things to come up to it; to defer judgment, and to acquire the habit of approaching and grasping an individual case from all sides. This is the first preparatory schooling of intellectuality. One must not respond immediately to a stimulus; one must acquire a command of the obstructing and isolating instincts. — Friedrich Nietzsche

Pain does not count as an objection to life — Friedrich Nietzsche

Possessions are usually diminished by possession. — Friedrich Nietzsche

An educator never says what he himself thinks, but only that which he thinks it is good for those whom he is educating to hear. — Friedrich Nietzsche

There are horrible people who, instead of solving a problem, tangle it up and make it harder to solve for anyone who wants to deal with it. Whoever does not know how to hit the nail on the head should be asked not to hit it at all. — Friedrich Nietzsche

All is alike, nothing is worth while, knowledge strangleth. — Friedrich Nietzsche

You want to make him interested in you? Then pretend to be embarrassed in his presence- — Friedrich Nietzsche

All life rests on appearance, art, illusion, optics, the need for perspective and for error ... — Friedrich Nietzsche

We take a fancy to something: and scarcely have we thoroughly taken a fancy to it when that tyrant in us calls out: "Give me thatin sacrifice"
and we give it. — Friedrich Nietzsche

Read from a distant star, the majuscule script of our earthly existence would perhaps lead to the conclusion that the earth was the distinctively ascetic planet, a nook of disgruntled, arrogant creatures filled with a profound disgust with themselves, at the earth, at all life, who inflict as much pain on themselves as they possibly can out of pleasure in inflicting pain which is probably their only pleasure. — Friedrich Nietzsche

Objection, evasion, joyous distrust, and love of irony are signs of health; everything absolute belongs to pathology. — Friedrich Nietzsche

I pass through this people and keep mine eyes open: they do not forgive me for do not envying their virtues. They bite at me, because I say unto them that for small people, small virtues are necessary - and because it is hard for me to understand that small people are necessary! — Friedrich Nietzsche

The surest aid in combating the male's disease of self-contempt is to be loved by a clever woman. — Friedrich Nietzsche

Just as it is certain that one leaf is never totally the same as another, so it is certain that the concept "leaf" is formed by arbitrarily discarding these individual differences and by forgetting the distinguishing aspects. This awakens the idea that, in addition to the leaves, there exists in nature the "leaf": the original model according to which all the leaves were perhaps woven, sketched, measured, colored, curled, and painted
but by incompetent hands, so that no specimen has turned out to be a correct, trustworthy, and faithful likeness of the original model. — Friedrich Nietzsche

In his heart every man knows quite well that, being unique, he will be in the world only once and that no imaginable chance will for a second time gather together into a unity so strangely variegated an assortment as he is: he knows it but hides it like a bad conscience. — Friedrich Nietzsche

215. As in the stellar firmament there are sometimes two suns which determine the path of one planet, and in certain cases suns of different colours shine around a single planet, now with red light, now with green, and then simultaneously illumine and flood it with motley colours: so we modern men, owing to the complicated mechanism of our "firmament," are determined by DIFFERENT moralities; our actions shine alternately in different colours, and are seldom unequivocal - and there are often cases, also, in which our actions are MOTLEY-COLOURED. — Friedrich Nietzsche

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. — Friedrich Nietzsche

For the longest time, marriage has had a guilty conscience about itself. Should we believe it?
Yes, we should believe it. — Friedrich Nietzsche

Not how one soul comes close to another, but how it moves away, shows me their kinship and how much they belong together. — Friedrich Nietzsche

Every culture that has lost myth has lost, by the same token, its natural healthy creativity. Only a horizon ringed about with myths can unify a culture. The forces of imagination and the Apollonian dream are saved only by myth from indiscriminate rambling. The images of myth must be the daemonic guardians, ubiquitous but unnoticed, presiding over the growth of the child's mind and interpreting to the mature man his life and struggles. — Friedrich Nietzsche

