Love Nietzsche Quotes & Sayings

Love your enemies because they bring out the best in you. — Friedrich Nietzsche

This is the hardest of all: to close the open hand out of love, and keep modest as a giver. — Friedrich Nietzsche

My formula is Amor fati: ... not only to bear up under every necessity, but to love it. — Friedrich Nietzsche

Man and man's earth are unexhausted and undiscovered. Wake and listen! Verily, the earth shall yet be a source of recovery. Remain faithful to the earth, with the power of your virtue. Let your gift-giving love and your knowledge serve the meaning of the earth. — 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

To embrace the contingency of one's life is to embrace one's fate as an ephemeral but sentient being. As Nietzsche claimed, one can come to love that fate. But to do so one must first embrace it, though one instinctively recoils at such a prospect. — Stephen Batchelor

What else is love but understanding and rejoicing in the fact that another person lives acts and experiences otherwise than we do? — Friedrich Nietzsche

Verily, too early died that Hebrew whom the preachers of slow death honour: and to many hath it proved a calamity that he died too early. As yet had he known only tears, and the melancholy of the Hebrews, together with the hatred of the good and just - the Hebrew Jesus: then was he seized with the longing for death. Had he but remained in the wilderness, and far from the good and just! Then, perhaps, would he have learned to live, and love the earth - and laughter also! Believe it, my brethren! He died too early; he himself would have disavowed his doctrine had he attained to my age! Noble enough was he to disavow! — Friedrich Nietzsche

Marriage as a long conversation. - When marrying you should ask yourself this question: do you believe you are going to enjoy talking with this woman into your old age? Everything else in a marriage is transitory, but most of the time that you're together will be devoted to conversation. — Friedrich Nietzsche

As Narrative (Novel, Passion), love is a story which is accomplished, in the sacred sense of the word: it is a program which must be completed. For me, on the contrary, this story has already taken place; for what is event is exclusively the delight of which I have been the object and whose aftereffects I repeat (and fail to achieve). Enamoration is a drama, if we restore to this word the archaic meaning Nietzsche gives it: "Ancient drama envisioned great declamatory scenes, which excluded action (action took place before or behind the stage)." Amorous seduction (a pure hypnotic moment) takes place before discourse and behind the proscenium of consciousness: the amorous "event" is of a hieratic order: it is my own local legend, my little sacred history that I declaim to myself, and this declamation of a fait accompli (frozen, embalmed, removed from any praxis) is the lover's discourse. — Roland Barthes

If we lacked curiosity, we should do less for the good of our neighbor. But, under the name of duty or pity, curiosity steals into the home of the unhappy and the needy. Perhaps even in the famous mother-love there is a good deal of curiosity. — Friedrich Nietzsche

You say it is the good cause that hallows even war? I say unto you: it is the good war that hallows any cause. War and courage have accomplished more great things than love of the neighbor. Not your pity but your courage has so far saved the unfortunate. — Friedrich Nietzsche

The Germans love frankness and honesty. It is so convenient to be frank and honest. This confidingness, this complacence, this showing the cards of German honesty, is probably the most dangerous and most successful disguise which the German is up to nowadays. — Friedrich Nietzsche

One can promise actions, but not feelings, for the latter are involuntary. He who promises to love forever or hate forever or be forever faithful to someone is promising something that is not in his power. — Friedrich Nietzsche

The inability to lie is far from the love of truth. — Friedrich Nietzsche

At every step one has to wrestle for truth; one has to surrender for it almost everything to which the heart, to which our love, our trust in life, cling otherwise. That requires greatness of soul: the service of truth is the hardest service. What does it mean, after all, to have integrity in matters of the spirit? That one is severe against one's heart ... that one makes of every Yes and No a matter of conscience. — Friedrich Nietzsche

I love him who seeks to create over and beyond himself and thus perishes. — Friedrich Nietzsche

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

Love brings the high and concealed characteristics of the lover into the light
what is rare and exceptional in him: to that extent it easily deceives regarding his normality. — Friedrich Nietzsche

