Friedrich Nietzsche Quotes

The bite of conscience, like the bite of a dog into a stone, is a stupidity.

"This - is now my way - where is yours"? Thus did I answer those who asked me "the way". For the way - it does not exist!

Truth will have no gods before it.- The belief in truth begins with the doubt of all truths in which one has previously believed.

Necessity is an interpretation, not a fact.

Whoever despises himself nonetheless respects himself as one who despises.

I love him who chasteneth his God, because he loveth his God: for he must succumb through the wrath of his God.

Whatever we have words for, that we have already got beyond.

Our crime against criminals lies in the fact that we treat them like rascals.

Every philosophy is the philosophy of some stage of life.

There is nothing very odd about lambs disliking birds of prey, but this is no reason for holding it against large birds of prey that they carry off lambs. And when the lambs whisper among themselves, "These birds of prey are evil, and does this not give us a right to say that whatever is the opposite of a bird of prey must be good," there is nothing intrinsically wrong with such an argument-though the birds of prey will look somewhat quizzically and say, We have nothing against these good lambs; in fact, we love them; nothing tastes better than a tender lamb.

In Bach there is still too much crude Christianity, crude Germanism, crude scholasticism; he stands on the threshold of European (modern) music, but he looks back from there to the Middle Ages.

To be moral, correct, and virtuous is to be obedient to an old established law and custom.

Aphorisms should be peaks - and those who are addressed, tall and lofty. The air thin and pure, danger near, and the spirit full of gay sarcasm: these go well together.

With deep men, as with deep wells, it takes a long time for anything that falls into them to hit bottom. Onlookers, who almost never wait long enough, readily suppose that such men are callous and unresponsive--or even boring.

Higher than "thou shalt" stands "I will" (the heroes), and higher than "I will" stands "I am" (the Greek gods).

Every society has a tendency to reduce it's opponents to caricatures.

Plato was a bore.

One must renounce the bad taste of wishing to agree with many people.

Idleness is the beginning of all psychology. What? Could it be that psychology is ? a vice?

He who lives as children live - who does not struggle for his bread and does not believe that his actions possess any ultimate significance - remains childlike.

In everything one thing is impossible: rationality.

The will to power can express itself only against resistances; it seeks that which resists it--this is the native tendency of theamoeba when it extends its pseudopodia and gropes around.

The patient. The pine tree seems to listen, the fir tree to wait: and both without impatience: - they give no thought to the little people beneath them devoured by their impatience and their curiosity.

The lack of closeness among friends is a fault that cannot be reprimanded without becoming incurable.

Iron necessity is a thing which in the course of history men come to see as neither iron nor necessary.

Most thinkers write badly, because they communicate not only their thoughts, but also the thinking of them.

There are people who want to make men's lives more difficult for no other reason than the chance it provides them afterwards to offer their prescription for alleviating life; their Christianity, for instance.

The machine is impersonal, it takes the pride away from a piece of work, the individual merits and defects that go along with allwork that is not done by a machine--which is to say, its little bit of humanity.

Art raises its head where creeds relax.

One has to pay dearly for immortality; one has to die several times while one is still alive.

All good things were formerly bad things; every original sin has turned into an original virtue.

The advocates of a criminal are seldom artists enough to turn the beautiful terribleness of the deed to the advantage of the doer.

That for which we find words is something already dead in our hearts.

Everyone nowadays lives through too much and thinks through too little: they have a ravenous appetite and colic at the same time so that they keep getting thinner and thinner no matter how much they eat.--Whoever says nowadays, "I have not experienced anything"--is a simpleton.

The dyed-in-the-wool teacher takes everything seriously only with respect to his students--himself included.

Wit is the epitaph of an emotion.

To do great things is difficult; but to command great things is more difficult.

This is what is hardest: to close the open hand because one loves.

Concerning great things one should either be silent or speak loftily.

I could dispense with nothing when I created the superman. His seed still carries all your evil and falsehood, your lies and yourignorance.

An attack on the roots of passion means an attack on the roots of life.

One pays dearly for being immortal: one must die many times during his life.

Partial knowledge is more triumphant than complete knowledge; it takes things to be simpler than they are, and so makes its theory more popular and convincing.

What an age experiences as evil is usually an untimely reverberation echoing what was previously experienced as good--the atavismof an older ideal.

In praise there is more obtrusiveness than in blame.

When Zarathustra was alone . . . he said to his heart: "Could it be possible! This old saint in the forest hath not yet heard of it, that God is dead!"

A woman does not want the truth; what is truth to women? From the beginning, nothing has been more alien, repugnant, and hostile to woman than the truth - her great art is the lie, her highest concern is mere appearance and beauty.

Some rule out of a lust for ruling; others, so as not to be ruled:Mto these it is merely the lesser of two evils.