What, if some day or night a demon were to steal after you into your loneliest loneliness and say to you: 'This life as you now live it and have lived it, you will have to live once more and innumerable times more' ... Would you not throw yourself down and gnash your teeth and curse the demon who spoke thus? Or have you once experienced a tremendous moment when you would have answered him: 'You are a god and never have I heard anything more divine. — Friedrich Nietzsche

Excelsior! You will never again pray, never again repose in limitless trust - you deny it to yourself to remain halted before an ultimate wisdom, ultimate good, ultimate power, and there unharness your thoughts — Friedrich Nietzsche

All credibility, all good conscience, all evidence of truth come only from the senses. — Friedrich Nietzsche

The English are the people of consummate cant. — Friedrich Nietzsche

At bottom every man knows well enough that he is a unique being, only once on this earth; and by no extraordinary chance will such a marvelously picturesque piece of diversity in unity as he is, ever be put together a second time. — Friedrich Nietzsche

We have already gone beyond whatever we have words for. — Friedrich Nietzsche

We fear our neighbor's hostile mood because we are afraid that this mood will lead him to penetrate our secrets. — Friedrich Nietzsche

War has always been the grand sagacity of every spirit which has grown too inward and too profound; its curative power lies even in the wounds one receives. — Friedrich Nietzsche

Once and for all, there is a great deal I do not want to know. - Wisdom sets bounds even to knowledge. — Friedrich Nietzsche

Brave people may be persuaded to an action by representing it as being more dangerous than it really is. — Friedrich Nietzsche

It is certainly not the least charm of a theory that it is refutable; it is precisely thereby that it attracts the more subtle minds. It seems that the hundred-times-refuted theory of the "free will" owes its persistence to this charm alone; some one is always appearing who feels himself strong enough to refute it. — Friedrich Nietzsche

There are expressions and bulls-eyes of the spirit, there are epigrams, a little handful of words, in which a whole culture, a whole society is suddenly crystallized. — Friedrich Nietzsche

The bad gains respect through imitation, the good loses it especially in art. — Friedrich Nietzsche

The world is a work of art that gives birth to itself. — Friedrich Nietzsche

What is not intelligible to me is not necessarily unintelligent — Friedrich Nietzsche

Write with blood, and you will find that blood is spirit. — Friedrich Nietzsche

Ah, my friend, I sometimes think that I lead a highly dangerous life since I'm one of those machines that can burst apart. — Friedrich Nietzsche

I love him whose soul is deep even in the wounding, and may perish through a small matter: thus he goes willingly over the bridge. — Friedrich Nietzsche

Follow in the footsteps of your fathers' virtue! How could you hope to climb high unless your fathers' will climbs with you? — Friedrich Nietzsche

I have not come to know atheism as a result of logical reasoning and still less as an event in my life: in me it is a matter of instinct. — Friedrich Nietzsche

I am interested only in the relations of a people to the rearing of the individual man, and among the Greeks the conditions were unusually favourable for the development of the individual; not by any means owing to the goodness of the people, but because of the struggles of their evil instincts.With the help of favourable measures great individuals might be reared who would be both different from and higher than those who heretofore have owed their existence to mere chance. Here we may still be hopeful: in the rearing of exceptional men. — Friedrich Nietzsche

To our strongest impulse, to the tyrant in us, not only our reason but also our conscience yields. — Friedrich Nietzsche

What is the seal of liberation? Not to be ashamed in front of oneself. — Friedrich Nietzsche

The final reward of the dead - to die no more — Friedrich Nietzsche

However closely people are attached to one another, their mutual horizon nonetheless includes all four compass directions, and nowand again they notice it. — Friedrich Nietzsche

Free will without fate is no more conceivable than spirit without matter, good without evil. — Friedrich Nietzsche

Experience, as a desire for experience, does not come off. We must not study ourselves while having an experience. — Friedrich Nietzsche

