Nietzsche Morality Quotes & Sayings

This is the antinomy: insofar as we believe in morality we pass sentence on existence. — Friedrich Nietzsche

[Anything which] is a living thing and not a dying body ... will have to be an incarnate will to power, it will strive to grow, spread, seize, become predominant - not from any morality or immorality but because it is living and because life simply is will to power ... 'Exploitation' ... belongs to the essence of what lives, as a basic organic function; it is a consequence of the will to power, which is after all the will of life. — Friedrich Nietzsche

For fanaticism is the only form of willpower that even the weak and insecure can be brought to attain. — Friedrich Nietzsche

If the morality of "thou shalt not lie" is rejected, the "sense for truth" will have to legitimize itself before another tribunal: - as a means of the preservation of man, as will to power. — Friedrich Nietzsche

Another root of our malady is our loss of the sense of the worth and dignity of the human being. Nietzsche predicted this when he pointed out that the individual was being swallowed up in the herd, and that we were living by a "slave-morality." Marx also predicted it when he proclaimed that modern man was being "de-humanized," and Kafka showed in his amazing stories how people literally can lose their identity as persons. — Rollo May

The destiny of the human race is to widen the gap separating it from the lower races of animals. Any code of morality which retains its permanence and authority after the conditions of existence which gave rise to it have changed, works against this upward progress of man. — Friedrich Nietzsche

Morality, said Jesus, is kindness to the weak; morality, said Nietzsche, is the bravery of the strong; morality, says Plato, is the effective harmony of the whole. — Will Durant

Every age, every culture, every ethos and tradition has a style of its own, has the varieties of gentleness and harshness, of beauty and cruelty that are appropriate to it. Each age will take certain kinds of suffering for granted, will patiently accept certain wrongs. Human life becomes a real hell of suffering only when two ages, two cultures and religions overlap. Required to live in the Middle Ages, someone from the Graeco-Roman period would have died a wretched death by suffocation, just as a savage inevitably would in the midst our civilization. Now, there are times when a whole generation gets caught to such an extent between two eras, two styles of life, that nothing comes naturally to it since it has lost all sense of morality, security and innocence. A man of Nietzsche's mettle had to endure our present misery more than a generation in advance. Today, thousands are enduring what he had to suffer alone and without being understood. — Hermann Hesse

One is in a state of hope because the basic physiological feeling is once again strong and rich; one trusts in God because the feeling of fullness and strength gives a sense of rest. Morality and religion belong entirely to the psychology of error: in every single case, cause and effect are confused; or truth is confused with the effects of believing something to be true; or a state of consciousness is confused with its physiological origins. — Friedrich Nietzsche

Whatever they may think and say about their "egoism", the great majority nonetheless do nothing for their ego their whole life long: what they do is done for the phantom of their ego which has formed itself in the heads of those around them and has been communicated to them. — Friedrich Nietzsche

The preponderance of pain over pleasure is the cause of our fictitious morality and religion. — Friedrich Nietzsche

Morality is just a fiction used by the herd of inferior human beings to hold back the few superior men. — Friedrich Nietzsche

In every ascetic morality man worships a part of himself as God and for that he needs to diabolize the other part. — Friedrich Nietzsche

Morality makes stupid.- Custom represents the experiences of men of earlier times as to what they supposed useful and harmful - but the sense for custom (morality) applies, not to these experiences as such, but to the age, the sanctity, the indiscussability of the custom. And so this feeling is a hindrance to the acquisition of new experiences and the correction of customs: that is to say, morality is a hindrance to the development of new and better customs: it makes stupid. — Friedrich Nietzsche

It is a prejudice to think that morality is more favourable to the development of reason than immorality. — Friedrich Nietzsche

Meaning and morality of One's life come from within oneself. Healthy, strong individuals seek self expansion by experimenting and by living dangerously. Life consists of an infinite number of possibilities and the healthy person explores as many of them as posible. Religions that teach pity, self-contempt, humility, self-restraint and guilt are incorrect. The good life is ever changing, challenging, devoid of regret, intense, creative and risky. — Friedrich Nietzsche

