Philosopher Nietzsche Quotes & Sayings

A married philosopher belongs to comedy. — Friedrich Nietzsche

It's strange that in an age when we pride ourselves on our independence of thought we meekly submit without further question to the declaration of a clearly unbalanced nineteenth century philosopher that God is dead! That's cheeky, of course - and one rarely comes away from reading Nietzsche without learning something new and significant. He's certainly FAR more unsettling for faith than any contemporary atheist I know of. — George Pattison

Another thing is war. I am naturally warlike. Attacking is one of my instincts. Being able to be an enemy, being an enemy - these require a strong nature, perhaps; in any case every strong nature presupposes them. It needs resistances, so it seeks
resistance: aggressive pathos is just as integrally necessary to strength as the feeling of revenge and reaction is to weakness. Woman, forinstance, is vengeful: that is a condition of her weakness, as is her sensitivity to other people's afflictions. - The strength of anattacker can in a way be gauged by the opposition he requires; allgrowth makes itself manifest by searching out a more powerful opponent - or problem: for a philosopher who is warlike challenges problems to duels, too. The task is not to master all resistances, but only those against which one has to pit one's entire strength, suppleness, and mastery-at-arms - opponents who are equal ... — Friedrich Nietzsche

What the philosopher is seeking is not truth, but rather the metamorphosis of the world into man. — Friedrich Nietzsche

Nietzsche claimed that a philosopher's system of thought always arises from his autobiography, and I believe that to be true for all therapists - in fact, for anyone who thinks about thought. At a conference approximately — Irvin D. Yalom

The peculiar, withdrawn attitude of the philosopher, world denying, hostile to life, suspicious of the senses, freed from sensuality, which has been maintained down to the most modern times and has become virtually the philosopher's pose par excellence - is above all a result of the emergency conditions under which philosophy arose and survived at all; for the longest time, philosophy would not have been possible at all on earth without ascetic wraps and cloaks, without an ascetic self-misunderstanding. To put it vividly: the ascetic priest provided until the most modern times the repulsive and gloomy caterpillar form in which alone the philosopher could live and creep about. — Friedrich Nietzsche

The philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche once wrote that when you look into the darkness of the abyss the abyss looks into you. Probably no other line or thought more inspires or informs my work. — Michael Connelly

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

I would love to meet a philosopher like Nietzsche on a train or boat and to talk with him all night. Incidentally, I don't consider his philosophy long-lived. It is not so much persuasive as full of bravura. — Anton Chekhov

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

The philosopher seeks to hear within himself the echoes of the world of symphony and to re-project them in the form if concepts — Friedrich Nietzsche

The Don Juan of knowledge: he has yet to be discovered by any philosopher or poet. He is lacking in love for the things he comes to know, but he has intellect, titillation, and pleasure in the hunt and intrigues involved in coming to know--all the way up to the highest and most distant planets of knowledge--until finally nothing remains for him to hunt down other than what is absolutely painful in knowledge, like the drunkard who ends up drinking absinthe and acqua fortis. Thus he ends up lusting for hell--it is the last knowledge that seduces him. Perhaps, like everything he has come to know, it will disillusion him as well! And then he would have to stand still for all of eternity, nailed on the spot to disillusionment, and himself having become the stone guest longing for an evening meal of knowledge that he never again will receive!--For the entire world of things no longer has a single morsel to offer this hungry man. — Friedrich Nietzsche

What verse is for the poet, dialectical thinking is for the philosopher. He grasps for it in order to get hold of his own enchantment, in order to perpetuate it. — Friedrich Nietzsche

All sciences are now under the obligation to prepare the ground for the future task of the philosopher, which is to solve the problem of value, to determine the true hierarchy of values. — Friedrich Nietzsche

It was the mutual study of the Spear and the significance of its legend and their strikingly opposite views about it which finally parted these inseperable friends
the master musician (Wagner) and the cynnical philosopher (Nietzsche). A parting which led them both to experience a bitter and pathetic lonliness, and later a growing hatred and contempt for one another which spilled over into a stormy controversy to shatter the emerging Pan-Germanic mystic-pagan idealism to its very foundations. — Trevor Ravenscroft

