Friedrich Nietzsche Quotes

One should not go into churches if one wants to breathe pure air.

What is wrong with Christianity is that it refrains from doing all those things that Christ commanded should be done.

A light has dawned for me: I need companions, living ones, not dead companions and corpses which I carry with me wherever I wish. But I need living companions who follow me because they want to follow themselves- and who want to go where I want to go.

Indeed, what forces us at all to suppose that there is an essential opposition of 'true' and 'false'? Is it not sufficient to assume degrees of apparentness and, as it were, lighter and darker shadows and shades of appearance- different 'values', to use the language of painters?

So live your life of obedience and of war! What matter about long life! What warrior wisheth to be spared!

Go through the towns and ask yourselves whether these people should reproduce! Let them go to their whores!

There are no limits to God's compassion with Paradises over their one universally felt want: he immediately created other animals besides. God's first blunder: Man didn't find the animals amusing, - he dominated them and didn't even want to be an 'animal.'

Mathematics is merely the means to a general and ultimate knowledge of man.

Probability but no truth, facility but no freedom--it is owing to these two fruits that the tree of knowledge cannot be confused with the tree of life.

As a human being Plato mingles regal, exclusive, and self-contained features with melancholy compassion.

Deception, flattering, lying, deluding, talking behind the back, putting up a false front, living in borrowed splendor, wearing a mask, hiding behind convention, playing a role for others and for oneself -- in short, a continuous fluttering around the solitary flame of vanity -- is so much the rule and the law among men that there is almost nothing which is less comprehensible than how an honest and pure drive for truth could have arisen among them.

Whom do you call bad?--Those who always want to induce shame.

It is only because man believes himself to be free, not because he is free, that he experiences remorse and pricks of conscience.

One who is always deeply involved in what he is doing is above all embarrassment.

There is no pre-established harmony between the furtherance of truth and the well-being of mankind.

To have to fight the instincts - that is the definition of decadence: as long as life is ascending, happiness equals instinct.

And like a wind shall I one day blow amongst them and with my spirit take away their soul's breath: thus my future wills it.

[Heraclitus] concluded that coming-to-be itself could not be anything evil or unjust.

Never trust a thought that didn't come by walking.

The thirst for equality can express itself either as a desire to draw everyone down to one's level, or to raise oneself and everyone else up.

Comparing man and woman on the whole, one may say: woman would not possess a genius for ornamentation if she did not also possessan instinct for the secondary role.

Against war it may be said that it makes the victor stupid and the vanquished revengeful.

[Heraclitus had] a regal air of certainty.

When on a Sunday morning we hear the old bells ring out, we ask ourselves, "Is it possible! This is done on account of a Jew crucified two thousand years ago who said he was the Son of God. The proof of such an assertion is wanting".

The irrationality of a thing is no argument against its existence, rather a condition of it.

Man wishes woman to be peaceable, but in fact she is essentially warlike, like the cat.

The Germans are like women, you can scarcely ever fathom their depths - they haven't any.

What is done out of love always occurs beyond good and evil.

The lie is a condition of life.

It is neither the best nor the worst things in a book that defy translation.

Our knowledge will take its revenge on us, just as ignorance exacted its revenge during the Middle Ages.

Has a woman who knew she was well-dressed ever caught a cold?

If you are considering marriage, ask yourself one question: Will I still enjoy talking with her when I'm old?

The great end of art is to strike the imagination with the power of a soul that refuses to admit defeat even in the midst of a collapsing world.

The child as a monument to the passion of two people; the will to oneness in two.

A life without music is an error.

The wreckage of stars - I built a world from this wreckage.

My genius is in my nostrils.

Pity makes suffering contagious.

The press, the machine, the railway, the telegraph are premises whose thousand-year conclusion no one has yet dared to draw.

as though "the Truth" were such an innocent and incompetent creature as to require protectors!

The familiarity of superiors embitters one, because it may not be returned.

A noble soul is not the one that can manage the highest flights but the one that rises very little and falls very little but always dwells in a free, resplendent atmosphere and altitude.

The abdomen is the reason why man does not readily take himself to be a god.

A certain type of person strives to become a master over all, and to extend his force, his will to power, and to subdue all that resists it. But he encounters the power of others, and comes to an arrangement, a union, with those that are like him: thus they work together to serve the will to power. And the process goes on.

One never dives into the water to save a drowning man more eagerly than when there are others present who dare not take the risk.

But let me open up my heart to you completely, my friends: if there were gods, how could I bear not being a god! Hence, there areno gods. I drew this conclusion, to be sure--but now it draws me.

Reason is the cause of our falsification of the evidence of the senses. In so far as the senses show becoming, passing away, change, they do not lie.