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

That philosophy died yesterday, since Hegel or Marx, Nietzsche, or Heidegger - and philosophy should still wander toward the meaning of its death - or that it has always lived knowing itself to be dying ... that philosophy died one day, within history, or that it has always fed on its own agony, on the violent way it opens history by opposing itself to nonphilosophy, which is its past and its concern, its death and wellspring; that beyond the death, or dying nature, of philosophy, perhaps even because of it, thought still has a future, or even, as is said today, is still entirely to come because of what philosophy has held in store; or, more strangely still, that the future itself has a future - all these are unanswerable questions. By right of birth, and for one time at least, these are problems put to philosophy as problems philosophy cannot resolve. — Jacques Derrida

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

The sense that the meaning of the universe had evaporated was what seemed to escape those who welcomed Darwin as a benefactor of mankind. Nietzsche considered that evolution presented a correct picture of the world, but that it was a disastrous picture. His philosophy was an attempt to produce a new world-picture which took Darwinism into account but was not nullified by it. — R. J. Hollingdale

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

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

Nietzsche was personally more philosophical than his philosophy. His talk about power, harshness, and superb immorality was the hobby of a harmless young scholar and constitutional invalid. — George Santayana

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

The balance between literature and philosophy in Schopenhauer and Nietzsche is different from that struck in the novella, but, as Mann clearly pointed out in his writings about both thinkers, both modes are present. — Philip Kitcher

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

Nietzsche says very clearly all the way through his career that if you want to define human nature the first thing you must say is that human beings insist on value
we see the world through value colored eyes. We do not know how to look at things neutrally, value-free. So, it's not a question of giving up all values, it's simply a question of which values. — Robert C. Solomon

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

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

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

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

It goes without saying that these effects do not suffice to annul the necessity for a "change of terrain." It also goes without saying that the choice between these two forms of deconstruction cannot be simple and unique. A new writing must weave and interlace these two motifs of deconstruction. Which amounts to saying that one must speak several languages and produce several texts at once. I would like to point out especially that the style of the first deconstruction is mostly that of the Heideggerian questions, and the other is mostly the one which dominates France today. I am purposely speaking in terms of a dominant style: because there are also breaks and changes of terrain in texts of the Heideggerian type; because the "change of terrain" is far from upsetting the entire French landscape to which I am referring; because what we need, perhaps, as Nietzsche said, is a change of "style"; and if there is style, Nietzsche reminded us, it must be plural. — Jacques Derrida

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

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

The worst thing, however, was having to watch those Nazis use my philosophy, thanks to Elisabeth's editing. They twisted it into something so perverse and unimaginable. Using it as part of their platform to execute genocide," Nietzsche hung his head, shaking it at the ground, his hands clenched around the arms of the chair. — Dylan Callens

Maybe I'm inclined to what Nietzsche called "impure thought," that is to say, a kind of thought where abstractions are so mixed with the facts of life that you can't disentangle them. I feel thought in general, and in particular what is unfortunately called "philosophy," should lead a sort of clandestine life for a while, just to renew itself. By clandestine I mean concealed in stories, in anecdotes, in numerous forms that are not the form of the treatise. Then thought can biologically renew itself, as it were. — Roberto Calasso

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

Nietzsche said that the earth has been a madhouse long enough. Without contradicting him we might perhaps soften the expression, and say that philosophy has been long enough an asylum for enthusiasts. — George Santayana

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

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

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

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

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

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

Character is fate, the Greeks believed. A hundred years of German philosophy went into the making of this decision in which the seed of self-destruction lay embedded, waiting for its hour. The voice was Schlieffen's, but the hand was the hand of Fichte who saw the German people chosen by Providence to occupy the supreme place in the history of the universe, of Hegel who saw them leading the world to a glorious destiny of compulsory Kultur, of Nietzsche who told them that Supermen were above ordinary controls, of Treitschke who set the increase of power as the highest moral duty of the state, of the whole German people, who called their temporal ruler the "All-Highest." What made the Schlieffen plan was not Clausewitz and the Battle of Cannae, but the body of accumulated egoism which suckled the German people and created a nation fed on "the desperate delusion of the will that deems itself absolute." The — Barbara W. Tuchman

