Friedrich Nietzsche Philosophy Quotes & Sayings

The Greeks, with their truly healthy culture, have once and for all justified philosophy simply by having engaged in it, and having engaged in it more fully than any other people. — Friedrich Nietzsche

Only when he has attained a final knowledge of all things will man have come to know himself. For things are only the boundaries of man. — Friedrich Nietzsche

The architect represents neither a Dionysian nor an Apollinian condition: here it is the mighty act of will, the will which moves mountains, the intoxication of the strong will, which demands artistic expression. The most powerful men have always inspired the architects; the architect has always been influenced by power. — Friedrich Nietzsche

Without music, life would be a mistake. — Friedrich Nietzsche

Main thought! The individual himself is a fallacy. Everything which happens in us is in itself something else which we do not know. 'The individual' is merely a sum of conscious feelings and judgments and misconceptions, a belief, a piece of the true life system or many pieces thought together and spun together, a 'unity', that doesn't hold together. We are buds on a single tree - what do we know about what can become of us from the interests of the tree! But we have a consciousness as though we would and should be everything, a phantasy of 'I' and all 'not I.' Stop feeling oneself as this phantastic ego! Learn gradually to discard the supposed individual! Discover the fallacies of the ego! Recognize egoism as fallacy! The opposite is not to be understood as altruism! This would be love of other supposed individuals! No! Get beyond 'myself' and 'yourself'! Experience cosmically! — Friedrich Nietzsche

There is more wisdom in your body than in your deepest philosophy. — Friedrich Nietzsche

How I understand the philosopher - as a terrible explosive, endangering everthing ... my concept of the philosopher is worlds removed from any concept that would include even a Kant, not to speak of academic "ruminants" and other professors of philosophy ... — Friedrich Nietzsche

French philosopher whom professional philosophers generally accord highest honors is Descartes. Montaigne and Pascal, Voltaire and Rousseau, Bergson and Sartre do not enjoy their greatest vogue among philosophers, and of these only Rousseau has had any considerable influence on the history of philosophy (through Kant and Hegel). — Friedrich Nietzsche

Discontent is the seed of ethics. — Friedrich Nietzsche

When I was twelve years old I thought up an odd trinity: namely, God the Father, God the Son, and God the Devil. My inference wasthat God, in contemplating himself, created the second person of the godhead; but that, in order to be able to contemplate himself, he had to contemplate, and thus to create, his opposite.
With this I began to do philosophy. — Friedrich Nietzsche

If a man has character, he has also his typical experience, which always recurs. — Friedrich Nietzsche

Socrates.- If all goes well, the time will come when one will take up the memorabilia of Socrates rather than the Bible as a guide to morals and reason ... The pathways of the most various philosophical modes of life lead back to him ... Socrates excels the founder of Christianity in being able to be serious cheerfully and in possessing that wisdom full of roguishness that constitutes the finest state of the human soul. And he also possessed the finer intellect. — Friedrich Nietzsche

Socrates condemned art because he preferred philosophy and only after much internal struggle did Plato accept this judgment. — Friedrich Nietzsche

Every philosophy is the philosophy of some stage of life. — Friedrich Nietzsche

Madness is something rare in individuals - but in groups, parties, peoples, and ages, it is the rule. — Friedrich Nietzsche

These solitary ones who are free in spirit know thatin one thing or another they must constantly put on an appearance that is different from the way they think; although they want nothing but truth and honesty, they are entangled in a web of misunderstandings. And despite their keen desire, they cannot prevent a fog of false opinions, of accommodation, of halfway concessions, of indulgent silence, of erroneous interpretation from settling on everything they do. And so a cloud of melancholy gathers around their brow, for such natures hate the necessity of appearances more than death, and their persistent bitterness about this makes them volatile and menacing. From time to time they take revenge for their violent selfconcealment, for their coerced constraint. They emerge from their caves with horrible expressions on their faces; at such times their words and deeds are explosions, and it is even possible for them to destroy themselves. — Friedrich Nietzsche

Almost everything we call "higher culture" is based on the spiritualization of cruelty. — Friedrich Nietzsche

Here is the hell for solitaries' thoughts: here great thoughts are boiled alive and then cooked down small. Here all the great feelings decay: here only tiny skin-and-bone feelings are allowed to rattle! — Friedrich Nietzsche

This crown of the laughter, the rosary crown: to you, my brothers, I throw this crown! I pronounced laughter holy: you higher men, learn - to laugh! — Friedrich Nietzsche