He who fights with monsters might take care lest he thereby becomes a monster. — Friedrich Nietzsche

What is evil?-Whatever springs from weakness. — Friedrich Nietzsche

We are noble, good, beautiful, and happy! — Friedrich Nietzsche

Anarchists are mouthpieces of a declining stratum of society; when they work themselves into a state of righteous indignation demanding 'rights', 'justice', 'equal rights', they are just acting under the pressure of their own lack of culture, which has no way of grasping why they really suffer, or what they lack in life. — Friedrich Nietzsche

It is our needs that interpret the world; our drives and their For and Against. Every drive is a kind of lust to rule; each one has its perspective that it would like to compel all other drives to accept as a norm. — Friedrich Nietzsche

Socialism is the phantastic younger brother of despotism, which it wants to inherit. Socialism wants to have the fullness of state force which before only existed in despotism ... However, it goes further than anything in the past because it aims at the formal destruction of the individual ... who ... can be used to improve communities by an expedient organ of government. — Friedrich Nietzsche

Willing emancipateth: that is the true doctrine of will and emancipation - so teacheth you Zarathustra. No longer willing, and no longer valuing, and no longer creating! Ah, that that great debility may ever be far from me! And also in discerning do I feel only my will's procreating and evolving delight ... — Friedrich Nietzsche

Art is not merely an imitation of the reality of nature, but in truth a metaphysical supplement to the reality of nature, placed alongside thereof for its conquest. — Friedrich Nietzsche

The perfect woman is a higher type of humanity than the perfect man, and also something much rarer. The natural history of animals furnishes grounds in support of this theory. — Friedrich Nietzsche

The abdomen is the reason why man does not easily take himself for a god. — Friedrich Nietzsche

O Voltaire! O humanity! O idiocy! There is something ticklish in "the truth," and in the SEARCH for the truth; and if man goes about it too humanely - "il ne cherche le vrai que pour faire le bien" - I wager he finds nothing! — Friedrich Nietzsche

All idealists imagine that the causes they serve are fundamentally better than any other causes in the world, and they refuse to believe that if their cause is to flourish at all it requires precisely the same foul-smelling manure that is necessary to all other human undertakings. — Friedrich Nietzsche

The tree that would grow to heaven must send its roots to hell. — Friedrich Nietzsche

It is true we love life; not because we are wont to live, but because we are wont to love. — Friedrich Nietzsche

The higher you ascend, the smaller you appear to the eye of envy. But most of all they hate those who fly. — Friedrich Nietzsche

The great advantage in noble parentage is that enables one to endure poverty more easily. — Friedrich Nietzsche

Knowledge kills action; action requires the veils of illusion. — Friedrich Nietzsche

Still am I the richest and most to be envied - I, the lonesomest one! — Friedrich Nietzsche

Human nature has nevertheless been changed by the ever new appearance of these teachers of the purpose of existence: It now has one additional need - the need for the ever new appearance of such teachers and teachings of a "purpose." Gradually, man has become a fantastic animal that has to fulfill one more condition of existence than any other animal: man has to believe, to know, from time to time why he exists; his race cannot flourish without a periodic trust in life - without faith in reason in life. — Friedrich Nietzsche

One is honest about oneself either with a sense of shame or with vanity. — Friedrich Nietzsche

Free from what? What does Zarathustra care! But brightly your eyes should signal to me: free for what? Can — Friedrich Nietzsche

When your heart overfloweth broad and full like the river, a blessing and a danger to the lowlanders: there is the origin of your virtue. — Friedrich Nietzsche

I know no other way to associate with great tasks than as play: as a sign of greatness, this is an essential presupposition. — Friedrich Nietzsche

the waking day of a mythically vibrant people, the ancient Greeks, for instance, is in fact more akin to dream than to the day of a sober scientific thinker. If — Friedrich Nietzsche

