Quotes & Sayings About Nietzsche

My Ego taught me a new pride, I teach it to men: No longer to bury the head in the sand of heavenly things, but to carry it freely, an earthly head which creates meaning for the earth! — Friedrich Nietzsche

They are not so much afraid of ennui as of labour without pleasure; — Friedrich Nietzsche

The best of all things is something entirely outside your grasp: not to be born, not to be, to be nothing. But the second best thing for you is to die soon. — Friedrich Nietzsche

With sturdy shoulders, space stands opposing all its weight to nothingness. Where space is, there is being. — Friedrich Nietzsche

It is the powerful who know how to honour, it is their art, their domain for invention. — Friedrich Nietzsche

Warfare is the father of all good things, it is also the father of good prose! — Friedrich Nietzsche

In August, 1900, [Friedrich] Nietzsche was laid to rest Nietzsche, as the apostle of atheism, heralded the darkest century the world has ever known. — Benjamin Wiker

To find everything profound - that is an inconvenient trait. It makes one strain one's eyes all the time, and in the end one finds more than one might have wished. — Friedrich Nietzsche

If tolerance poses as a middle road between rejection on the one side and assimilation on the other, this road, as already suggested, is paved by necessity rather than virtue; tolerance, as Nietzsche would say, becomes a virtue only retroactively and retrospectively. — Wendy Brown

You say that a good cause will even sanctify war! I tell you, it is the good war that sanctifies every cause! — Friedrich Nietzsche

The question of place and climate is most closely related to the question of nutrition. Nobody is free to live everywhere; and whoever has to solve great problems that challenge all his strength actually has a very restricted choice in this matter. The influence of climate on our metabolism, its retardation, its acceleration, goes so far that a mistaken choice of place and climate can not only estrange a man from his task but can actually keep it from him: he never gets to see it. — Friedrich Nietzsche

What we experience in dreams - assuming that we experience it often - belongs in the end just as much to the over-all economy of our soul as anything experienced "actually": we are richer or poorer on account of it. — 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

Actual philosophers ... are commanders and law-givers: they say "thus it shall be!", it is they who determine the Wherefore and Whither of mankind, and they possess for this task the preliminary work of all the philosophical laborers, of all those who have subdued the past - they reach for the future with creative hand, and everything that is or has been becomes for them a means, an instrument, a hammer. — Friedrich Nietzsche

When our brain feels too weak to deal with our opponent's objections, our heart answers by casting suspicion on their underlying motives. — Friedrich Nietzsche

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

The church is precisely that against which Jesus preached
and against which he taught his disciples to fight. — Friedrich Nietzsche

The existence of the world is justified only as an aesthetic phenomenon. — Friedrich Nietzsche

When we have to change our mind about a person, we hold the inconvenience he causes us very much against him. — Friedrich Nietzsche

But the worst enemy you can meet will always be yourself; you lie in wait for yourself in caverns and forests. Lonely one, you are going the way to yourself! And your way goes past yourself, and past your seven devils! You will be a heretic to yourself and witch and soothsayer and fool and doubter and unholy one and villain. You must be ready to burn yourself in your own flame: how could you become new, if you had not first become ashes? — Friedrich Nietzsche

Every characteristic absence of spirituality, every piece of common vulgarity, is due to an inability to resist a stimulus - you have to react, you follow every impulse. — Friedrich Nietzsche

Every kind of perfection is purchased at a high price on earth, where everything is perhaps purchased too dear; one is an expert in one's department at the price of being also a victim of one's department. — Friedrich Nietzsche

Is the most pleasant feeling in those who have not much pride, and have no prospect of great conquests: — Friedrich Nietzsche

You great star, what would your happiness be had you not those for whom you shine? — Friedrich Nietzsche

Bad cooks - and the utter lack of reason in the kitchen - have delayed human development longest and impaired it most. — 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

truths are illusions about which one has forgotten that this is what they are; metaphors which are worn out and without sensuous power; coins which have lost their pictures and now matter only as metal, no longer as coins. We still do not know where the urge for truth comes from; for as yet we have heard only of the obligation imposed by society that it should exist: to be truthful means using the customary metaphors - in moral terms: the obligation to lie according to a fixed convention, to lie herd-like in a style obligatory for all. . . . — Friedrich Nietzsche

Precisely this is godliness
that there are gods, but no God. — Friedrich Nietzsche

The surest way to corrupt a youth? Teach him to value thinking alike more than thinking differently. — Friedrich Nietzsche

Over immense periods of time the intellect produced nothing but errors. A few of these proved to be useful and helped to preserve the species: those who hit upon or inherited these had better luck in their struggle for themselves and their progeny. Such erroneous articles of faith ... include the following: that there are things, substances, bodies; that a thing is what it appears to be; that our will is free; that what is good for me is also good in itself. — Friedrich Nietzsche