Sometimes, you have to love beyond yourself! And that's how you learn to love! That's why you had to drink the bitter glass of your love. — Friedrich Nietzsche

Remain true to the earth, my brethren, with the power of your virtue! Let your bestowing love and your knowledge be devoted to be the meaning of the earth! ... Let it not fly away from the earthly and beat against eternal walls with its wings ... Lead, like me, the flown-away virtue back to the earth - yes, back to body and life: that it may give to the earth its meaning, a human meaning! — Friedrich Nietzsche

What is love but understanding and rejoicing that another lives, works, and feels in a different and opposite way to ourselves? That love may be able to bridge over the contrasts by joys, we must not remove or deny those contrasts. — Friedrich Nietzsche

Marriages that made out of love (so-called "love-matches") have error as their father and misery (necessity) as their mother. — Friedrich Nietzsche

A "free spirit" - this cool expression does good in every condition, it almost warms. One no longer lives, in the fetters of love and hatred, without Yea, without Nay, voluntarily near, voluntarily distant, preferring to escape, to turn aside, to flutter forth, to fly up and away; one is fastidious like everyone who has once seen an immense variety beneath him, - and one has become the opposite of those who trouble themselves about things which do not concern them. In fact, it is nothing but things which now concern the free spirit, - and how many things! - which no longer trouble him! — Friedrich Nietzsche

Like the creatures of the forest and the sea, I love
To lose myself for a while ... — Friedrich Nietzsche

The weak and misbegotten shall perish: first principle of our brotherly love. And they shall be given every assistance. — Friedrich Nietzsche

Our faith in others betrays that we would rather have faith in ourselves. Our longing for a friend is our betrayer. And often with our love we want merely to overcome envy. And often we attack and make ourselves enemies, to conceal that we are vulnerable. — Friedrich Nietzsche

Love forgives the lover even his lust. — Friedrich Nietzsche

I love those who do not know how to live, except by going under, for they are those who cross over. — Friedrich Nietzsche

They believe one becomes selfless in love because one desires the advantage of another human being, often against one's own advantage. But in return for that they want to possess the other person. — Friedrich Nietzsche

Do I advise you to love thy neighbor? I suggest rather to escape from thy neighbor and to love those who are the farthest away from you. Higher than the love for thy neighbor is the love for the man who is distant and has still to come. — Friedrich Nietzsche

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

In woman's love there is injustice and blindness to all she does not love. And even in woman's conscious love, there is still always attack and lightning and night, along with the light. — Friedrich Nietzsche

One ought to hold on to one's heart; for if one lets it go, one soon loses control of the head too. — Friedrich Nietzsche

Discovering that one is loved in return really ought to disenchant the lover with the beloved. 'What? this person is modest enough to love even you? Or stupid enough? Or-or- — Friedrich Nietzsche

Is this Tree of Life a God one could worship? Pray to? Fear? Probably not. But it did make the ivy twine and the sky so blue, so perhaps the song I love tells a truth after all. The Tree of Life is neither perfect nor infinite in space or time, but it is actual, and if it is not Anselm's "Being greater than which nothing can be conceived," it is surely a being that is greater than anything any of us will ever conceive of in detail worthy of its detail. Is something sacred? Yes, say I with Nietzsche. I could not pray to it, but I can stand in affirmation of its magnificence. This world is sacred. — Daniel C. Dennett

The man of knowledge must be able not only to love his enemies but also to hate his friends. — Friedrich Nietzsche

You shall love beyond yourselves some day! So first, learn to love. And for that you have to drink the bitter cup of your love. — Friedrich Nietzsche

Of all writings I love only that which is written with blood. Write with blood: and you will discover that blood is spirit. — Friedrich Nietzsche

I have thought of you much, and have shared with you in thought much that has been elevating, stirring, and gay, so much so that it has been like living with my dear friends. If only you know how novel and strange that seems to an old hermit like me? How often it has made me laugh at myself! — Friedrich Nietzsche

Here and there on earth there is probably a kind of continuation of love; in which this greedy desire of two people for each other gives way to a new desire and greed, a shared higher thirst for an ideal above them.
But who knows such love? who has experienced it?
Its true name is friendship — Friedrich Nietzsche

