Friedrich Nietzsche Quotes

There are no facts, only interpretations.

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

The individual has always had to struggle to keep from being overwhelmed by the tribe. If you try it, you will be lonely often, and sometimes frightened. But no price is too high to pay for the privilege of owning yourself.

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

I cannot believe in a God who wants to be praised all the time.

When we are tired, we are attacked by ideas we conquered long ago.

You have your way. I have my way. As for the right way, the correct way, and the only way, it does not exist.

Insanity in individuals is something rare - but in groups, parties, nations and epochs, it is the rule.

The advantage of a bad memory is that one enjoys several times the same good things for the first time.

Man is the cruelest animal.

The surest way to corrupt a youth is to instruct him to hold in higher esteem those who think alike than those who think differently.

Is man merely a mistake of God's? Or God merely a mistake of man?

Thoughts are the shadows of our feelings - always darker, emptier and simpler.

We should consider every day lost on which we have not danced at least once.

Faith: not wanting to know what is true.

The true man wants two things: danger and play. For that reason he wants woman, as the most dangerous plaything.

There are two different types of people in the world, those who want to know, and those who want to believe.

The higher we soar the smaller we appear to those who cannot fly.

There are no eternal facts, as there are no absolute truths.

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

The thought of suicide is a great consolation: by means of it one gets through many a dark night.

A thinker sees his own actions as experiments and questions—as attempts to find out something. Success and failure are for him answers above all.

A casual stroll through the lunatic asylum shows that faith does not prove anything.

We have art in order not to die of the truth.

All truly great thoughts are conceived by walking.

A good writer possesses not only his own spirit but also the spirit of his friends.

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

All things are subject to interpretation whichever interpretation prevails at a given time is a function of power and not truth.

There will always be rocks in the road ahead of us. They will be stumbling blocks or stepping stones; it all depends on how you use them.

Ah, women. They make the highs higher and the lows more frequent.

Blessed are the forgetful, for they get the better even of their blunders.

Art is the proper task of life.

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

To leave is to suffer,to survive is to find some meaning in the suffering.

One must still have chaos in oneself to be able to give birth to a dancing star.

Perhaps I know best why it is man alone who laughs; he alone suffers so deeply that he had to invent laughter.

The lonely one offers his hand too quickly to whomever he encounters.

A thought, even a possibility, can shatter and transform us.

After coming into contact with a religious man I always feel I must wash my hands.

Enjoy life. This is not a dress rehearsal.

The visionary lies to himself, the liar only to others.

He who would learn to fly one day must first learn to stand and walk and run and climb and dance; one cannot fly into flying.

Become who you are!

Is it better to out-monster the monster or to be quietly devoured?

Hope in reality is the worst of all evils because it prolongs the torments of man.

There is more wisdom in your body than in your deepest philosophy.

The most perfidious way of harming a cause consists of defending it deliberately with faulty arguments."

I know of no better life purpose than to perish in attempting the great and the impossible.

And once you are awake, you shall remain awake eternally.

Is life not a thousand times too short for us to bore ourselves?

Talking much about oneself can also be a means to conceal oneself.

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

Distrust all in whom the impulse to punish is powerful.

Whenever I climb I am followed by a dog called 'Ego'.

I assess the power of a will by how much resistance, pain, torture it endures and knows how to turn to its advantage.

For art to exist, for any sort of aesthetic activity to exist, a certain physiological precondition is indispensable: intoxication.

It is my ambition to say in ten sentences what others say in a whole book.

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

Convictions are more dangerous foes of truth than lies.

Nothing on earth consumes a man more quickly than the passion of resentment.

At bottom every man knows well enough that he is a unique being, only once on this earth; and by no extraordinary chance will such a marvelously picturesque piece of diversity in unity as he is, ever be put together a second time.

The irrationality of a thing is no argument against its existence, rather a condition of it.

One has to pay dearly for immortality; one has to die several times while one is still alive.

Only sick music makes money today.

When marrying, ask yourself this question: Do you believe that you will be able to converse well with this person into your old age? Everything else in marriage is transitory.

Two great European narcotics, alcohol and Christianity.

Love is blind; friendship closes its eyes.