If you wish to strive for peace of soul and pleasure, then believe; if you wish to be a devotee of truth, then inquire. — 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

Never to read another book that was born and baptized (with ink) at the same time. — Friedrich Nietzsche

The essence of all beautiful art, all great art, is gratitude. — Friedrich Nietzsche

The people on their part may think that cognition is knowing all about things, but the philosopher must say to himself: When I analyze the process that is expressed in the sentence, 'I think,' I find a whole series of daring assertions, the argumentative proof of which would be difficult, perhaps impossible: for instance, that it is I who think, that there must necessarily be something that thinks, that thinking is an activity and operation on the part of a being who is thought of as a cause, that there is an 'ego,' and finally, that it is already determined what is to be designated by thinking - that I KNOW what thinking is. — Friedrich Nietzsche

Since humanity came into being, man hath enjoyed himself too little: that alone, my brethren, is our original sin. — Friedrich Nietzsche

the pity which the spectators then exhibit is in so far a consolation for the weak and suffering in that the latter recognize therein that they possess still one power , in spite of their weakness, the power of giving pain. The unfortunate derives a sort of pleasure from this feeling of superiority, of which the exhibition of pity makes him conscious; his imagination is exalted, he is still powerful enough to give the world pain. Thus the thirst for pity is the thirst for self-gratification, and that, moreover, at the expense of his fellow-men; it shows man in the whole inconsiderateness of his own dear self, but — Friedrich Nietzsche

Art is the activity that exalts and denies simultaneously. "No artist tolerates reality," says Nietzsche. That
is true, but no artist can get along without reality. Artistic creation is a demand for unity and a rejection of
the world. But it rejects the world on account of what it lacks and in the name of what it sometimes is.
Rebellion can be observed here in its pure state and in its original complexities. Thus art should give us a
final perspective on the content of rebellion. — Albert Camus

One physiological precondition is indispensible for there to be art: intoxication, or the feeling of fullness and increasing strenth. — Friedrich Nietzsche

The weak and the botched shall perish: first principle of our charity. — Friedrich Nietzsche

For today the petty people have become lord and master: they all preach submission and acquiescence and prudence and diligence and consideration and the long et cetera of petty virtues. — Friedrich Nietzsche

He who rejoices even at the stake triumphs not over pain but over the absence of pain where he had anticipated feeling it. A parable. — Friedrich Nietzsche

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

In being wildly natural we recover best from being unnatural, from being spiritual. — Friedrich Nietzsche

Go up close to your friend, but do not go over to him! We should also respect the enemy in our friend. — Friedrich Nietzsche

It is only those who know how to feel that "this is not good" who devise improvements. — Friedrich Nietzsche

This demand follows from an insight that I was the first to articulate: that there are no moral facts. — Friedrich Nietzsche

The one necessary thing. - A person must have one or the other. Either a cheerful disposition by nature, or a disposition made cheerful by art and knowledge. — Friedrich Nietzsche

You cannot learn to fly by flying. First you must learn to walk, to run, to climb, to dance. — Friedrich Nietzsche

We, however, want to become those we are
human beings who are new, unique, incomparable, who give themselves laws, who create themselves. To that end we must become the best learners and discoverers of everything that is lawful and necessary in the world: we must become physicists in order to be able to be creators in this sense
while hitherto all valuations and ideals have been based on ignorance of physics or were constructed so as to contradict it. Therefore: long live physics! And even more so that which compels us to turn to physics
our honesty! — Friedrich Nietzsche

So long as men praise you, you can only be sure that you are not yet on your own true path but on someone else's. — Friedrich Nietzsche

Freedoers are at disadvantage compared with freethinkers because people suffer more obviously from the consequences of deeds than from those of thoughts. — Friedrich Nietzsche

Convictions are prisons. — Friedrich Nietzsche

I teach the No to all that makes weak
that exhausts. I teach the Yes to all that strengthens, that stores up strength, that pride. — Friedrich Nietzsche

Only great pain, the long, slow pain that takes its time ... compels us to descend to our ultimate depths ... I doubt that such pain makes us "better"; but I know it makes us more profound ... In the end, lest what is most important remain unsaid: from such abysses, from such severe sickness, one returns newborn, having shed one's skin ... with merrier senses, with a second dangerous innocence in joy, more childlike and yet a hundred times subtler than one has ever been before. — Friedrich Nietzsche

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

To have and to want more that is life. — Friedrich Nietzsche

That which an age considers evil is usually an unseasonable echo of what was formerly considered good - the atavism of an old ideal. — Friedrich Nietzsche

No man ever wrote more eloquently and luminously [than Heraclitus]. — Friedrich Nietzsche