Remain faithful to the earth, my brothers, with the power of your virtue. Let your gift-giving love and your knowledge serve the meaning of the earth. Thus I beg and beseech you. Do not let them fly away from earthly things and beat with their wings against eternal walls. Alas, there has always been so much virtue that has flown away. Lead back to the earth the virtue that flew away, as I do - back to the body, back to life, that it may give the earth a meaning, a human meaning. — Friedrich Nietzsche

Today I love myself as I love my god: who could charge me with a sin today? I know only sins against my god; but who knows my god? — Friedrich Nietzsche

Let this idea take possession of you, and I promise that it will change you forever.
Do you love the idea or hate it?
Live in such a way that you love the idea.
Nietzsche's wager.
Consummate your life.
Die at the right time.
The courage to change your convictions!
This life is your eternal life. — Irvin D. Yalom

We no longer love our knowledge enough once we have passed it on. — Friedrich Nietzsche

I love the valiant; but it is not enough to wield a broadsword, one must also know against whom. — Friedrich Nietzsche

There is always some madness in love. But there is also always some reason in madness. — Friedrich Nietzsche

I love him who scatters golden words in advance of his deeds, and always does more than he promises: for he seeks his own down-going. — Friedrich Nietzsche

Even the most beautiful scenery is no longer assured of our love after we have lived in it for three months, and some distant coast attracts our avarice: possessions are generally diminished by possession. — Friedrich Nietzsche

Love, too, has to be learned. — Friedrich Nietzsche

Parasitism is the only practice of the church; with its ideal of anaemia, its holiness, draining all blood, all love, all hope for life; the beyond as the will to negate every reality; the cross as the mark of recognition for the most subterranean conspiracy that ever existed-against health, beauty, whatever has turned out well, courage, spirit, graciousness of the soul, against life itself. — Friedrich Nietzsche

Love of one is a piece of barbarism: for it is practised at the expense of all others. Love of God likewise. — Friedrich Nietzsche

Let your virtue be too high for the familiarity of names, and if you must speak of it, then do not be ashamed to stammer about it. Then speak and stammer: "This is my good, I love this, thus I like it entirely, thus alone do I want the good. I — Friedrich Nietzsche

Sensuality often hastens the "Growth of Love" so much that the roots remain weak and are easily torn up. — Friedrich Nietzsche

The danger in happiness - Now everything is turning out right for me; from now on i'll love every turn of fate - Who wants to be my fate? — Friedrich Nietzsche

That is an artist as I love artists, modest in his needs: he really wants only two things, his bread and his art - panem et Circen. — Friedrich Nietzsche

What [Nietzsche] calls slave morality is to him purely spite-morality; and this spite-morality gave new names to all ideals. Thus impotence, which offers no reprisal, became goodness; craven baseness became humility; submission to him who was feared became obedience; inability to assert one's self became reluctance to assert one's self, became forgiveness, love of one's enemies. Misery became a distinction — Georg Brandes

My formula for human greatness is amor fati: that one wants nothing to be different, not in the future, not in the past, not for all eternity. Not only to endure what is necessary, still less to conceal it - all idealism is falseness in the face of necessity - , but to love it ... — Friedrich Nietzsche

O happiness! O happiness! Wilt thou perhaps sing, O my soul? Thou liest in the grass. But this is the secret, solemn hour, when no shepherd playeth his pipe.

Take care! Hot noontide sleepeth on the fields. Do not sing! Hush! The world is perfect.

Do not sing, thou prairie-bird, my soul! Do not even whisper! Lo - hush! The old noontide sleepeth, it moveth its mouth: doth it not just now drink a drop of happiness -

- An old brown drop of golden happiness, golden wine? Something whisketh over it, its happiness laugheth. Thus - laugheth a God. Hush!

"For happiness, how little sufficeth for happiness!" Thus spoke I once and thought myself wise. But it was a blasphemy: that have I now learned. Wise fools speak better.