Which is it? Is man only a blunder of God? Or is God only a blunder of man? — Friedrich Nietzsche

Philosophers are in the habit of setting themselves before life and experience. — Friedrich Nietzsche

All that exists is just and unjust and is equally justified in both respects. — Friedrich Nietzsche

Try for once to justify the meaning of your existence as it were a posteriori by setting yourself an aim, a goal ... an exalted and noble 'to this end.' Perish in pursuit of this and only this — Friedrich Nietzsche

I caught this insight on the way and quickly seized the rather poor words that were closest to hand to pin it down lest it fly away again. And now it has died of these arid words and shakes and flaps in them
and I hardly know anymore when I look at it how I could ever have felt so happy when I caught this bird. — Friedrich Nietzsche

Their [philosophers] thinking is, in fact, far less a discovery than a re-recognizing, a remembering, a return and a home-coming to a far-off, ancient common-household of the soul, out of which those ideas formerly grew: philosophizing is so far a kind of atavism of the highest order. — Friedrich Nietzsche

A nation is a detour of nature to arrive at five or six great men- yes, and then to get around them. — Friedrich Nietzsche

From the beginning, nothing has been more alien, repugnant, and hostile to woman than truth
her great art is the lie, her highest concern is mere appearance of beauty. — Friedrich Nietzsche

The levelling of the European man is the great process which cannot be obstructed; it should even be accelerated. The necessity of cleaving gulfs, distance, order of rank, is therefore imperative - not the necessity of retarding this process. This homogenizing species requires justification as soon as it is attained: its justification is that it lies in serving a higher and sovereign race which stands upon the former and can raise itself this task only by doing this. Not merely a race of masters whose sole task is to rule, but a race with its own sphere of life, with an overflow of energy for beauty, bravery, culture, and manners, even for the most abstract thought; a yea-saying race that may grant itself every great luxury - strong enough to have no need of the tyranny of the virtue-imperative, rich enough to have no need of economy or pedantry; beyond good and evil; a hothouse for rare and exceptional plants. — Friedrich Nietzsche

There have been two great narcotics in European civilisation: Christianity and alcohol. — Friedrich Nietzsche

At the moment when anyone begins to take philosophy seriously, all the world believes the opposite."
- Human, All Too Human, "Assorted Opinions and Maxims, — Friedrich Nietzsche

With rope-ladders learned I to reach many a window, with nimble legs did I climb high masts: to sit on high masts of perception seemed to me no small bliss; To flicker like small flames on high masts: a small light, certainly, but a great comfort to cast-away sailors and shipwrecked ones!
By diverse ways and wendings did I arrive at my truth; not by one ladder did I mount to the height where mine eye roveth into my remoteness. And unwillingly only did I ask my way - that was always counter to my taste! Rather did I question and test the ways themselves.
A testing and a questioning hath been all my travelling: and verily, one must also learn to answer such questioning! That, however - is my taste: Neither a good nor a bad taste, but my taste, of which I have no longer either shame or secrecy.
"This is now my way - where is yours?" Thus did I answer those who asked me "the way." For "the way" - it doth not exist! — Friedrich Nietzsche

Accordingly, I do not believe that an "impulse to knowledge" is the father of philosophy; but that another impulse, here as elsewhere, has only made use of knowledge (and mistaken knowledge!) as an instrument. — Friedrich Nietzsche

As soon as a religion comes to dominate it has as its opponents all those who would have been its first disciples. — Friedrich Nietzsche

It is hard enough to remember my opinions, without also remembering my reasons for them! — Friedrich Nietzsche

You have made your way from worm to man, and much in you is still worm. — Friedrich Nietzsche

Healthy introspection, without undermining oneself; it is a rare gift to venture into the unexplored depths of the self, without delusions or fictions, but with an uncorrupted gaze. — Friedrich Nietzsche

But in the end one also has to understand that the needs that religion has satisfied and philosophy is now supposed to satisfy are not immutable; they can be weakened and exterminated. Consider, for example, that Christian distress of mind that comes from sighing over ones inner depravity and care for ones salvation - all concepts originating in nothing but errors of reason and deserving, not satisfaction, but obliteration. — Friedrich Nietzsche

Whenever a great thinker wants to make of himself a binding institution for future mankind, one may be certain that he is past the peak of his powers and is very weary, very close to the setting of his sun. — Friedrich Nietzsche

The most perfidious way of harming a cause consists of defending it deliberately with faulty arguments. — Friedrich Nietzsche

