Friedrich Nietzsche Quotes

The noble caste was in the beginning always the barbarian caste: their superiority lay, not in their physical strength, but primarily in their psychical - they were more complete human beings.

The danger of our culture.- We belong to a period of which the culture is in danger of being destroyed by the appliances of culture.

Every achievement, every step forward in knowledge, is the consequence of courage, of toughness towards oneself, of sincerity to oneself

Everything good is the transmutation of something evil: every god has a devil for a father.

To call a thing good not a day longer than it appears to us good, and above all not a day earlier - that is the only way to keep joy pure.

I am a law only for my kind, I am no law for all.

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

That is an artist as I would have an artist be, modest in his needs: he really wants only two things, his bread and his art--panemet Circen.

Nihilism: any aim is lacking, any answer to the question "why" is lacking. What does nihilism mean?--that the supreme values devaluate themselves.

No honey is sweeter than that of knowledge.

Extreme positions are not succeeded by moderate ones but by extreme positions of the opposite kind.

To one who is accustomed to thinking a lot, every new thought that he hears or reads about immediately appears as a link in a chain.

I am too inquisitive, too skeptical, too arrogant, to let myself be satisfied with an obvious and crass solution of things. God is such an obvious and crass solution; a solution which is a sheer indelicacy to us thinkers - at bottom He is really nothing but a coarse commandment against us: ye shall not think!

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

It was Christianity which first painted the devil on the worlds walls; It was Christianity which first brought sin into the world. Belief in the cure which it offered has now been shaken to it's deepest roots; but belief in the sickness which it taught and propagated continues to exists.

The unselective knowledge drive resembles the indiscriminate sexual drive--signs of vulgarity!

A man who whinnies with noisy laughter, surpasses all the animals in vulgarity.

Democratic institutions form a system of quarantine for tyrannical desires.

A married philosopher belongs to comedy.

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

The transition from Religion to Scientific contemplation is a violent, dangerous leap, which is not to be recommended. In order to make this transition, art is far rather to be employed to relieve the mind overburdened with emotions. Out of the illogical comes much good. It is so firmly rooted in the passions, in language, in art, in religion, and generally in everything which gives value to life. It is only the naive people who can believe that the nature of man can be changed into a purely logical one. We have yet to learn that others can suffer, and this can never be completely learned.

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.

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

Profundity of thought belongs to youth, clarity of thought to old age.

Young people love what is interesting and odd, no matter how true or false it is. More mature minds love what is interesting and odd about truth. Fully mature intellects, finally, love truth, even when it appears plain and simple, boring to the ordinary person; for they have noticed that truth tends to reveal its highest wisdom in the guise of simplicity.

We cannot live without valuing: but we can live without valuing what you value.

What good is all this free-thinking, modernity, and turncoat flexibility if at some gut level you are still a Christian, a Catholic, and even a priest!

What do you regard as most humane? To spare someone shame.

It is the music in our conscience, the dance in our spirit, to which Puritan litanies, moral sermons, and goody goodness won’t chime.

“Evil men have no songs.” How is it, then, that the Russians have songs?

Genteel women suppose that those things do not really exist about which it is impossible to talk in polite company.

The one seeks a midwife to deliver his thoughts, the other, someone to assist: thus a good conversation comes into being.

For men are not equal: thus speaks justice.

He who seeks intelligence lacks intelligence.

The most general deficiency in our sort of culture and education is gradually dawning on me: no one learns, no one strives towards, no one teaches--enduring loneliness.

The wisest man would be the one richest in contradictions, who has, as it were, antennae for all types of men---as well as his great moments of grand harmony---a rare accident even in us! A sort of planetary motion---

The truthful man ends up realizing that he always lies.

What? A great man? I only ever see the ape of his own ideal.

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.

A vocation is the backbone of life.

One has renounced the great life when one renounces war.

Everyone becomes brave when he observes one who despairs.

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

History teaches that a race of people is best preserved where the greater number hold one common spirit in consequence of the similarity of their accustomed and indisputable principles.

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

Jealous is every virtue of the others, and a dreadful thing is jealousy. Even virtues may succumb by jealousy.

When a man is in love he endures more than at other times; he submits to everything.

God is dead, God remains dead, and we have killed him.