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

What does a philosopher demand of himself, first and last? To overcome his time in himself, to become timeless. — Friedrich Nietzsche

Faced with a world of "modern ideas" which would like to banish everyone into a corner and a "specialty," a philosopher, if there could be a philosopher these days, would be compelled to establish the greatness of mankind, the idea of "greatness," on the basis of his own particular extensive range and multiplicity, his own totality in the midst of diversity. — Friedrich Nietzsche

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

People try so hard to believe in leaders now, pitifully hard. But we no sooner get a popular reformer or politician or soldier or writer or philosopher - a Roosevelt, a Tolstoy, a Wood, a Shaw, a Nietzsche, than the cross-currents of criticism wash him away. My Lord, no man can stand prominence these days. It's the surest path to obscurity. People get sick of hearing the same name over and over. — F Scott Fitzgerald

The Olympian vice.
In defiance of that philosopher who as true Englishman tried to give any thinking person's laughter a bad reputation ('Laughter is a nasty infirmity of human nature that any thinking person will endeavour to overcome'
Hobbes), I would actually go as far as to rank philosophers according to the level of their laughter
right up to the ones who are capable of golden laughter. And assuming that gods, too, are able to philosophize, as various of my conclusions force me to believe, then I do not doubt when they do so, they know how to laugh in a new and superhuman fashion
and at the expense of everything serious! Gods like to jeer: it seems that even at religious observances they cannot keep from laughing. — Friedrich Nietzsche

The German philosopher Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche, who had syphilis, said that only a person of deep faith could afford the luxury of religious skepticism. Humanists, by and large educated, comfortably middle-class persons with rewarding lives like mine, find rapture enough in secular knowledge and hope. Most people can't. — Kurt Vonnegut

My conception of freedom. - The value of a thing sometimes does not lie in that which one attains by it, but in what one pays for it - what it costs us. Liberal institutions cease to be liberal as soon as they are attained: later on, there are no worse and no more thorough injurers of freedom than liberal institutions. — Friedrich Nietzsche

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

This is the fundamental idea of culture, insofar as it sets but one task for each of us: to further the production of the philosopher, of the artist, and of the saint within us and outside us, and thereby to work at the consummation of nature. — Friedrich Nietzsche

To my surprise, I find the most relevant commentary on a marriage that continues into the sunset years comes from the radical German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche, who, in an atypically practical frame of mind, wrote, 'When marrying, ask yourself this question: Do you believe that you will be able to converse well with this person into your old age? Everthing else in marriage is transitory. — Daniel Klein

I would not know what the spirit of a philosopher might wish more to be than a good dancer. — Friedrich Nietzsche

Perhaps no philosopher is more correct than the cynic. The happiness of the animal, that thorough cynic, is the living proof of cynicism. — Friedrich Nietzsche

I am a disciple of the philosopher Dionysus, and I would prefer to be even a satyr than a saint. — Friedrich Nietzsche

In the interview, Roger reflected how the German philosopher Nietzsche said a man can undergo torture if he knows the why of his life. But I, here at Dachau, learned something far greater. I learned to know the Who of my life. He was enough to sustain me then, and is enough to sustain me still — Ken Dignan

Success has always been the greatest liar - and the "work" itself is a success; the great statesman, the conqueror, the discoverer is disguised by his creations, often beyond recognition; the "work," whether of the artist or the philosopher, invents the man who has created it, who is supposed to have create it; "great men," as they are venerated, are subsequent pieces of wretched minor fiction — Friedrich Nietzsche

The philosopher caught in the nets of language. — Friedrich Nietzsche

And what magnificent instruments of observation we possess in our senses! This nose, for example, of which no philosopher has yet spoken with reverence and gratitude, is actually the most delicate instrument so far at our disposal: it is able to detect tiny chemical concentrations that even elude a spectroscope. — Friedrich Nietzsche

If you wish to understand a philosopher, do not ask what he says, but find out what he wants — Friedrich Nietzsche