The least thing precisely, the gentlest thing, the lightest thing, a lizard's rustling, a breath, a whisk, an eye-glance - little maketh up the best happiness. Hush! — Friedrich Nietzsche

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

Whoever wants to set a good example must add a grain of foolishness to his virtue: then others can imitate and yet at the same time surpass the one they imitate-which human beings love to do. — Friedrich Nietzsche

State is the name of the coldest of all cold monsters. It even lies coldly, and this lie crawls out of its mouth: "I, the state, am the people." This is a lie! The ones who created the peoples were the creators, they hung a faith and a love over them, and thus they served life. The ones who set traps for the many and call them "state" are annihilators, they hang a sword and a hundred cravings over them. Where there are still peoples the state is not understood, and it is hated as the evil eye and the sin against customs and rights. This — Friedrich Nietzsche

I love him who justifies the future ones, and redeems the past ones: for he is willing to perish through the present ones. — Friedrich Nietzsche

Many brief follies
that is what you call love. And your marriage puts an end to many brief follies, with a single long stupidity. — Friedrich Nietzsche

There is not enough love and kindness in the world to permit us to give any of it away to imaginary beings. — Friedrich Nietzsche

I love the great despisers because they are the great adorers ... — Friedrich Nietzsche

Whoever extolls him as a God of love, does not think highly enough of love itself. — Friedrich Nietzsche

Every great love brings with it the cruel idea of killing the object of its love so that it may be removed once and for all from the wicked game of change: for love dreads change even more than annihilation. — Friedrich Nietzsche

Out of a brotherly love we occasionally embrace this or that somebody (because we cannot embrace everybody): but we must never letour somebody know it. — Friedrich Nietzsche

Love is a state in which a man sees things most decidedly as they are not. — Friedrich Nietzsche

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

That which is done out of love is always beyond good and evil. — Friedrich Nietzsche

Your bad love of yourselves makes solitude a prison to you. — Friedrich Nietzsche

We do not by any means think it desirable that the kingdom of righteousness and peace should be established on earth (because under any circumstances it would be the kingdom of the profoundest mediocrity and Chinaism); we rejoice in all men, who like ourselves love danger, war and adventure, who do not make compromises, nor let themselves be captured, conciliated and stunted; we count ourselves among the conquerors; we ponder over the need of a new order of things, even of a new slavery for every strengthening and elevation of the type "man" also involves a new form of slavery. — Friedrich Nietzsche

He sank more and more into apathy; little interested him apart from dolls and other children's toys. He still spoke occasionally, but mainly to produce stock sentences in the style of a brainwashed schoolboy. Franziska made a record of some of them: 'I translated much'. 'I lived in a good place called Naumburg'. 'I swam in the Saale'. 'I was very fine because I lived in a fine house'. 'I love Bismarck'. 'I don't like Friedrich Nietzsche'. It would be a mercy to think that he experienced at least a kind of vegetative contentment, but this seems not to have been the case. He suffered from his life-long curse of insomnia, and visitors downstairs were often disturbed by groans and howls coming from the upstairs bedroom. Towards the end of Franziska recorded him uttering 'More light!' (Goethe's dying words) and 'In short, dead!' suggesting that that is what he wanted to be. — Julian Young

O my brothers, your nobility should not look backward but ahead! Exiles shall you be from all father- and forefather-lands! Your children's land shall you love: this love shall be your new nobility - the undiscovered land in the most distant sea. For that I bid your sails search and search. In your children you shall make up for being the children of your fathers: thus shall you redeem all that is past. — Friedrich Nietzsche

I love him whose soul is lavish, who wants no thanks and does not give back: for he always gives, and desires not to keep for himself. — Friedrich Nietzsche

He wants to be known deep down, abysmally deep down, before he is capable of being loved at all; he dares to let himself be fathomed. He feels that his beloved is fully in his possession only when she no longer deceives herself about him, when she loves him just as much for his devilry and hidden insatiability as for his graciousness, patience, and spirituality. — Friedrich Nietzsche

My formula for greatness in a human being is amor fati: that one wants nothing to be different, not forward, not backward, not in all eternity. Not merely bear what is necessary, still less conceal it - all idealism is mendaciousness in the face of what is necessary - but love it — Friedrich Nietzsche