Man, the bravest of animals, and the one most accustomed to suffering, does not repudiate suffering as such; he desires it, he even seeks it out, provided he is shown a meaning for it, a purpose of suffering. The meaninglessness of suffering, not suffering itself, was the curse that lay over mankind so far. — Friedrich Nietzsche

[Nietzsche's] questions - transcend, but where to; ascend, but to what height? - would have answered themselves if he had calmly kept both feet on the ascetic ground. He was too sick to follow his most important insight: that the main thing in life is to take the minor things seriously. When minor things grow stronger, the danger posed by the main thing is contained; then climbing higher in the minor things means advancing in the main thing. — Peter Sloterdijk

Gradually it has become clear to me what every great philosophy so far has been: namely, the personal confession of its author and a kind of involuntary and unconscious memoir. — Friedrich Nietzsche

I would believe only in a God that knows how to dance. — Friedrich Nietzsche

Because we have for millenia made moral, aesthetic, religious demands on the world, looked upon it with blind desire, passion or fear, and abandoned ourselves to the bad habits of illogical thinking, this world has gradually become so marvelously variegated, frightful, meaningful, soulful, it has acquired color - but we have been the colorists: it is the human intellect that has made appearances appear and transported its erroneous basic conceptions into things. — Friedrich Nietzsche

Plato has given to all posterity the model of a new art form, the model of the novel--which may be described as an infinitely enhanced Aesopian fable, in which poetry holds the same rank in relation to dialectical philosophy as this same philosophy held for many centuries in relation to theology: namely the rank of ancilla. — Friedrich Nietzsche

The good men of every age are those who go to the roots of the old thoughts and bear fruit with them. — Friedrich Nietzsche

And even to me, one who likes life, it seems butterflies and soap bubbles and whatever is of their kind among human beings know most about happiness.
To see these light, foolish, delicate, sensitive little souls fluttering
that seduces Zarathustra to tears and songs.
I would only believe in a god who knew how to dance.
And when I saw my devil, there I found him earnest, thorough, deep, somber; it was the spirit of gravity
through him all things fall.
Not by wrath does one kill, but by laughing. Up, let us kill the spirit of gravity! — Friedrich Nietzsche

In some remote corner of the universe, poured out and glittering among innumerable solar systems, there once was a star on which clever animals invented knowledge. — Friedrich Nietzsche

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

The men of the period of corruption are witty and calumnious; they know that there are yet other ways of murdering than by the dagger and ambush
they know also that all that is well said is believed in. — Friedrich Nietzsche

Knapsack of the Metaphysicians.- Those who boast so mightily of the scientificality of their metaphysics should receive no answer; it is enough to pluck at the bundle which, with a certain degree of embarrassment, they keep concealed behind their back; if one succeeds in opening it, the products of that scientificality come to light, attended by their blushes: a dear little Lord God, a nice little immortality, perhaps a certain quantity of spiritualism, and in any event a whole tangled heap of 'wretched poor sinner' and Pharisee arrogance. — Friedrich Nietzsche

Rational thought is interpretation according to a scheme which we cannot escape. — Friedrich Nietzsche

At the very moment when someone is beginning to take philosophy seriously, the whole world believes the opposite. — Friedrich Nietzsche

as soon as any philosophy begins to believe in itself. It always creates the world in its own image; it cannot do otherwise. Philosophy — Friedrich Nietzsche

Nihilism is ... not only the belief that everything deserves to perish; but one actually puts one shoulder to the plough; one destroys. — Friedrich Nietzsche

Did I seek where the wind bites keenest, learn to live where no one lives, in the desert where only the polar bear lives, unlearn to pray and curse, unlearn man and god, become a ghost flitting across the glaciers? — Friedrich Nietzsche

The tragedy is that we cannot believe the dogmas of religion and metaphysics if we have the strict methods of truth in heart and head, but on the other hand, we have become through the development of humanity so tenderly suffering that we need the highest kind of means of salvation and consolation: whence arises the danger that man may bleed to death through the truth that he realises. — Friedrich Nietzsche

Amor fati: this is the very core of my being - And as to my prolonged illness, do I not owe much more to it than I owe to my health? To it I owe a higher kind of health, a sort of health which grows stronger under everything that does not actually kill it! - To it, I owe even my philosophy. ... Only great suffering is the ultimate emancipator of spirit, for it teaches one that vast suspiciousness which makes an X out of every U, a genuine and proper X, i.e., the antepenultimate letter. Only great suffering; that great suffering, under which we seem to be over a fire of greenwood, the suffering that takes its time - forces us philosophers to descend into our nethermost depths, and to let go of all trustfulness, all good-nature, all whittling-down, all mildness, all mediocrity, - on which things we had formerly staked our humanity. — Friedrich Nietzsche