In the philosopher, on the contrary, there is absolutely nothing impersonal; and above all, his morality furnishes a decided and decisive testimony as to WHO HE IS, - that is to say, in what order the deepest impulses of his nature stand to each other. — Friedrich Nietzsche

Master-morality and Slave-morality. — Friedrich Nietzsche

Compulsion precedes morality, indeed morality itself is compulsion for a time, to which one submits for the avoidance of pain. — Friedrich Nietzsche

As the will to truth thus gains self-consciousness - there can be no doubt of that - morality will gradually perish now: this is the great spectacle in a hundred acts reserved for the next two centuries in Europe - the most terrible, most questionable, and perhaps also the most hopeful of all spectacles. Friedrich Nietzsche, The Genealogy of Morals — Jonathan Glover

There is no such thing as moral phenomena, but only a moral interpretation of phenomena — Friedrich Nietzsche

Life was indeed cruel; but it was better to glorify the Will than deny it. — John N. Gray

The definition of morality: Morality is the idiosyncrasy of decadents having the hidden desire to revenge themselves upon life - and being successful. — Friedrich Nietzsche

Even though there is neither much altruism nor equality in the world, there is almost universal endorsement of the values of altruism and equality - even, notoriously (and as Nietzsche seemed well aware), by those who are is worst enemies in practice. So Nietzsche's critique is that a culture in the grips of MPS [Morality in the Pejorative Sense], even without acting on MPS, poses the real obstacle to flourishing, because it teaches potential higher types to disvalue what would be most conductive to their creativity and value what is irrelevant or perhaps even hostile to it. — Brian Leiter

And while I shall keep silent about some points, I do not want to remain silent about my morality which says to me: Live in seclusion so that you can live for yourself. Live in ignorance about what seems most important to your age. Between yourself and today lay the skin of at least three centuries. And the clamor of today, the noise of wars and revolutions should be a mere murmur for you. — Friedrich Nietzsche

While every aristocratic morality springs from a triumphant affirmation of its own demands, the slave morality says "no" from the very outset to what is "outside itself," "different from itself," and "not itself: and this "no" is its creative deed. This — Friedrich Nietzsche

The refinement of morality increases together with the refinement of fear. Today the fear of disagreeable feelings in other people is almost the strongest of our own disagreeable feelings. — Friedrich Nietzsche

A moral system valid for all is basically immoral. — Friedrich Nietzsche

Suspicious.- To admit a belief merely because it is a custom - but that means to be dishonest, cowardly, lazy! - And so could dishonesty, cowardice and laziness be the preconditions for morality? — Friedrich Nietzsche

All preachers of morality, as also all theologians have a bad habit in common: all of them try to persuade man that he is very ill, and that a severe, final, radical cure is necessary. — Friedrich Nietzsche

Our vanity would have just that which we do best count as that which is hardest for us. The origin of many a morality. — Friedrich Nietzsche

People have always wanted to 'improve' human beings; for the most part, this has been called morality. — Friedrich Nietzsche

No one is accountable for existing at all, or for being constituted as he is, or for living in the circumstances and surroundings in which he lives. The fatality of his nature cannot be disentangled from the fatality of all that which has been and will be. He is not the result of a special design, a will, a purpose; he is not the subject of an attempt to attain an 'ideal of man' or an 'ideal of happiness' or an 'ideal of morality'
it is absurd to want to hand over his nature to some purpose or other. We invented the concept 'purpose': in reality purpose is lacking ... One is necessary, one is a piece of fate, one belongs to the whole, one is in the whole
there exists nothing which could judge, measure, compare, condemn our being, for that would be to judge, measure, condemn the whole ... — Friedrich Nietzsche

The feelings of devotion, self-sacrifice for one's neighbor, the whole morality of self-denial must be questioned mercilessly and taken to court ... There is too much charm and sugar in these feelings of 'for others,' 'not for myself,' for us not to need to become doubly suspicious at this point and to ask: 'are these not perhaps-seductions? — Friedrich Nietzsche

Zarathustra was the first to consider the fight of good and evil the very wheel in the machinery of things: the transposition of morality into the metaphysical realm, as a force, cause, and end in itself, is his work. [ ... ] Zarathustra created this most calamitous error, morality; consequently, he must also be the first to recognize it. — Friedrich Nietzsche

