Friedrich Nietzsche Quotes

Truth is the kind of error without which a certain species of life could not live. The value for life is ultimately decisive.

Alas! There cometh the time when man will no longer give birth to any star. Alas! There cometh the time of the most despicable man, who can no longer despise himself.

The author must keep his mouth shut when his work starts to speak.

The reason adultery is immoral is that it might lead to marriage.

A book should long for pen, ink, and writing-table: but usually it is pen, ink, and writing-table that long for a book. That is why books are so negligible nowadays.

Impoliteness is frequently the sign of an awkward modesty that loses its head when surprised and hopes to conceal this with rudeness.

Genuine historical knowledge requires nobility of character, a profound understanding of human existence - not detachment and objectivity.

Just look at the faces of the great Christians! They are the faces of great haters.

School has no task more important than to teach strict thought, cautious judgment, and logical conclusions, hence it must pay no attention to what hinders these operations, such as religion, for instance.

The charm of knowledge would be small indeed, were it not that there is so much shame to be overcome on the way to it.

The child is innocence and forgetting, a new beginning, a game, a wheel rolling on its own, a prime movement, a sacred Yes.

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.

As much as possible, and this as quickly as possible: that is what the great mental and emotional illness craves that is variously called "present" or "culture," but that is actually a symptom of consumption.

It is, indeed, a fact that, in the midst of society and sociability every evil inclination has to place itself under such great restraint, don so many masks, lay itself so often on the procrustean bed of virtue, that one could well speak of a martyrdom of the evil man. In solitude all this falls away. He who is evil is at his most evil in solitude: which is where he is at his best - and thus to the eye of him who sees everywhere only a spectacle also at his most beautiful.

Faith actually moves no mountains, but instead raises them up where there were none before.

It is not when it is dangerous to tell the truth that its advocates are hardest to find, but when it is boring.

If there is to be art, if there is to be any aesthetic doing and seeing, one physiological condition is indispensable: frenzy.

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

Beware in the presence of cats: they never give, they do not even retaliate--they only reply, and purr in doing so.

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

He who speaks a bit of a foreign language has more delight in it than he who speaks it well; pleasure goes along with superficial knowledge.

The "religion of pity" to which people would like to convert us- oh, we know well enough the hysterical little men and women who need this religion at present as a veil and an adornment!

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

Belief in truth begins with doubting all that has hitherto been believed to be true.

One should adpot only those situations in which one is in no need of sham virtues, but rather, like the tight-rope dancer on his tight rope, in which one must either fall or stand--or escape.

Each word of Heraclitus expresses the pride and the majesty of truth, but of truth grasped in intuitions rather than attained by the rope ladder of logic.

Ye shall be those whose eyes ever seek for an enemy - for YOUR enemy. And with some of you there is hatred at first sight.

Tragedy is dead! Poetry itself died with it! Away, away with you, puny, stunted imitators! Away with you to Hades, and eat your fill of the old masters' crumbs!

It is within your power to see that all you have experienced, trials, errors, faults, deceptions, passions, your love and your hope, shall be merged wholly in your aim.

Evaluation is creation: hear it, you creators! Evaluating is itself the most valuable treasure of all that we value. It is only through evaluation that value exists: and without evaluation the nut of existence would be hollow. Hear it, you creators!

The public easily confuses him who fishes in troubled waters with him who draws up water from the depths.

Remain true to the earth.

He who laughs best today, will also laughs last.

Scholarship has the same relationship to wisdom as righteousness has to holiness: it is cold and dry, it is loveless and knows nodeep feelings of inadequacy or longing.

Our shortcomings are the eyes with which we see the ideal.

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

How is freedom measured, in individuals as in nations? By the resistance which has to be overcome, by the effort it costs to stay aloft. One would have to seek the highest type of free man where the greatest resistance is constantly being overcome: five steps from tyranny, near the threshold of the danger of servitude.

Christianity is Platonism for the people.

Such a man as instinctively feeds on pure ambrosia and leaves alone the indigestible in things.

That is the most extreme form of nihilism: nothingness (the "meaningless") eternally!

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

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

Men seldom persevere in a vocation unless they believe or can convince themselves that it is fundamentally more important than anyother calling. Women are the same with their lovers.

I absolutely cannot see how one can later make up for having failed to go to a good school at the proper time. For this is what distinguishes the hard school as a good school from all others: that much is demanded; and sternly demanded; that the good, even the exceptional, is demanded as the norm; that praise is rare, that indulgence is nonexistent; that blame is apportioned sharply, objectively, without regard for talent or antecedents. What does one learn in a hard school? Obeying and commanding.

He who climbeth on the highest mountains, laugheth at all tragic plays and tragic realities.

Everything about woman is a riddle, and everything about woman has a single solution: that is, pregnancy

To die proudly when it is no longer possible to live proudly. Death of one's own free choice, death at the proper time, with a clear head and with joyfulness, consummated in the midst of children and witnesses: so that an actual leave-taking is possible while he who is leaving is still there.

Desire is happiness: satisfaction as happiness is merely the ultimate moment of desire. To be wish and wish alone is happiness, and a new wish over and over again.