Friedrich Nietzsche Quotes

Christianity is a metaphysics of the hangman.

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

One who is publicly honest about himself ends up by priding himself somewhat on this honesty: for he knows only too well why he is honest-for the same reasons another person prefers illusion and dissimulation.

I will believe in the Redeemer when the Christians look a little more redeemed.

Physician, help yourself: thus help your patient too. Let this be his best help: that he may behold with his eyes the man who heals himself.

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

Your soul will be dead even before your body: fear nothing further.

In constructing concepts, we overlook the fact that no two things are the same. There is no such thing as the concept of a leaf, only billions and billions of leaves.

The Hour-Hand of Life --- Life consists of rare, isolated moments of the greatest significance, and of innumerably many intervals, during which at best the silhouettes of those moments hover about us. Love, springtime, every beautiful melody, mountains, the moon, the sea - all these speak completely to the heart but once, if in fact they ever do get a chance to speak completely. For many men do not have those moments at all, and are themselves intervals and intermissions in the symphony of real life.

Christianity has taken the part of all the weak, the low, the botched; it has made an ideal out of antagonism to all the self preservative instincts of sound life; it has corrupted even the faculties of those natures that are intellectually most vigorous, by representing the highest intellectual values as sinful, as misleading, as full of temptation.

In the whole of the New Testament there is not one joke, that fact alone would invalidate any book.

Whoever has not two-thirds of his time to himself, is a slave.

People are always angry at anyone who chooses very individual standards for his life; because of the extraordinary treatment which that man grants to himself, they feel degraded, like ordinary beings.

When we talk in company we lose our unique tone of voice, and this leads us to make statements which in no way correspond to our real thoughts.

Whoever writes in blood and aphorisms wants not to be learned but to be learned by heart.

What makes us heroic?--Confronting simultaneously our supreme suffering and our supreme hope.

Man Is Something That Must Be Overcome

Actual philosophers... are commanders and law-givers: they say "thus it shall be!", it is they who determine the Wherefore and Whither of mankind, and they possess for this task the preliminary work of all the philosophical laborers, of all those who have subdued the past - they reach for the future with creative hand, and everything that is or has been becomes for them a means, an instrument, a hammer.

Men have hitherto treated women like birds which have strayed down to them from the heights; as something more delicate, more fragile, more savage, stranger, sweeter, soulful--but as something which has to be caged up so that it shall not fly away.

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

Everyone thinks that the principal thing to the tree is the fruit, but in point of fact the principal thing to it is the seed.

What really makes one indignant about suffering isn't the thing itself but the senselessness of it.

We must understand how to hide in darkness in order to escape the gnat-swarms of utterly annoying admirers.

And so while dreams are the individual man's play with reality, the sculptor's art is (in a broader sense) the play with dreams.

The code of Manu differs from the bible. By means of it the nobles, the philosophers, and the warriors keep the whip hand over the majority. It is full of noble valuations; it shows a feeling of perfection, an acceptance of life, and triumphant feeling toward self and life.

In Russia there is an emigration of intelligence: émigrés cross the frontier in order to read and to write good books. But in doing so they contribute to making their fatherland, abandoned by spirit, into the gaping jaws of Asia that would like to swallow our little Europe.

There is nothing that has caused me to meditate more on Plato's secrecy and sphinx-like nature, than the happily preserved petit fait that under the pillow of his death-bed there was found no 'Bible,' nor anything Egyptian, Pythagorean, or Platonic - but a book of Aristophanes. How could even Plato have endured life - a Greek life which he repudiated - without an Aristophanes!

What we experience in dreams - assuming that we experience it often - belongs in the end just as much to the over-all economy of our soul as anything experienced "actually": we are richer or poorer on account of it.

Hold a true friend with both your hands.

All truths are bloody truths to me.

Again and again I am brought up against it, and again and again I resist it: I don't want to believe it, even though it is almost palpable: the vast majority lack an intellectual conscience; indeed, it often seems to me that to demand such a thing is to be in the most populous cities as solitary as in the desert.

From the State the exceptional individual cannot expect much. He is seldom benefited by being taken into its service; the only certain advantage it can give him is complete independence. Only real culture will prevent him being too early tired out or used up, and will spare him the exhausting struggle against culture-philistinism.

The purpose of criminal law is to punish the enemies of those in power.

Doing ill to those on whom we have to make our power felt; for pain is a far more sensitive means for that purpose than pleasure: pain always asks concerning the cause, while pleasure is inclined to keep within itself and not look backward.

We talk so abstractly about poetry because all of us are usually bad poets.

The greatest events-they are not our loudest but our stillest hours.

There is always a certain noise in applause: even in the applause we give ourselves.

Every one being allowed to learn to read, ruineth in the long run not only writing but also thinking.

That the world is a divine game and beyond good and evil:Min this the Vedanta philosophy and Heraclitus are my predecessors.

Whatever may be your desire to accomplish great deeds, the deep silence of pregnancy never comes to you! The event of the day sweeps you along like straws before the wind whilst ye lie under the illusion that ye are chasing the event,-poor fellows! If a man wishes to act the hero on the stage he must not think of forming part of the chorus; he should not even know how the chorus is made up.

Whoever has witnessed another's ideal becomes his inexorable judge and as it were his evil conscience.

You highest men whom I have ever seen! This is my suspicion about you and my secret laughter: I guess that you would call my superman--a devil!

It is thus only this personal feeling of misery that we get rid of by acts of pity.

Full is the earth of the superfluous; marred is life by the many-too-many. May they be decoyed out of this life by the "life eternal"!

You call yourself free? I want to hear your ruling thought and not that you have escaped a yoke. Are you such a one as was permitted to escape a yoke? There are some who threw away their ultimate worth when they threw away their servitude. Free from what? What is that to Zarathustra! But your eyes should announce to me brightly: free for what?

Enjoy life. This is not a dress rehearsal.

[Heraclitus speaks as if] in entrancement ... but [also] truthfully.

One should not wrongly reify 'cause' and 'effect,' as the natural scientists do (and whoever, like them, now 'naturalizes' in his thinking), according to the prevailing mechanical doltishness which makes the cause press and push until it 'effects' its end; one should use 'cause' and 'effect' only as pure concepts, that is to say, as conventional fictions for the purpose of designation and communication-not for explanation.