Friedrich Nietzsche Quotes

I love those who do not know how to live, except by going under, for they are those who cross over.

What a dissimilarity we see in walking, swimming, and flying. And yet it is one and the same motion: it is just that the load- bearing capacity of the earth differs from that of the water, and that that of the water differs from that of the air! Thus we should also learn to fly as thinkers--and not imagine that we are thereby becoming idle dreamers!

From whatever you wish to know and measure you must take your leave, at least for a time. Only when you have left the town can yousee how high its towers rise above the houses.

Egoism is the law of perspective applied to feelings: what is closest appears large and weighty, and as one moves farther away size and weight decrease.

It is not a lack of love, but a lack of friendship that makes unhappy marriages.

Out of damp and gloomy days, out of solitude, out of loveless words directed at us, conclusions grow up in us like fungus: one morning they are there, we know not how, and they gaze upon us, morose and gray. Woe to the thinker who is not the gardener but only the soil of the plants that grow in him.

The bite of conscience is indecent.

You may lie with your mouth, but with the mouth you make as you do so you none the less tell the truth.

There's no defense against stupidity.

How can anyone become a thinker unless he spends at least a third of every day away from passions, people, and books?

Among austere men intimacy involves shame--and is something precious.

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

God remains dead. And we have killed him. Yet his shadow still looms. How shall we comfort ourselves, the murderers of all murderers?

It is good to express a thing twice right at the outset and so to give it a right foot and also a left one. Truth can surely stand on one leg, but with two it will be able to walk and get around.

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

Only great pain is, as the teacher of great suspicion, the ultimate liberator of the spirit...I doubt whether such pain improves us-but I do know it deepens us.

Every step forward is made at the cost of mental and physical pain to someone.

There is a certain right by which we many deprive a man of life, but none by which we may deprive him of death; this is mere cruelty.

I fear animals regard man as a creature of their own kind which has in a highly dangerous fashion lost its healthy animal reason - as the mad animal, as the laughing animal, as the weeping animal, as the unhappy animal.

A man who possesses genius is insufferable unless he also possesses at least two other things: gratitude and cleanliness.

What is more harmful than any vice? Practical sympathy and pity for all the failures and all the weak : Christianity.

A friend whose hopes we cannot satisfy is a friend we would rather have as an enemy.

All truly great thoughts are conceived by walking.

In every real man a child is hidden that wants to play.

Never to talk about oneself is a very refined form of hypocrisy.

How much beer is in German intelligence?

Annoyance is a physical malady that is in no way cured just because the annoying situation that causes it is eliminated.

Pity aims just as little at the pleasure of others as malice at the pain of others Per-Se.

All of life is a dispute over taste and tasting.

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

You want to be paid as well, you virtuous! You want reward for virtue, and heaven for earth, and eternity for your today?

As regards the celebrated struggle for life, it seems to me for the present to have been rather asserted than proved. It does occur, but as the exception; the general aspect of life is not hunger and distress, but rather wealth, luxury, even absurd prodigality -- where there is a struggle it is a struggle for power.

"What is good?" ye ask. To be brave is good. Let the little girls say: "To be good is what is pretty, and at the same time touching."

Something unappeased, unappeasable, is within me.

I know the hatred and envy of your hearts. Ye are not great enough not to know of hatred and envy. Then be great enough not to be ashamed of them!

. . . an absurd problem came to the surface: 'How COULD God permit that (crucifixion of Jesus Christ)!' . . . the deranged reason of the little community found quite a frightfully absurd answer: God gave his Son for forgiveness, as a SACRIFICE . . . The SACRIFICE FOR GUILT, and just in its most repugnant and barbarous form - the sacrifice of the innocent for the sins of the guilty! What horrifying heathenism!

Unexplained, obscure matters are regarded as more important than explained, clear ones.

Christianity remains to this day the greatest misfortune of humanity.

To find everything profound - that is an inconvenient trait. It makes one strain one's eyes all the time, and in the end one finds more than one might have wished.

Faith, indeed, has up to the present not been able to move real mountains, although I do not know who assumed that it could. But it can put mountains where there are none.

Lying very still and thinking very little is the most inexpensive medicine for all the sicknesses of the soul, and when administered with good intentions it grows more and more pleasant with each passing hour.

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.

Rendering oneself unarmed when one had been the best-armed, out of a height of feeling-that is the means to real peace, which must always rest on a peace of mind.

A letter is an unannounced visit, the postman the agent of rude surprises. One ought to reserve an hour a week for receiving letters and afterwards take a bath.

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

Your only problem, perhaps, is that you scream without letting yourself cry.

In morality, man treats himself not as individuum but as dividuum.

I do not know what the spirit of a philosopher could more wish to be than a good dancer. For the dance is his ideal, also his fine art, finally also the only kind of piety he knows, his 'divine service.'