Friedrich Nietzsche Quotes

A certain sense of cruelty towards oneself and others is Christian; hatred of those who think differently; the will to persecute. Mortal hostility against the masters of the earth, against the 'noble', that is also Christian; hatred of mind, of pride, courage, freedom, libertinage of mind, is Christian; hatred of the senses, of joy in general, is Christian.

Every power draws its ultimate consequences at every moment.

How much disgruntled heaviness, lameness, dampness, how much beer is there in the German intelligence.

Writers ought to be regarded as wrongdoers who deserve to be acquitted or pardoned only in the rarest cases: that would be a way to keep books from getting out of hand.

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.

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?

We evaluate the services that anyone renders to us according to the value he puts on them, not according to the value they have for us.

Rash actions are seldom committed in isolation. With the first rash action we always do too much. So we usually go on to commit asecond one--and then we do too little.

A pair of powerful spectacles has sometimes sufficed to cure a person in love.

We labour at our daily work more ardently and thoughtlessly than is necessary to sustain our life because it is even more necessary not to have leisure to stop and think. Haste is universal because everyone is in flight from himself.

We are doubly willing to jump into the water after some one who has fallen in, if there are people present who have not the courage to do so.

Books that teach us to dance: There are writers who, by portraying the impossible as possible, and by speaking of morality and genius as if both were high-spirited freedom, as if man were rising up on tiptoe and simply had to dance out of inner pleasure.

Every virtue has its privilege: for example, that of contributing its own little bundle of wood to the funeral pyre of one condemned.

Animals know nothing of themselves, and they also know nothing of the world.

A book calls for pen, ink, and a writing desk; today the rule is that pen, ink, and a writing desk call for a book.

I have not come to know atheism as a result of logical reasoning and still less as an event in my life: in me it is a matter of instinct.

O my brothers, am I then cruel? But I say: that which is falling should also be pushed!

There did he sit shrivelled in his chimney corner, fretting on account of his weak legs, world weary, will weary, and one day he suffocated through his excessive pity.

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

Why is it that wellnesses are not as contagious as illnesses--generally speaking, but also especially regarding taste? Or are there epidemics of health?

With the strength of his spiritual sight and insight the distance, and as it were the space, around man continually expands: his world grows deeper, ever new stars, ever new images and enigmas come into view.

They would have to sing better songs for me to learn to have faith in their Redeemer; and his disciples would have to look more redeemed!

Do you believe then that the sciences would ever have arisen and become great if there had not before hand been magicians, alchemists, astrologers and wizards, who thirsted and hungered after abscondite and forbidden powers?

Whoever has really sacrificed anything, knows that he wanted and got something in return.

Ultimately, it is the desire, not the desired, that we love.

The Germans are incapable of any conception of greatness: proof Schumann.

However closely people are attached to one another, their mutual horizon nonetheless includes all four compass directions, and nowand again they notice it.

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

There are two things a real man likes - danger and play; and he likes woman because she is the most dangerous of play things.

It says nothing against the ripeness of a spirit that it has a few worms.

It is doubtful whether anyone who has travelled widely has found anywhere in the world regions more ugly than in the human face.

Like the creatures of the forest and the sea, I love To lose myself for a while.

Carlyle, a man of strong words and attitudes, a rhetorician out of necessity, constantly aroused by the craving for a strong faithas well as by the feeling of an incapacity for it (Min this respect a typical romantic!).... Fundamentally, Carlyle is an English atheist who makes it a point of honor not to be one.

Man's task is simple. He should cease letting his existence be a thoughtless accident.

Where one despises, one cannot wage war.

The command 'become hard! ', the deep conviction that all creators are hard, is the really distinctive sign of a Dionysian nature.

Companions the creator seeks, not corpses, not herds and believers. Fellow creators the creator seeks -- those who write new values on new tablets. Companions the creator seeks, and fellow harvesters; for everything about him is ripe for the harvest.

It is regrettable that a Dostoyevsky did not live near this most interesting of all decadents (Jesus Christ) - I mean someone who would have known how to sense the very stirring charm of such a mixture of the sublime, the sickly, and the childlike.

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

You know these things as thoughts, but your thoughts are not your experiences, they are an echo and after-effect of your experiences: as when your room trembles whe na carriage goes past. I however am sitting in the carriage, and often I am the carriage itself. Ina man who thinks like this, the dichotomy between thinking and feeling, intellect and passion, has really disappeared. He feels his thoughts. He can fall in love with an idea. An idea can make him ill.

In every party there is one person who, through his dotingly credulous enunciation of party principles, incites the other members to defection.

A very popular error: having the courage of one's convictions; rather it is a matter of having the courage for an attack on one's convictions.

The view that honesty is something, and even a virtue, belongs, it is true, to those private opinions which are forbidden in this age of public opinions.

It is the evening that questions thus from within me.

In heaven, all the interesting people are missing.

Let them like the Tibetans, chew the cud of their "om mane padme hum" innumerable times, or, as in Benares, count the name of the God Ram-Ram-Ram (etc. with or without charm) on their fingers; or honour Vishnu with his thousand names of invocation, Allah with his ninety-nine; or they may make use of the prayer-wheels and the rosary: the main thing is that they are settled down for a time at this work and are tolerable to look at. This kind of prayer has been invented for the benefit of the pious who have thought and elevations of their own.

I know no other way to associate with great tasks than as play: as a sign of greatness, this is an essential presupposition.

Men subsequently put whatever is newly learned or experienced to use as a plowshare, perhaps even as a weapon: but women immediately include it among their ornaments.