Wisdom - seems to the rabble a kind of escape, a means and a trick for getting well out of a wicked game. But the genuine philosopher - as it seems to us, my friends? - lives 'unphilosophically' and 'unwisely,' above all imprudently, and feels the burden and the duty of a hundred attempts and temptations of life - he risks himself constantly, he plays the wicked game. — Friedrich Nietzsche

In every philosophical school, three thinkers succeed one another in the following way: the first produces out of himself the sapand seed, the second draws it out into threads and spins a synthetic web, and the third waits in this web for the sacrificial victims that are caught in it
and tries to live off philosophy. — Friedrich Nietzsche

Weariness that wants to reach the ultimate with one leap, with one fatal leap, a poor ignorant weariness that does not want to want any more: this created all gods and afterworlds. — Friedrich Nietzsche

One has to take a somewhat bold and dangerous line with this existence: especially as, whatever happens, we are bound to lose it. — Friedrich Nietzsche

So far there has been no philosopher in whose hands philosophy has not grown into an apology for knowledge; on this point, at least, every one is an optimist, that the greatest usefulness must be ascribed to knowledge. They are all tyrannized over by logic, and this is optimism in its essence. — Friedrich Nietzsche

More and more it seems to me that the philosopher, being of necessity a man of tomorrow and the day after tomorrow, has always found himself, and had to find himself, in contradiction to his today: his enemy was ever the ideal of today. So far all these extraordinary furtherers of men whom one calls philosophers, though they themselves have rarely felt like friends of wisdom but rather like disagreeable fools and dangerous question marks, have found their task, their hard, unwanted, inescapable task, but eventually also the greatness of their task, in being the bad conscience of their time. — Friedrich Nietzsche

And finally, to call to mind the enormous influence which "German philosophy"
I hope you understand its right to inverted commas- — Friedrich Nietzsche

Love of truth is something fearsome and mighty. — Friedrich Nietzsche

When, however, you have an enemy, then do not requite him good for evil: for that would shame him. Instead, prove that he did some good for you. And rather be angry than put to shame! And when you are cursed, I do not like it that you want to bless. Rather curse a little also! And if you are done a great injustice, then quickly add five small ones. Hideous to behold is he who is obsessed with an injustice. — Friedrich Nietzsche

Nietzsche, an infinitely harder and more courageous intellect, was incapable of any such confusion of ideas; he seldom allowed sentimentality to turn him from the glaring fact. — H.L. Mencken

Ah, ye brethren, that God whom I created was human work and human madness, like all the Gods! — Friedrich Nietzsche

The maturity of man - that means, to have reacquired the seriousness that one had as a child at play — Friedrich Nietzsche

Nothing stands so much in the way of the production and propagation of the great philosopher by nature as does the bad philosopher who works for the state. — Friedrich Nietzsche

Our way is upward, from the species across to the super-species. But the degenerate mind which says 'All for me' is a horror to us. — Friedrich Nietzsche

What then is truth? A movable host of metaphors, metonymies, and anthropomorphisms: in short, a sum of human relations which have been poetically and rhetorically intensified, transferred, and embellished, and which, after long usage, seem to a people to be fixed, canonical, and binding. Truths are illusions which we have forgotten are illusions - they are metaphors that have become worn out and have been drained of sensuous force. — Friedrich Nietzsche

Socrates ... is the first philosopher of life [Lebensphilosoph], ... Thinking serves life, while among all previous philosophers life had served thought and knowledge ... Thus Socratic philosophy is absolutely practical: it is hostile to all knowledge unconnected to ethical implications. — Friedrich Nietzsche

Even today many educated people think that the victory of Christianity over Greek philosophy is a proof of the superior truth of the former - although in this case it was only the coarser and more violent that conquered the more spiritual and delicate. So far as superior truth is concerned, it is enough to observe that the awakening sciences have allied themselves point by point with the philosophy of Epicurus, but point by point rejected Christianity. — Friedrich Nietzsche

4. The falseness of an opinion is not for us any objection to it: it is here, perhaps, that our new language sounds most strangely. 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. TO RECOGNISE UNTRUTH AS A CONDITION OF LIFE; that is certainly to impugn the traditional ideas of value in a dangerous manner, and a philosophy which ventures to do so, has thereby alone placed itself beyond good and evil. — Friedrich Nietzsche