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

There are actually two separate issues here. The first is whether (as ancient philosophers and Nietzsche assume) only the privileged elite can live a worthwhile life. The second is whether it's possible to fulfill the roles of both serious artist and upstanding citizen. It seems to me that philosophy can dissect both questions, by delineating clearly the anatomy of the good life and the structural conditions of the roles. — Philip Kitcher

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

Truth," Nietzsche continued, "is arrived at through disbelief and skepticism, not through a childlike wishing something were so! Your patient's wish to be in God's hands is not truth. It is simply a child's wish - and nothing more! It is a wish not to die, a wish for the eveastingly bloated nipple we have labeled 'God'! Evolutionary theory scientifically demonstrates God's redundancy - though Darwin himself had not the courage to follow his evidence to its true conclusion. Surely, you must realize that we created God, and that all of us together now have killed him. — Irvin D. Yalom

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

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

The problem, however, is that I have yet to meet anyone, materialist or otherwise, who was able to dispense with value judgements. On the contrary, the literature of materialism is peculiarly marked by its wholesale profusion of denunciations of all sorts. Starting with Marx and Nietzsche, materialists have never been able to refrain from passing continuous moral judgement on all and sundry, which their whole philosophy might be expected to discourage them from doing. — Luc Ferry

I have a serious question."
"I will give a serious answer."
"Can a god be killed?"
The humor drained from Roman's face. "Well, that depends on if you're a pantheist or a Marxist."
"What's the difference?"
"The first believes that divinity is the universe. The two are synonymous and nonexistent without each other. The second believes in anthropocentrism, seeing man in the center of the universe, and god as just an invention of human conscience. Of course, if you follow Nietzsche, you can kill God just by thinking about him. — Ilona Andrews

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

The emancipation of the scholars and scientists from philosophy is according to [Nietzsche] only a part of the democratic movement, i.e. of the emancipation of the low from subordination to the high ... The plebeian character of the contemporary scholar or scientist is due to the fact that he has no reverence for himself. — Leo Strauss

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

Nietzsche is absolutely correct, even more correct today than when he wrote it in Thus Spake Zarathustra: I looked all about me for human beings but all I saw were fragments, deformed creatures with too much eye or too much ear. This is what the modern culture of specialized intellect-the kind of one-sidedness that banausic utilitarianism alone can value-works so hard to produce. — Kenny Smith

Nietzsche said we will never rid ourselves of God because we have too much faith in grammar/language.

Lacan said because of the religious tenets of language, religion will triumph.

Chomsky, master linguist, says 'there are no skeptics. You can discuss it in a philosophy seminar but no human being can - in fact - be a skeptic.'

These musings shed light on Soren K's leap to faith idea. This is more nuanced than the circular leap of faith argument he's been wrongly accused of...

Soren is saying that, as we use the logic of language to express existence and purpose, we will always leap TO faith in a superior, all encompassing, loving force that guides our lives.

This faith does not negate our reason. It simply implies that the reasoning of this superior force is superior to our own. Edwin Abbott crystalizes this in Flatland. — Chester Elijah Branch

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

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

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

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

Should a reasonable person not demand that philosophy should not be foolishly purveyed before people incompetent to see the point of it, as pearls before swine? For Nietzsche is utterly correct: philosophy is only for the healthy and whole-minded, the sick it has always only made even sicker. By means of philosophy they dig themselves even deeper into their pathetic delusions. — Kenny Smith

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

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

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

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

Life is more than thought: what a man feels, and what his senses awaken in him, are more indispensable to his life's fullness than subsequent reflection on their significance. Both Stirner and Nietzsche have elaborated Faust's opening speech in which he bemoans his wasted years in academia: this speech is Goethe's own impeachment of Kant and Hegel . Philosophy proceeds always under the risk of making a fetish of thinking. — John Carroll