Ultimately, no one can extract from things, books included, more than he already knows. — Friedrich Nietzsche

Hope, in its stronger forms, is a great deal more powerful stimulans to life than any sort of realized joy can ever be. Man must be sustained in suffering by a hope so high that no conflict with actuality can dash it - so high, indeed, that no fulfilment can satisfy it: a hope reaching out beyond this world. — Friedrich Nietzsche

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

He does not wear a twitching, mobile, human face, but rather a mask, as it were, with its features in dignified equilibrium; he does not shout, nor does he even change his tone of voice. If a veritable storm-cloud empties itself on his head, he wraps himself in his cloak and slowly walks away from under it. — Friedrich Nietzsche

He who denies his own vanity usually possesses it in so brutal a form that he instinctively shuts his eyes to avoid the necessity of despising himself. — Friedrich Nietzsche

The humanity of famous intellectuals lies in being wrong with gracious courtesy when dealing with those who are not famous. — Friedrich Nietzsche

Enjoying praise is in some people merely a civility of the heart
and just the opposite of a vanity of the spirit. — Friedrich Nietzsche

Nietzsche saw in the Protestant ethic, in both its religious and secular (economic) forms, a final protest before the emergence into dominance of the ordered, bourgeois world of the 'last man' he who will pay any price in tedium for comfort and the absence of tension. — John Carroll

In solitude the lonely man is eaten up by himself, among crowds by the many. — Friedrich Nietzsche

Every man in creating the beautiful appearance of the dream worlds is a perfect artist. — 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

I admire the courage and wisdom of Socrates in everything he did, said
and did not say. — Friedrich Nietzsche

Humor is just Schadenfreude with a clear conscience — 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

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

Profundity of thought belongs to youth, clarity of thought to old age. — Friedrich Nietzsche

Your god is dead and only the ignorant weep. And if you claim there is a hell, then we shall meet there! — Friedrich Nietzsche

We belong to an age whose culture is in danger of perishing through the means to culture. — Friedrich Nietzsche

It is a distinction to have many virtues, but a hard lot. — Friedrich Nietzsche

A dangerous crossing, a dangerous wayfaring, a dangerous looking-back, a dangerous trembling and halting. — Friedrich Nietzsche

One has to know the size of one's stomach. — Friedrich Nietzsche

What is the truth, but a lie agreed upon. — Friedrich Nietzsche

Those things for which we find words, are things we have already overcome. — 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

One does not want to be deceived, under the supposition that it is injurious, dangerous, or fatal to be deceived. — 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

... 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

There is no more dreary or more repulsive creature than the man who has evaded his genius. — Friedrich Nietzsche

It is only because man believes himself to be free, not because he is free, that he experiences remorse and pricks of conscience. — Friedrich Nietzsche

He who has a why to live can bear almost any how. — Friedrich Nietzsche

Of all evil I deem you capable: Therefore I want good from you. Verily, I have often laughed at the weaklings who thought themselves good because they had no claws. — Friedrich Nietzsche

Something might be true, even if it is also harmful and dangerous in the highest degree. — 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

And if your friend does evil to you, say to him, 'I forgive you for what you did to me, but how can I forgive you for what you did to yourself? — Friedrich Nietzsche

When we observe how some people know how to manage their experiences
their insignificant, everyday experiences
so that they become an arable soil that bears fruit three times a year, while others
and how many there are!
are driven through surging waves of destiny, the most multifarious currents of the times and the nations, and yet always remain on top, bobbing like a cork, then we are in the end tempted to divide mankind into a minority (a minimality) of those who know how to make much of little, and a majority of those who know how to make little of much. — Friedrich Nietzsche

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

Emotion is not a defect in an otherwise perfect reasoning machine. Reason, unfettered from human feeling, has led to as many horrors as any crusader's zeal. What use is pity in a world devoted to maximizing efficiency and productivity? Scientific husbandry tells us to weed out the sick, the infirm, the weak. The ruthless efficiency of euthanasia initiatives and ethnic cleansing are but the programmatic application of Nietzsche's point: from any quantifiable cost-benefit analysis, the principles of animal husbandry should apply to the human race. Charles Darwin himself acknowledged that strict obedience to "hard reason" rather than sympathy for fellow humans would represent a sacrifice of "the noblest part of our nature."6 It is the human heart resonating with empathy, not the logical brain attuned to the mathematics of efficiency, that revolts at cruelty and inhumanity. In — Terryl L. Givens

One should not wish to enjoy where one does not give joy. — Friedrich Nietzsche

In truth,there was only one christian and he died on the cross. — Friedrich Nietzsche

Society tames the wolf into a dog. And man is the most domesticated animal of all. — Friedrich Nietzsche

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