I am one thing, my writings are another. — Friedrich Nietzsche

Moderation sees itself as beautiful; it is unaware that in the eye of the immoderate it appears black and sober and consequently ugly-looking — Friedrich Nietzsche

Philosophy is not suited for the masses, what they need is holiness. — Friedrich Nietzsche

... if you refuse to let your own suffering lie upon you for an hour and if you constantly try to prevent and forestall all possible stress way ahead of time; if you experience suffering and displeasure as evil, hateful, worthy of annihilation, and as a defect of existence, then it is clear that besides your religion of pity you also harbor another religion in your heart that is perhaps the mother of the religion of pity: the religion of comfortableness. How little you know of human happiness, you comfortable and benevolent people, for happiness and unhappiness are sisters and even twins that either grow up together or, as in your case, remain small together. — Friedrich Nietzsche

It is a self-deception of philosophers and moralists to imagine that they escape decadence by opposing it. That is beyond their will; and, however little they acknowledge it, one later discovers that they were among the most powerful promoters of decadence. — Friedrich Nietzsche

The philosopher believes that the value of his philosophy lies in the whole, in the building: posterity discovers it in the bricks with which he built and which are then often used again for better building: in the fact, that is to say, that building can be destroyed and nonetheless possess value as material. — 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

Every means hitherto employed with the intention of making mankind moral has been thoroughly immoral. — Friedrich Nietzsche

All great things must first wear terrifying and monstrous masks, in order to inscribe themselves on the hearts of humanity. — Friedrich Nietzsche

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

Kaufmann was nothing if not thorough. He exposed in detail the machinations of Nietzsche's sister Elisabeth to manipulate her brother's texts, and to enlist him in the very causes that he had consistently denounced. Her crude prejudices, including a heavy dose of anti-Semitism, had nothing in common with her brother's philosophy. — Friedrich Nietzsche

You may lie with your mouth, but with the mouth you make as you do so you none the less tell the truth. — Friedrich Nietzsche

Excess of strength alone is proof of strength — 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

It is so little true that martyrs offer any support to the truth of a cause that
I am inclined to deny that any martyr has ever had anything to do with the
truth at all. — Friedrich Nietzsche

One must reach out and try to grasp this astonishing finesse, that the value of lif cannot be estimated. — Friedrich Nietzsche

All beings so far have created something beyond themselves; and do you want to be the ebb of this great flood and even go back to the beasts rather than overcome man? What is the ape to man? A laughingstock or a painful embarrassment. And man shall be just that for the overman: a laughingstock or a painful embarrassment ... — Friedrich Nietzsche

I do not believe that an "impulse
to knowledge" is the father of philosophy; but that another impulse, here as elsewhere, has only made use of knowledge (and mistaken knowledge!) as an instrument.But whoever considers the fundamental impulses of man with a view to determining how far they may have here acted as INSPIRING GENII (or as demons and cobolds), will find that they have all practiced philosophy at one time or another, and that each one of them would have been only too glad to look upon itself as the ultimate end of existence and the legitimate LORD over all the other impulses. — Friedrich Nietzsche

[Philosophers] are not honest enough in their work, although they make a lot of virtuous noise when the problem of truthfulness is touched even remotely. They all pose as if they had discovered and reached their real opinions through the self-development of a cold, pure, divinely unconcerned dialectic ... ; while at bottom it is an assumption, a hunch, indeed a kind of "inspiration" most often a desire of the heart that has been filtered and made abstract that they defend with reasons they have sought after the fact. — Friedrich Nietzsche

All philosophy is a form of confession. — Friedrich Nietzsche

Popular medicine and popular morality belong together and ought not to be evaluated so differently as they still are: both are the most dangerous pseudo-sciences. — Friedrich Nietzsche

Where are we headed? Are we not endlessly plunging - backwards, sideways, forwards, in all directions? Is there an up and a down anymore? Do we not wander as if through an endless nothingness? Do we not feel the breath of empty space? Hasn't it grown colder? — Friedrich Nietzsche

Pure logic is the impossibility by means of which science is maintained. — Friedrich Nietzsche

There is a point in every philosophy at which the "conviction" of the philosopher appears on the scene; or, to put it in the words of an ancient mystery: adventavit asinus, / pulcher et fortissimus. (Translation: The ass arrives, beautiful and most brave.) — Friedrich Nietzsche