Those who have abandoned God cling that much more firmly to the faith in morality.[11] — Friedrich Nietzsche

The pathetic thing that grows out of this condition is called faith: in other words, closing one's eyes upon one's self once for all, to avoid suffering the sight of incurable falsehood. People erect a concept of morality, of virtue, of holiness upon this false view of all things; they ground good conscience upon faulty vision; they argue that no other sort of vision has value any more, once they have made theirs sacrosanct with the names of "God," "salvation" and "eternity." I unearth this theological instinct in all directions: it is the most widespread and the most subterranean form of falsehood to be found on earth. — Friedrich Nietzsche

I deny morality as I deny alchemy. — 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

That passion is better than stoicism or hypocrisy; that straightforwardness, even in evil, is better than losing oneself in trying to observe traditional morality; that the free man is just as able to be good as evil, but that the unemancipated man is a disgrace to nature, and has no share in heavenly or earthly bliss — Friedrich Nietzsche

Friedrich Nietzsche, who famously gave us the 'God is dead' phrase was interested in the sources of morality. He warned that the emergence of something (whether an organ, a legal institution, or a religious ritual) is never to be confused with its acquired purpose: 'Anything in existence, having somehow come about, is continually interpreted anew, requisitioned anew, transformed and redirected to a new purpose.'

This is a liberating thought, which teaches us to never hold the history of something against its possible applications. Even if computers started out as calculators, that doesn't prevent us from playing games on them. (47) (quoting Nietzsche, the Genealogy of Morals) — Frans De Waal

Morality is neither rational nor absolute nor natural. World has known many moral systems, each of which advances claims universality; all moral systems are therefore particular, serving a specific purpose for their propagators or creators, and enforcing a certain regime that disciplines human beings for social life by narrowing our perspectives and limiting our horizons. — Friedrich Nietzsche

Secular society has been unfairly impoverished by the loss of an array of practices and themes which atheists typically find it impossible to live with because they seem too closely associated with, to quote Nietzsche's useful phrase, 'the bad odours of religion'. We have grown frightened of the word morality. We bridle at the thought of hearing a sermon. We flee from the idea that art should be uplifting or have an ethical mission. We don't go on pilgrimages. We can't build temples. We have no mechanisms for expressing gratitude. Strangers rarely sing together. We are presented with an unpleasant choice between either committing to peculiar concepts about immaterial deities or letting go entirely of a host of consoling, subtle or just charming rituals for which we struggle to find equivalents in secular society. — Alain De Botton

In the presence of morality, as in the face of any authority, one is not allowed to think, far less to express an opinion: here one has to - obey! As long as the world has existed no authority has yet been willing to let itself become the object of criticism; and to criticise morality itself, to regard morality as a problem, as problematic: what? has that not been - is that not - immoral? — Friedrich Nietzsche

If this is so, why should any man bother about moral rules and regulations? Why should any man conform to laws formulated by a people whose outlook on the universe probably differed diametrically from his own? Why should any man obey a regulation which is denounced, by his common-sense, as a hodge-podge of absurdities, and why should he model his whole life upon ideals invented to serve the temporary needs of a forgotten race of some past age? These questions Nietzsche asked himself. His conclusion was a complete rejection of all fixed codes of morality, and with them of all gods, messiahs, prophets, saints, popes, — H.L. Mencken

Do you suppose that sacrifice is the hallmark of moral action?
Just stop to consider whether sacrifice is not involved in every action that is done with deliberation, the worst as well as the best. — Friedrich Nietzsche

When one gives up the Christian faith, one pulls the right to Christian morality out from under one's feet. This morality is by no means self-evident. Christianity is a system, a whole view of things thought out together. By breaking one main concept out of it, the faith in God, one breaks the whole. It stands or falls with faith in God. — Friedrich Nietzsche

While every noble morality develops from a triumphant affirmation of itself, slave morality from the outset says No to what is "outside," what is "different," what is "not itself"; and this No is its creative deed. — Friedrich Nietzsche

In Christianity neither morality nor religion come into contact with reality at any point. — Friedrich Nietzsche

All history is the experimental refutation of the theory of the so-called moral order of things. — Friedrich Nietzsche

