Friedrich Nietzsche Quotes

I overcame myself, the sufferer; I carried my own ashes to the mountains; I invented a brighter flame for myself.

The hour-hand of life.

A thought, even a possibility, can shatter and transform us.

Philosophers are in the habit of setting themselves before life and experience.

He who cannot obey himself will be commanded. That is the nature of living creatures.

Everything good is instinct--and, as a result, easy, necessary, free.

All philosophers make the common mistake of taking contemporary man as their starting point and of trying, through an analysis of him, to[21] reach a conclusion. "Man" involuntarily presents himself to them as an aeterna veritas as a passive element in every hurly-burly, as a fixed standard of things. Yet everything uttered by the philosopher on the subject of man is, in the last resort, nothing more than a piece of testimony concerning man during a very limited period of time.

The surest way to corrupt a youth is to instruct him to hold in higher esteem those who think alike than those who think differently.

A man unconsciously imagines that where he is strong, where he feels most thoroughly alive, the element of his freedom must lie.

Vanity is the fear of appearing original: it is thus a lack of pride, but not necessarily a lack of originality.

In those days it was possible for a Greek to flee from an over-abundant reality as though it were but the tricky scheming off the imagination-and to flee, not like Plato into the land of eternal ideas, into the workshop off the world-creator, feasting one's eyes on the unblemished unbreakable archetypes, but into the rigor mortis off the coldest emptiest concept off all, the concept of being.

The secret of reaping the greatest fruitfulness and the greatest enjoyment from life is to live dangerously.

There is a rollicking kindness that looks like malice.

And he who must be a creator in good and evil: verily, he must be an annihilator first and demolish values.

I should not believe in a God who does not dance.

Warfare is the father of all good things, it is also the father of good prose!

The surest sign that two people no longer speak the same language is that both say ironic things to one another but that neither senses the irony.

We attack not only to hurt someone, to defeat him, but perhaps also simply to become conscious of our own strength.

They muddy the water, to make it seem deep.

Shackled heart, free spirit.--Whoever binds his heart tightly and imprisons it may indulge his spirit in many liberties: I have already said that once. But no one believes me unless he already knows.

On the heights it is warmer than those in the valley imagine.

To have and to want more that is life.

Here is a hero who did nothing but shake the tree as soon as the fruit was ripe. Does this seem to be too small a thing to you? Then take a good look at the tree he shook.

Sometimes in our relationship to another human being the proper balance of friendship is restored when we put a few grains of impropriety onto our own side of the scale.

But say, my brothers, what can the child do that even the lion could not do? Why must the preying lion still become a child? The child is innocence and forgetting, a new beginning, a sacred 'Yes.' For the game of creation, my brothers, a sacred 'Yes' is needed: the spirit now wills his own will, and he who had been lost to the world now conquers his own world.

Do not be deceived! The busiest people harbor the greatest weariness, their restlessness is weakness--they no longer have the capacity for waiting and idleness.

Courageous, unconcerned, scornful, coercive - so wisdom wisheth us; she is a woman, and ever loveth only a warrior.

A good writer possesses not only his own spirit but also the spirit of his friends.

The aphorism, the apothegm, in which I am the first among the Germans to be a master, are the forms of “eternity”; it is my ambition to say in ten sentences what everyone else says in a book — what everyone else does not say in a book.

Speaking of Georges Bizet: His music has the tang of sunny climates, their bracing air, their clearness. It voices a sensibility hitherto unknown to us.

Have you noticed there are no interesting people in heaven? -Just a hint to the girls as to where they can find their salvation.

Natural death is independent of all reason and is really an irrational death, in which the pitiable substance of the shell determines how long the kernel is to exist or not; in which, accordingly, the stunted, diseased and dull witted jailer is lord, and indicates the moment at which his distinguished prisoner shall die.

Conversation with a friend will only bear good fruit of knowledge when both think only of the matter under consideration and forget that they are friends.

If you are too weak to give yourselves your own law, then a tyrant shall lay his yoke upon you and say: "Obey! Clench your teeth and obey!" And all good and evil shall be drowned in obedience to him.

As soon as we climb higher than those who had at one time admired us, we appear to them as though we have sunken and fallen down:for, in any event, they had at one time supposed that they were with us (even if it were through us) on the heights.

All truth is crooked, time itself is a circle

One must learn to love oneself with a wholesome and healthy love, so that one can bear to be with oneself and need not roam.

Convictions are more dangerous enemies of truth than lies.Courageous, untroubled, mocking and violent-that is what Wisdom wants us to be. Wisdom is a woman, and loves only a warrior.

One can promise actions, but not feelings, for the latter are involuntary. He who promises to love forever or hate forever or be forever faithful to someone is promising something that is not in his power.

There is not sufficient religion in the world merely to put an end to the number of religions.

Whoever regards human beings as a herd and flees them as swiftly as he can will no doubt be overtaken by them and impaled on theirhorns.

When the gratitude that many owe to one discards all modesty, then there is fame.

Rejoicing in our joy, not suffering over our suffering, makes someone a friend.

It's not the intensity of the man, but the duration of his intensity that makes the man great.

Stupid as a man, say the women: cowardly as a woman, say the men. Stupidity in a woman is unwomanly.

In song and dance, man forgets how to walk and speak and is on the way into flying into the air, dancing... his very gestures express enchantment.

Are you visiting women? Do not forget your whip

Whoever has overthrown an existing law of custom has always first been accounted a bad man: but when, as did happen, the law could not afterwards be reinstated and this fact was accepted, the predicate gradually changed; - history treats almost exclusively of these bad men who subsequently became good men!