The earth has a skin and that skin has diseases; one of its diseases is called man.

The spiritualization of sensuality is called love: it is a great triumph over Christianity.

All great things must first wear terrifying and monstrous masks, in order to inscribe themselves on the hearts of humanity.

The Christian resolution to find the world ugly and bad has made the world ugly and bad.

Plato was a bore.

Poets are shameless with their experiences: they exploit them.

He who climbs upon the highest mountains laughs at all tragedies, real or imaginary.

Of all that is written, I love only what a person has written with his own blood.

There is an old illusion. It is called good and evil.

Many are stubborn in pursuit of the path they have chosen, few in pursuit of the goal.

Woman was God's second mistake.

The world is beautiful, but has a disease called man.

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

We do not place especial value on the possession of a virtue until we notice its total absence in our opponent.

Some men are born posthumously.

The most spiritual human beings, assuming they are the most courageous, also experience by far the most painful tragedies: but it is precisely for this reason that they honor life, because it brings against them its most formidable weapons.

Admiration for a quality or an art can be so strong that it deters us from striving to possess it.

A joke is an epigram on the death of a feeling.

Family love is messy, clinging, and of an annoying and repetitive pattern, like bad wallpaper.

Cynicism is the only form in which base souls approach honesty.

It is nobler to declare oneself wrong than to insist on being right —especially when one is right.

He who fights too long against dragons becomes a dragon himself; and if you gaze too long into the abyss, the abyss will gaze into you.

The vanity of others runs counter to our taste only when it runs counter to our vanity.

Arrogance on the part of the meritorious is even more offensive to us than the arrogance of those without merit: for merit itself is offensive.

Morality is the herd-instinct in the individual.

In music the passions enjoy themselves.

Everyone who has ever built anywhere a "new heaven" first found the power thereto in his own hell.

Freedom is the will to be responsible for ourselves.

Success has always been a great liar.

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

The essence of all beautiful art, all great art, is gratitude.

Many a man fails as an original thinker simply because his memory it too good.

Belief means not wanting to know what is true.

He who despises himself esteems himself as a self-despiser.

A bad conscience is easier to cope with than a bad reputation.

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

I am not a man, I am dynamite!

At times one remains faithful to a cause only because its opponents do not cease to be insipid.

Art is essentially the affirmation, the blessing, and the deification of existence.

The more abstract the truth you wish to teach, the more you need to seduce the senses to it.

When one has not had a good father, one must create one.

One should die proudly when it is no longer possible to live proudly.

The secret of reaping the greatest fruitfulness and the greatest enjoyment from life is to live dangerously.

On the mountains of truth you can never climb in vain: either you will reach a point higher up today, or you will be training your powers so that you will be able to climb higher tomorrow.

Nothing is beautiful, only man: on this piece of naivete rests all aesthetics, it is the first truth of aesthetics. Let us immediately add its second: nothing is ugly but degenerate man - the domain of aesthetic judgment is therewith defined.

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

In the consciousness of the truth he has perceived, man now sees everywhere only the awfulness or the absurdity of existence and loathing seizes him.

And we should consider every day lost on which we have not danced at least once. And we should call every truth false which was not accompanied by at least one laugh.

Some die too young, some die too old; the precept sounds strange, but die at the right age.

The lie is a condition of life.

There is one thing one has to have either a soul that is cheerful by nature, or a soul made cheerful by work, love, art, and knowledge....

Nothing has been purchased more dearly than the little bit of reason and sense of freedom which now constitutes our pride.

In the mountains, the shortest way is from peak to peak: but for that you must have long legs

You are rewarding a teacher poorly if you remain always a pupil.

Sensuality often makes love grow too quickly, so that the root remains weak and is easy to pull out.

Which is it? Is man only a blunder of God? Or is God only a blunder of man?

Let man fear woman when she loves: then she makes any sacrifice, and everything else seems without value to her

Hope is the worst of evils, for it prolongs the torment of man

The last Christian died on a cross.

No one lies so boldly as the man who is indignant.

He who cannot give anything away cannot feel anything either.

Man... cannot learn to forget, but hangs on the past: however far or fast he runs, that chain runs with him.