Morality is the herd-instinct in the individual. — 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

Life has not been devised by morality: it wants deception, it lives on deception. — Friedrich Nietzsche

concerns indeed morality, - a — Friedrich Nietzsche

In order for once to get a glimpse of our European morality from a distance, in order to compare it with other earlier or future moralities, one must do as the traveller who wants to know the height of the towers of a city: he leaves the city. — Friedrich Nietzsche

For, confronted with morality (especially Christian, or unconditional, morality), life must continually and inevitably be in the wrong, because life is something essentially amoral
and eventually, crushed by the weight of contempt and the eternal No, life must then be felt to be unworthy of desire and altogether worthless. — Friedrich Nietzsche

Morality is: the mediocre are worth more than the exceptions ... I abhore Christianity with a deadly hatred. — Friedrich Nietzsche

From the moment that man submits God to moral judgment, he kills Him in his own heart. And then what
is the basis of morality? God is denied in the name of justice, but can the idea of justice be understood
without the idea of God? At this point are we not in the realm of absurdity? Absurdity is the concept that
Nietzsche meets face to face. In order to be able to dismiss it, he pushes it to extremes: morality is the
ultimate aspect of God, which must be destroyed before reconstruction can begin. Then God no longer
exists and is no longer responsible for our existence; man must resolve to act, in order to exist. — Albert Camus

This is the crux of the moral pessimists: if they really wanted to promote their neighbor's redemption, then they would have to resolve themselves to spoiling existence for him, and thus to being his misfortune; out of pity, they would have to
become evil! — Friedrich Nietzsche

Those moralists, on the other hand, who, following in the footsteps of Socrates, offer the individual a morality of self-control and temperance as a means to his own advantage, as his personal key to happiness, are the exceptions. — Friedrich Nietzsche

Their usual mistaken premise is that they affirm some consensus among people, at least among tame peoples, concerning certain moral principles, and then conclude that these principles must be unconditionally binding also for you and me-or conversely, they see that among different peoples moral valuations are necessarily different and infer from this that no morality is binding-both of which are equally childish. — Friedrich Nietzsche

Fear is the mother of morality. — Friedrich Nietzsche

Moral sensibilities are nowadays at such cross-purposes that to one man a morality is proved by its utility, while to another its utility refutes it. — Friedrich Nietzsche

It is difficult to preach, this morality of mediocrity! It may never admit what it is and what it wants! It must speak about restraint and worth and duty and love of one's neighbor. — Friedrich Nietzsche

Morality is a fiction used by a herd of inferior human beings to hold back the few superior ones..!! — Friedrich Nietzsche

Books that teach us to dance: There are writers who, by portraying the impossible as possible, and by speaking of morality and genius as if both were high-spirited freedom, as if man were rising up on tiptoe and simply had to dance out of inner pleasure. — Friedrich Nietzsche

Subordination to morality can be slavish or vain or self- interested or resigned or gloomily enthusiastic or thoughtless or an act of despair, just as subordination to a prince can be: in itself it is nothing moral. — Friedrich Nietzsche

[Nietzsche] had the good manners to despise Christianity, in large part, for what it actually was
above all, for its devotion to an ethics of compassion
rather than allow himself the soothing, self-righteous fantasy that Christianity's history had been nothing but an interminable pageant of violence, tyranny, and sexual neurosis. He may have hated many Christians for their hypocrisy, but he hated Christianity itself principally on account of its enfeebling solicitude for the weak, the outcast, the infirm, and the diseased; and, because he was conscious of the historical contingency of all cultural values, he never deluded himself that humanity could do away with Christian faith while simply retaining Christian morality in some diluted form, such as liberal social conscience or innate human sympathy. — David Bentley Hart

With all willing we are dealing simply with commanding and obeying, on the foundation ... of a social structure of many "souls", which is why a philosopher should exercise the right to conceive willing itself under the horizon of morality: that is, morality understood as a doctrine of the power relations under which the phenomenon "life" emerges. — Friedrich Nietzsche

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

In morality, man treats himself not as individuum but as dividuum. — Friedrich Nietzsche

Higher than "thou shalt" stands "I will" (the heroes), and higher than "I will" stands "I am" (the Greek gods). — Friedrich Nietzsche