Human society: it is an attempt - so I teach - a long seeking: it seeketh however the ruler! - An attempt, my brethren! And NO "contract"! Destroy, I pray you, destroy that word of the soft-hearted and half-and-half! — Friedrich Nietzsche

Life is a flat circle. — Friedrich Nietzsche

Are you one who looks on? or lends a hand? - or who looks away, sidles off? ... Third question for the conscience. — Friedrich Nietzsche

He who cannot obey himself will be commanded. That is the nature of living creatures. — Friedrich Nietzsche

If one uses one's intellect to become master over the unlimited emotions, it may produce a sorry and diversionary effect upon the intellect. — Friedrich Nietzsche

Spirit and his solitude, and for ten years did not weary of it. But finally he had a change of heart — Friedrich Nietzsche

For believe me! - the secret for harvesting from existence the greatest fruitfulness and the greatest enjoyment is: to live dangerously! Build your cities on the slopes of Vesuvius! Send your ships into uncharted seas! Live at war with your peers and yourselves! Be robbers and conquerors as long as you cannot be rulers and possessors, you seekers of knowledge! Soon the age will be past when you could be content to live hidden in forests like shy deer! At long last the search for knowledge will reach out for its due: - it will want to rule and possess, and you with it! — Friedrich Nietzsche

The question is, how far an opinion is life-furthering, life-preserving, species-preserving, perhaps species-rearing, and we are fundamentally inclined to maintain that the falsest opinions (to which the synthetic judgments a priori belong), are the most indispensable to us, that without a recognition of logical fictions, without a comparison of reality with the purely IMAGINED world of the absolute and immutable, without a constant counterfeiting of the world by means of numbers, man could not live - that the renunciation of false opinions would be a renunciation of life, a negation of life. — Friedrich Nietzsche

Thus the man who is responsive to artistic stimuli reacts to the reality of dreams as does the philosopher to the reality of existence; he observes closely, and he enjoys his observation: for it is out of these images that he interprets life, out of these processes that he trains himself for life. — Friedrich Nietzsche

But one day solitude will make you weary, one day your pride will buckle and your courage gnash its teeth. One day you will cry, 'I am alone! — Friedrich Nietzsche

It is doubtful whether anyone who has travelled widely has found anywhere in the world regions more ugly than in the human face. — Friedrich Nietzsche

Truth is the kind of error without which a certain species of life could not live. The value for life is ultimately decisive. — Friedrich Nietzsche

I love to lose myself for a while. — Friedrich Nietzsche

Even the wisest among you is only a confusion and hybrid of plant and phantom. But do I ask you to become phantoms or plants? — Friedrich Nietzsche

... Language shows a tendency for the words "good" and "stupid" to come [close] together... a hint of contempt... within these term[s]... [dictating that] the good man must always be unthreatening. — Friedrich Nietzsche

It is possible that the production of genius is reserved to a limited period of mankind's history. — Friedrich Nietzsche

With hard men intimacy is a thing of shame- and something precious. — Friedrich Nietzsche

Every tradition grows continually more venerable, and the more remote its origins, the more this is lost sight of. The veneration paid the tradition accumulates from generation to generation, until it at last becomes holy and excites awe. — Friedrich Nietzsche

I can be thrown by the wayside, but I'm looking at the stars. — Friedrich Nietzsche

Thus do I want man and woman to be: the one fit to wage war and the other fit to give birth, but both fit to dance with head and feet. — Friedrich Nietzsche

To recognize untruth as a condition of life
that certainly means resisting accustomed value feelings in a dangerous way; and a philosophy that risks this would by that token alone place itself beyond good and evil. — Friedrich Nietzsche

But this word will I say to my enemies: What is all manslaughter in comparison with what you have done to me! — Friedrich Nietzsche

Basic insight regarding the nature of decadence: it's supposed causes are its consequences. — Friedrich Nietzsche

My time has not yet come either; some are born posthumously. — Friedrich Nietzsche