Idleness is the parent of psychology.

God is a thought who makes crooked all that is straight.

How much truth can a spirit bear, how much truth can a spirit dare? ... that became for me more and more the real measure of value.

Discontent is the seed of ethics

Jesus died too soon. If he had lived to my age he would have repudiated his doctrine.

The future influences the present just as much as the past.

One does not hate as long as one has a low esteem of someone, but only when one esteems him as an equal or a superior.

No one dies of fatal truths nowadays: there are too many antidotes.

Like tourists huffing and puffing to reach the peak we forget the view on the way up.

If a man wishes to rid himself of a feeling of unbearable oppression, he may have to take hashish.

We are franker towards others than towards ourselves.

To forget one's purpose is the commonest form of stupidity.

Great intellects are skeptical.

The strongest have their moments of fatigue.

All of life is a dispute over taste and tasting.

Existence really is an imperfect tense that never becomes a present.

One often contradicts an opinion when what is uncongenial is really the tone in which it was conveyed.

No, life has not disappointed me. On the contrary, I find it truer, more desirable and mysterious every year — ever since the day when the great liberator came to me: the idea that life could be an experiment of the seeker for knowledge — and not a duty, not a calamity, not trickery.

Living in a constant chase after gain compels people to expend their spirit to the point of exhaustion.

All in all, punishment hardens and renders people more insensible; it concentrates; it increases the feeling of estrangement; it strengthens the power of resistance.

Has a woman who knew she was well-dressed ever caught a cold?

Although the most acute judges of the witches and even the witches themselves, were convinced of the guilt of witchery, the guilt nevertheless was non-existent. It is thus with all guilt.

Wit is the epitaph of an emotion.

He who fights with monsters might take care lest he thereby become a monster. Is not life a hundred times too short for us to bore ourselves?

What was silent in the father speaks in the son, and often I found in the son the unveiled secret of the father.

Dancing in all its forms cannot be excluded from the curriculum of all noble education; dancing with the feet, with ideas, with words, and, need I add that one must also be able to dance with the pen?

Once spirit was God, then it became man, and now it is even becoming mob.

Extreme positions are not succeeded by moderate ones, but by contrary extreme positions.

Whoever despises himself nonetheless respects himself as one who despises.

Love is not consolation. It is light.

When one does away with oneself one does the most estimable thing possible: one thereby almost deserves to live.

He that humbleth himself wishes to be exalted.

To do great things is difficult; but to command great things is more difficult.

Necessity is not an established fact, but an interpretation.

You may have enemies whom you hate, but not enemies whom you despise. You must be proud of your enemy: then the success of your enemy shall be your success too.

The aphorism in which I am the first master among Germans, are the forms of 'eternity'; my ambition is to say in ten sentences what everyone else says in a book - what everyone else does not say in a book.

Women are quite able to make friends with a man; but to preserve such a friendship - that no doubt requires the assistance of a slight physical antipathy

How good music and bad reasons sound when one marches against an enemy.

When a hundred men stand together, each of them loses his mind and gets another one.

Strong hope is a much greater stimulant to life than any single realized joy could be.

The broad effects which can be obtained by punishment in man and beast, are the increase of fear, the sharpening of the sense of cunning, the mastery of the desires; so it is that punishment tames man, but does not make him "better.".

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

Shared joys make a friend, not shared sufferings.

The doer is merely a fiction added to the deed ? the deed is everything.

Wisdom sets bounds even to knowledge.

Sleeping is no mean art: for its sake one must stay awake all day.

Not to him who is offensive to us are we most unfair, but to him who doth not concern us at all.

The abdomen is the reason why man does not readily take himself to be a god.

Does wisdom perhaps appear on the earth as a raven which is inspired by the smell of carrion?

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

The existence of forgetting has never been proved: We only know that some things don't come to mind when we want them.

Better know nothing than half-know many things.

What is bad? All that proceeds from weakness

Against boredom even gods struggle in vain.

It is always consoling to think of suicide: in that way one gets through many a bad night.

What we do in dreams we also do when we are awake: we invent and fabricate the person with whom we associate-and immediately forget we have done so.

That which needs to be proved cannot be worth much.

