Friedrich Nietzsche Quotes

It is however a disgrace to pray! Not for all, but for you, and me, and whoever has his a conscience.

Does wisdom perhaps appear on the earth as a raven which is inspired by the smell of carrion?

Every word is a preconceived judgment.

Alas, where is there still a sea in which one could drown: thus our lament resounds – across shallow swamps.

Freedom of opinion is like health; both are individual, and no good general conception can be set up of either of them.

The higher its type, the more rarely a thing succeeds.

Do you call yourself Free? It is your ruling thought that I would hear, and not that you have escaped from a yoke.

So long as the spectator has to figure out the meaning of this or that person, or the presuppositions of this or that conflict of inclinations and purposes, he cannot become completely absorbed in the activities and sufferings of the chief characters or feel breathless pity and fear.

Wherever I found a living creature, there I found the will to power.

You must climb above yourself-up and beyond, until you have even your stars under you.

For the purpose of knowledge we must know how to make use of the inward current which draws us towards a thing, and also of the current which after a time draws us away from it.

Every extension of knowledge arises from making the conscious the unconscious.

We should be a mirror of being: we are God in miniature.

The Devil has the broadest perspectives for God; therefore, he keeps so far away from God -- the Devil being the most ancient friend of wisdom

Rather perish than hate and fear, and twice rather perish than make oneself hated and feared — this must some day become the highest maxim for every single commonwealth.

What good is a book that does not even transport us beyond all books?

Let us beware of saying that death is the opposite of life. The living being is only a species of the dead, and a very rare species.

Their usual mistaken premise is that they affirm some consensus among people, at least among tame peoples, concerning certain moral principles, and then conclude that these principles must be unconditionally binding also for you and me-or conversely, they see that among different peoples moral valuations are necessarily different and infer from this that no morality is binding-both of which are equally childish.

Necessity is not an established fact, but an interpretation.

At a certain place in Beethoven's Ninth Symphony, for example, he might feel that he is floating above the earth in a starry dome, with the dream of immortality in his heart; all the stars seem to glimmer around him, and the earth seems to sink ever deeper downwards.

It is inhuman to bless where one is cursed.

One who has a why can endure anyhow.

I desire that your conjectures should not reach beyond your creative will. Could you create a god? Then do not speak to me of any gods.

Man is more sensitive to the contempt that others feel towards him than to the contempt that he feels towards himself.

There is a lake that one day refused to flow away and threw up a dam at the place where it had before flowed out and since then this lake has always risen higher and higher. Perhaps the very act of renunciation provides us with the strength to bear it ; perhaps man will rise ever higher and higher when he no longer flows out into a God.

I love all who are like heavy drops falling one by one out of the dark cloud that lowereth over man: they herald the coming of the lightning, and succumb as heralds.

It has therewith come to be recognized that the history of moral valuations is at the same time the history of an error, the error of responsibility, which is based upon the error of the freedom of will.

The higher culture an individual attains, the less field there is left for mockery and scorn.

Is it better to out-monster the monster or to be quietly devoured?

Our writing equipment takes part in forming our thoughts.

Is man one of God's blunders? Or is God one of man's blunders?

The value of a thing sometimes lies not in what one attains with it, but in what one pays for it - what it costs us

Just as a waterfall grows slower and more lightly suspended as it plunges down, so the great man of action tends to act with greater calmness than his tempestuous desires prior to the deed would lead one to expect.

There is no more dangerous error than that of mistaking the consequence for the cause.

Will, pure will, without the troubles and complexities of intellect - how happy! how free!

Sins are indispensable to every society organized on an ecclesiastical basis; they are the only reliable weapons of power; the priest lives upon sins; it is necessary to him that there be sinning.

I call Christianity the one great curse, the one great intrinsic depravity, and the one great instinct of revenge, for which no means are venomous enough, or secret, subterranean and small enough - I call it the one immortal blemish on the human race.

A lack of the historical sense is the hereditary fault of all philosophers.

But what if pleasure and pain should be so closely connected that he who wants the greatest possible amount of the one must also have the greatest possible amount of the other, that he who wants to experience the "heavenly high jubilation," must also be ready to be "sorrowful unto death"?

Hope in reality is the worst of all evils because it prolongs the torments of man.

Freedom is the will to be responsible for ourselves.

So long as men praise you, you can only be sure that you are not yet on your own true path but on someone else's.

Should not the giver be thankful that the receiver received? Is not giving a need? Is not receiving, mercy?

The apprentice and the master love the master in different ways.

As refined fare serves a hungry man as well as and no better than coarser food, the more pretentious artist will not dream of inviting the hungry man to his meal.

We laugh at a man who, stepping out of his room at the very minute when the sun is rising, says, “It is my will that the sun shall rise”; or at him who, unable to stop a wheel, says, “I wish it to roll”; or, again, at him who, thrown in a wrestling match, says, “Here I lie, but here I wish to lie.” But, joking apart, do we not act like one of these three persons whenever we use the expression “I wish”?

Praise is more obtrusive than a reproach.

A casual stroll through the lunatic asylum shows that faith does not prove anything.