Friedrich Nietzsche, the German philosopher, said that what he resented in most Christians was what he perceived as a constant underlying resentment: (1) a denied resentment toward God for demanding sacrifice, (2) toward others for not appreciating our sacrifice, (3) sacrificing as much as we sacrifice, (4) and a resentment toward others for not having to do it! — Richard Rohr

I do not know what the spirit of a philosopher could more wish to be than a good dancer. For the dance is his ideal, also his fine art, finally also the only kind of piety he knows, his 'divine service.' — Friedrich Nietzsche

Yesterday I heard - would you believe it? - Bizet's masterpiece, for the twentieth time. Again I stayed there with tender devotion, again I did not run away. This triumph over my impatience surprises me. How such a work makes one perfect! One becomes a "masterpiece" oneself. - And really, every time I heard Carmen I seemed to myself more of a philosopher, a better philosopher, than I generally consider myself: so patient do I become, so happy, so Indian, so settled ... To sit five hours: the first stage of holiness! - May I say that the tone of Bizet's orchestra is almost the only one I can still endure? — Friedrich Nietzsche

You're not very good at being contemplative," Milo said. "You always sound like some bad caricature of a philosopher, like those fortune cookies with 'Confucius say' or the Nietzsche guy from Mystery Men that's always saying 'when you walk on the ground, the ground walks on you. — Amanda Hocking

I have never come across someone who could inspire more respect than the Greek philosophers. — Friedrich Nietzsche

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

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

Can an ass be tragic?
To perish under a burden that one can neither bear nor cast off? The case of the philosopher. — Friedrich Nietzsche

It was modesty that invented the word "philosopher" in Greece and left the magnificent overweening presumption in calling oneselfwise to the actors of the spirit
the modesty of such monsters of pride and sovereignty as Pythagoras, as Plato. — Friedrich Nietzsche

Nietzsche ... has caused [philosophers] so much confusion. — Hannah Arendt

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 philosopher is lacking who interprets the deed and does not merely transpose it. — Friedrich Nietzsche

All that philosophers have handled for millennia has been conceptual mummies; nothing actual has ever escaped from their hands alive. — 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

In all willing it is absolutely a question of commanding and obeying, on the basis, as already said, of a social structure composed of many "souls," on which account a philosopher should claim the right to include willing-as-such within the sphere of morals - regarded as the doctrine of the relations of supremacy under which the phenomenon of "life" manifests itself. — 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

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

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

and for the first time in his life he realised the whole horror of that loneliness to which, perhaps, all greatness is condemned. But to be forsaken is something very different from deliberately choosing blessed loneliness. How he longed, in those days, for the ideal friend who would thoroughly understand him, to whom he would be able to say all, and whom he imagined he had found at various periods in his life from his earliest youth onwards. Now, however, that the way he had chosen grew ever more perilous and steep, he found nobody who could follow him: he therefore created a perfect friend for himself in the ideal form of a majestic philosopher, and made this creation the preacher of his gospel to the world. Whether — Friedrich Nietzsche

The really royal calling of the philosopher (as expressed by Alcuin the Anglo-Saxon): To correct what is wrong, and strengthen the right, and raise what is holy. — 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

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

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

Like the famous mad philosopher said, when you stare into the void, the void stares also; but if you cast into the void, you get a type conversion error. (Which just goes to show Nietzsche wasn't a C++ programmer.) — Charles Stross

Aristotle says that in order to live alone one must either be an animal or a god. The third alternative is lacking. A man must be both; a philosopher. — 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

To paraphrase the philosopher Nietzsche, he who has a strong enough why can bear almost any how. I've found that 20 percent of any change is knowing how; but 80 percent is knowing why. If we gather a set of strong enough reasons to change, we can change in a minute something we've failed to change for years. — Tony Robbins

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

What I understand by "philosopher": a terrible explosive in the presence of which everything is in danger. — Friedrich Nietzsche

A married philosopher is a comic character. — Friedrich Nietzsche

To live alone one must be either a beast or a god, says Aristotle. Leaving out the third case: one must be both - a philosopher. — Friedrich Nietzsche