Strength is the morality of the man who stands out from the rest, and it is mine. — Friedrich Nietzsche

Where Nietzsche's response to the equation of socialism and morality was to question the value of morality, at least as it had been customarily understood, economists like Mises and Hayek pursued a different path, one Nietzsche would never have dared to take: they made the market the very expression of morality. — Ludwig Von Mises

Morality negates life. — Friedrich Nietzsche

The former morality, namely Kant's, demanded of the individual actions which one desired of all men: that was a very naive thing; — Friedrich Nietzsche

The trodden worm curls up. This testifies to its caution. It thus reduces its chances of being trodden upon again. In the language of morality: Humility. — Friedrich Nietzsche

Merchant and pirate were for a long period one and the same person. Even today mercantile morality is really nothing but a refinement of piratical morality. — Friedrich Nietzsche

Zarathustra, the first to recognize that the optimist is just as degenerate as the pessimist though perhaps more detrimental says: "Good men never speak the truth. The Good preach of false shores and false security. You were born and bred in the lies of the good. Through the good everything has become false and twisted down to the very roots". Fortunately the world is not built solely to serve good natured herd animals their little happiness ; to desire everybody to become a "good man", "a herd animal", blue-eyed, benevolent, "a beautiful soul" - or, as Herbert Spencer wished - altruistic, would mean robbing existence of its great character, to castrate mankind and reduce humanity to a sort of wretched Chinadom. And this some have tried to do! It is precisely this that men have called morality. — Friedrich Nietzsche

Truly, you understand the reverse art of alchemy, the depreciating of the most valuable things! Try, just for once, another recipe, in order not to realise as hitherto the opposite of what you mean to attain: deny those good things, withdraw from them the applause of the populace and discourage the spread of them, make them once more the concealed chastities of solitary souls, and say: morality is something forbidden! Perhaps you will thus attract to your cause the sort of men who are only of any account, I mean the heroic. But then there must be something formidable in it, and not as hitherto something disgusting! — Friedrich Nietzsche

The enjoyment that all morality has given us to now and that it continues to give us
and so, what has kept it going up to now
lies in everyone's right, without lengthy investigation, to praise and blame. And who could endure life without praising and blaming! — 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

Skepticism regarding morality is what is decisive — Friedrich Nietzsche

An important species of pleasure, and therewith the source of morality, arises out of habit. — Friedrich Nietzsche

Without the errors which lie in the assumption of morality, man would have remained an animal. — Friedrich Nietzsche

The masters have been done away with; the morality of the common man has triumphed. — Friedrich Nietzsche

Have already in the fourth act killed all the Gods- for the sake of morality! — Friedrich Nietzsche

Stirner and Nietzsche ... reveal how prone morality is to being used as a means of rationalization, a cloak for concealing violent and brutish passions, and making their sadistic expression a virtue. — John Carroll

Morality in Europe today is herd-morality — Friedrich Nietzsche

To be ashamed of one's immorality: that is a step on the staircase at whose end one is also ashamed of one's morality. — Friedrich Nietzsche

Whatever is done for love always occurs beyond good and evil. — Friedrich Nietzsche

Anything which is a living and not a dying body ... will have to be an incarnate will to power, it will strive to grow, spread, seize, become predominant - not from any morality or immorality but because it is living and because life simply is will to power ... 'Exploitation' ... belongs to the essence of what lives, as a basic organic function; it is a consequence of the will to power, which is after all the will to life. — Friedrich Nietzsche

Man is not equally moral at all hours, this is well known. If his morality is judged to be the capability for great self-sacrificing resolutions and self-denial (which, when continuous and grown habitual, are called holiness) — 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

What, seen in the perspective of life, is the significance of morality? — Friedrich Nietzsche

Morality is the best of all devices for leading mankind by the nose. — Friedrich Nietzsche

A person must have a good memory to keep the promises he has made. A person must have a strong imagination to be able to have pity. So closely is morality tied to the quality of the intellect. — Friedrich Nietzsche

When one gives up Christian belief one thereby deprives oneself of the right to Christian morality. For the latter is absolutely not self-evident: one must make this point clear again and again, in spite of English shallowpates. — Friedrich Nietzsche