Friedrich Nietzsche Quotes

When we dream about those who are long since forgotten or dead, it is a sign that we have undergone a radical transformation and that the ground on which we live has been completely dug up: then the dead rise up, and our antiquity becomes modernity.

Life without music is only error, exhaustion, exile... Indeed, there is nothing that concerns me more than the fate of music.

Thus do I want man and woman to be: the one fit to wage war and the other fit to give birth, but both fit to dance with head and feet.

This is one of the stout-hearted old warriors: he is angry with civilization because he supposes that its aim is to make all goodthings--honors, treasures, beautiful women--accessible even to cowards.

We have art in order not to die of the truth.

One must need to be strong, otherwise one will never become strong.

When death brings at last the desired forgetfulness, it abolishes life and being together, and sets the seal on the knowledge that "being" is merely a continual "has been," a thing that lives by denying and destroying and contradicting itself.

Fall down seven times, stand up eight. - Chinese proverbWithout music, life would be a mistake.

Men are even lazier than they are timorous, and what they fear most is the troubles with which any unconditional honesty and nudity would burden them.

In our interactions with people, a benevolent hypocrisy is frequently required--acting as though we do not see through the motivesof their actions.

The really royal calling of the philosopher (as expressed by Alcuin the Anglo-Saxon): To correct what is wrong, and strengthen the right, and raise what is holy.

To see others suffer does one good, to make others suffer even more: this is a hard saying but an ancient, mighty, human, all-too-human principle [....] Without cruelty there is no festival.

Blessed are the forgetful: for they get the better even of their blunders.

When we cannot stand certain people, we try to have suspicions about them.

The spiritual activity of millennia is deposited in language.

The perfect woman is a higher type of humanity than the perfect man, and also something much rarer. The natural history of animals furnishes grounds in support of this theory.

The ability to suffer is a small matter - weak women and even slaves can acheive virtuosity in that.

A nation usually renews its youth on a political sick-bed, and there finds again the spirit which it had gradually lost in seeking and maintaining power.

The English are the people of consummate cant.

In the end one only experiences oneself.

I teach you beyond Man (superman). Man is something that shall be surpassed. What have you done to surpass him?

I too have been in the underworld, as was Odysseus, and I will often be there again; not only sheep have I sacrificed so as to beable to speak with a few dead souls, but neither have I spared my own blood as well.

Away from God and gods did this will lure me: what would there be to create if gods existed?

There are no facts, only interpretations.

Christianity was from the beginning, essentially and fundamentally, life's nausea and disgust with life, merely concealed behind, masked by, dressed up as, faith in "another" or "better" life.

Acknowledge your will and speak to us all, "This alone is what I will to be!" Hang your own penal code up above you: we want to be its enforcers!

Dancing in all its forms cannot be excluded from the curriculum of all noble education; dancing with the feet, with ideas, with words, and, need I add that one must also be able to dance with the pen?

Crude men who feel themselves insulted tend to assess the degree of insult as high as possible, and talk about the offense in greatly exaggerated language, only so they can revel to their heart's content in the aroused feelings of hatred and revenge.

Why couldn't the world that concerns us- be a fiction? And if somebody asked, 'but to be a fiction there surely belongs an author?'- couldn't one answer simply: 'Why? Doesn't this "belongs" perhaps belong to the fiction, too?'

Was mich nicht zugrunde richtet, macht mich starker.

It was a subtle refinement of God to learn Greek when he wished to write a book – and that he did not learn it better.

Pain makes hens and poets cackle.

The form of a work of art, which gives speech to their thoughts and is, therefore, their mode of talking, is always somewhat uncertain, like all kinds of speech.

When we stand the truth on its head we generally fail to notice that our head is not standing where it should be standing either.

All mankind is divided, as it was at all times and is still, into slaves and freemen.

When an idea is just rising on the horizon, the soul's temperature with respect to it is usually very cold. Only gradually does the idea develop its warmth, and it is hottest (which is to say, exerting its greatest influence) when belief in the idea is already once again in decline.

Let that day be lost to us on which we did not dance once!

Mastery has been achieved when one neither makes a mistake nor hesitates in the performance.

Without forgetting it is quite impossible to live at all.

The reasons for which 'this' world has been characterized as 'apparent' are the very reasons which indicate its reality; any other kind of reality is absolutely indemonstrable.

Christianity in particular should be dubbed a great treasure-chamber of ingenious consolations, such a store of refreshing, soothing, deadening drugs has it accumulated within itself.

To be natural means to dare to be as immoral as Nature is.

We should turn our death into a celebration, even if only out of a malice towards life: towards the woman who wants to leave--us!

In every age the wisest have passed the identical judgment on life: it is worthless.

Towards gnats and fleas we should show no pity. We would do right to hang petty thieves, petty calumniators, and slanderers.

Man, full of emptiness and torn apart with homesickness for the desert has had to create from within himself an adventure, a torture-chamber, an unsafe and hazardous wilderness- this fool, this prisoner consumed with longing and despair, became the inventor of 'bad conscience'.

Being human is a complicated gig. So give that ol' dark night of the soul a hug. Howl the eternal yes!

"Ego," sayest thou, and art proud of that word. But the greater thing - in which thou art unwilling to believe - is thy body with its big sagacity; it saith not "ego," but doeth it.