To love mankind for the sake of God-that has been the most nobel and far-fetched feeling yet achieved by human beings. The idea that without some sanctifying ulterior motive, a love of mankind is just one more brutish stupidity, that the predisposition to such a love must first find its weight, its refinement, its grain of salt and pinch of ambergris in another even higher predisposition-whoever first felt and 'witnessed' this, and however much his tongue may have stuttered in attempting to express such a delicate idea: may he remain forever venerable and holy in our sight as the man who as yet has flown the highest and erred the most beautifully! — Friedrich Nietzsche

The greatest cure for love is still that time honoured medicine - love returned. — Friedrich Nietzsche

To love those who despise us, and to give one's hand to the phantom who tries to frighten us? — Friedrich Nietzsche

The sexes deceive themselves about one another: the reason being that at bottom they honor and love only themselves (or their ownideal, to express it more agreeably). Thus man wants woman to be peaceable
but woman is essentially, like the cat, not peaceable, however well she may have trained herself to assume the appearance of peace. — Friedrich Nietzsche

If God had wanted to become an object of love, he would first of all have had to forgo judging and justice : a judge, and even a gracious judge, is no object of love. — Friedrich Nietzsche

Whoever extolleth him as a God of love, doth not think highly enough of love itself. Did not that God want also to be judge? But the loving one loveth irrespective of reward and requital. — Friedrich Nietzsche

In true love it is the soul that envelops the body. — Friedrich Nietzsche

You utlilitarians, you too love everything useful only as avehicle of your inclinations - you too really find the noise of its wheels intolerable? — Friedrich Nietzsche

Immature is the love of the youth, and immature his hatred of man and earth. His mind and the wings of his spirit are still tied down and heavy. — Friedrich Nietzsche

I call myself the last philosopher, because I am the last man. No one speaks with me but myself, and my voice comes to me like the voice of a dying man! Let me associate for but one hour more with you, dear voice, with you, the last trace of the memory of all human happiness. With you I escape loneliness through self-delusion and lie myself into multiplicity and love. For my heart resists the belief that love is dead. It cannot bear the shudder of the loneliest loneliness, and so it forces me to speak as if I were two. — Friedrich Nietzsche

My thoughts', said the wanderer to his shadow, 'should show me where I stand, but they should not betray to me where I am going. I love ignorance of the future and do not want to perish of impatience and premature tasting of things promised. — Friedrich Nietzsche

There is not enough love and goodness in the world to permit giving any of it away to imaginary beings. — Friedrich Nietzsche

Ultimately, it is the desire, not the desired, that we love. — Friedrich Nietzsche

We must learn to love, learn to be kind, and this from the earliest youth; if education or chance give us no opportunity to practice these feelings, our soul becomes dry and unsuited even to understanding the tender inventions of loving people. — Friedrich Nietzsche

as if a round apple presented itself to my hand, a ripe, golden apple with a soft, cool, velvety skin - thus the world presented itself to me -
as if a tree nodded to me, a wide-branching, strong-willed tree, bent for reclining and as a footstool for the way-weary: thus the world stood upon my headland -
as if tender hands brought me a casket - a casket open for the delight of modest, adoring eyes: thus the world presented himself before me today -
not so enigmatic as to frighten away human love, not so explicit as to put to sleep human wisdom - a good, human thing was the world to me today, this world of which so many evil things are said! — Friedrich Nietzsche

Out of love, women become entirely what it is that they are in the imaginations of the men who love them. — Friedrich Nietzsche

Where one can no longer love, there one should pass by. — Friedrich Nietzsche

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

Help yourself, then everyone will help you. Principle of brotherly love. — Friedrich Nietzsche

Thus spoke the devil to me once: "God too has his hell: it is his love of man." ... And most recently I heard him speak this word: "God is dead: God died of his pity for man." - On the Pitying — Friedrich Nietzsche

You force all things to flow towards you and into you, so that they shall flow back again out of your fountain as the gifts of your love. — Friedrich Nietzsche