Pathetic attitudes are not in keeping with greatness.

Undeserved praise causes more pangs of conscience later than undeserved blame, but probably only for this reason, that our power of judgment are more completely exposed by being over praised than by being unjustly underestimated.

Man is more ape than many of the apes.

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.

In large states public education will always be mediocre, for the same reason that in large kitchens the cooking is usually bad.

Experience, as a desire for experience, does not come off. We must not study ourselves while having an experience.

Our treasure lies in the beehive of our knowledge. We are perpetually on the way thither, being by nature winged insects and honey gatherers of the mind.

It is not the strengths, but the durations of great sentiments that make great men.

People who comprehend a thing to its very depths rarely stay faithful to it forever. For they have brought its depths into the light of day: and in the depths there is always much that is unpleasant to see.

A man who is very busy seldom changes his opinions.

The best weapon against an enemy is another enemy.

Growth in wisdom can be measured precisely by decline in bile.

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

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

A woman may very well form a friendship with a man, but for this to endure, it must be assisted by a little physical antipathy.

Sometimes we owe a friend to the lucky circumstance that we give him no cause for envy.

Whoever knows he is deep tries to be clear, but whoever wants to seem deep to the crowd tries to be obscure. For the crowd supposes that anything it cannot see to the bottom must be deep: it is so timid and goes so unwillingly into the water.

When a man has just been greatly honored and has eaten a little he is the most generous.

One should steal only where one cannot rob.

Judgments, value judgments concerning life, for or against, can in the last resort never be true: they possess value only as symptoms, they come into consideration only as symptoms - in themselves such judgments are stupidities.

Under peaceful conditions a warlike man sets upon himself.

He who laughs best today, will also laughs last.

For the woman, the man is a means: the end is always the child.

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

People who have given us their complete confidence believe that they have a right to ours. The inference is false, a gift confers no rights.

Everything in woman hath a solution. It is called pregnancy.

The ascetic makes a necessity of virtue.

Woman learns how to hate in proportion as she forgets how to charm.

Our destiny exercises its influence over us even when, as yet, we have not learned its nature: it is our future that lays down the law of our today

Science and art have that in common that everyday things seem to them new and attractive.

About sacrifice and the offering of sacrifices, sacrificial animals think quite differently from those who look on: but they have never been allowed to have their say.

One must have a good memory to be able to keep the promises that one makes

The devotion of the greatest is to encounter risk and danger, and play dice for death.

Every philosophy is the philosophy of some stage of life.

With the unknown, one is confronted with danger, discomfort, and care; the first instinct is to abolish these painful states. First principle: any explanation is better than none. . . . The causal instinct is thus conditional upon, and excited by, the feeling of fear. The "why?" shall, if at all possible, not give the cause for its own sake so much as for a particular kind of cause — a cause that is comforting, liberating, and relieving.

The so called unconscious inferences can be traced back to the all-preserving memory, which presents us with parallel experiences and hence already knows the consequences of an action. It is not anticipation of the effects; rather, it is the feeling: identical causes, identical effects . . .

Morality in Europe today is herd-morality

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

An artist has no home in Europe except in Paris.

Here the ways of men divide. If you wish to strive for peace of soul and happiness, then believe; if you wish to be a disciple of truth, then inquire.

If there is something to pardon in everything, there is also something to condemn.

The patient. The pine tree seems to listen, the fir tree to wait: and both without impatience: - they give no thought to the little people beneath them devoured by their impatience and their curiosity.

One should part from life as Odysseus parted from Nausicaa-blessing it rather than in love with it.

These small things - nutrition, place, climate, recreation, the whole casuistry of selfishness - are inconceivably more important than everything one has taken to be important so far.

Art raises its head where creeds relax.

The same passions in man and woman nonetheless differ in tempo; hence man and woman do not cease misunderstanding one another.

What does not kill you makes you stronger.

The love of truth has its reward in heaven and even on earth.

Each day I count wasted in which there has been no dancing

Death. The certain prospect of death could sweeten every life with a precious and fragrant drop of levity- and now you strange apothecary souls have turned it into an ill-tasting drop of poison that makes the whole of life repulsive.

The more you let yourself go, the less others let you go.