Friedrich Nietzsche Quotes

Convictions are more dangerous foes of truth than lies.

Man alone suffers so excruciatingly in the world that he was compelled to invent laughter.

Spiritual strength and passion, when accompanied by bad manners, only provoke loathing.

I want to learn more and more to see as beautiful what is necessary in things:—then I shall be one of those who make things beautiful. Amor fati: let that be my love from henceforth!

Envy and jealousy are the private parts of the human soul. Perhaps the comparison can be extended.

All great artists and thinkers are great workers.

People live for the morrow, because the day-after-to-morrow is doubtful.

A sure way to irritate people and to put evil thoughts into their heads is to keep them waiting a long time. This makes them immoral.

I love him whose soul is lavish, who wanteth no thanks and doth not give back: for he always bestoweth, and desireth not to keep for himself.

Danger alone acquaints us with our own resources, our virtues, our armor and weapons, our spirit, and forces us to be strong.

A subject for a great poet would be God's boredom after the seventh day of creation.

Possessions are usually diminished by possession.

But the worst enemy you can meet will always be yourself; you lie in wait for yourself in caverns and forests. Lonely one, you are going the way to yourself! And your way goes past yourself, and past your seven devils! You will be a heretic to yourself and witch and soothsayer and fool and doubter and unholy one and villain. You must be ready to burn yourself in your own flame: how could you become new, if you had not first become ashes?

He who denies his own vanity usually possesses it in so brutal a form that he instinctively shuts his eyes to avoid the necessity of despising himself.

But this people has deliberately made itself stupid, for nearly a millennium: nowhere have the two great European narcotics, alcohol and Christianity, been abused more dissolutely.

You gave him an opportunity of showing greatness of character and he did not seize it. He will never forgive you for that.

The end of a melody is not its goal; but nonetheless, if the melody had not reached its end it would not have reached its goal either. A parable.

One should not wish to enjoy where one does not give joy.

Does not the discipline of the scientific spirit just commence when one no longer harbours any conviction?

Verily, I do not like them, the merciful who feel blessed in their pity: they are lacking too much in shame. If I must pity, at least I do not want it known; and if I do pity, it is preferably from a distance.

I love him whose soul is deep even in the wounding, and may succumb through a small matter: thus goeth he willingly over the bridge.

If a man have a strong faith he can indulge in the luxury of skepticism.

His (the theologian) basic instinct of self preservation forbids him to respect reality at any point or even to let it get a word in.

Remorse.-- Never yield to remorse, but at once tell yourself: remorse would simply mean adding to the first act of stupidity a second.

Interest in Education will acquire great strength only from the moment when belief in a God and His care is renounced, just as the art of healing could only flourish when the belief in miracle cures ceased.

The last Christian died on a cross.

It is nothing but fanaticism and beautiful soulism to expect very much (or even, much only) from humanity when it has forgotten how to wage war.

Joy wants the eternity of all things, wants deep, wants deep eternity.

There is a universal need to exercise some kind of power, or to create for one's self the appearance of some power, if only temporarily, in the form of intoxication.

There is an old illusion. It is called good and evil.

How lovely it is that there are words and sounds. Are not words and sounds rainbows and illusive bridges between things which are eternally apart?

And as long as you are in any way ashamed before yourself, you do not yet belong with us.

One must repay good and ill; but why just to the person who did us good or ill?

In a man devoted to knowledge, pity seems almost ridiculous, like delicate hands on a cyclops.

There is no more dreary or more repulsive creature than the man who has evaded his genius.

The one conclusive argument that has at all times discouraged people from drinking a poison is not that it kills but rather that it tastes bad.

It is with artworks as it is with wine: it is much better when we do not need either one, when we stick with water, and when out of our own inner fire, the inner sweetness of our own soul, we turn the water over and over again into wine ourselves.

What is originality? To see something that has no name as yet and hence cannot be mentioned although it stares us all in the face. The way men usually are, it takes a name to make something visible for them.

Life is a well of joy; but for those out of whom an upset stomach speaks, which is the father of melancholy, all wells are poisoned.

Only with the ultimate knowledge of all things will man have come to know himself. For things are but the boundaries of man.

I love him whose soul is so overfull that he forgetteth himself, and all things are in him: thus all things become his down-going.

Perhaps I know best why it is man alone who laughs; he alone suffers so deeply that he had to invent laughter.

That, however, is - mediocrity, though it be called moderation.

The world is a work of art that gives birth to itself.

Thoughts are the shadows of our feelings - always darker, emptier and simpler.

Really unreflective people are now inwardly without Christianity, and the more moderate and reflective people of the intellectual middle class now possess only an adapted, that is to say marvelously simplified Christianity. A god who in his love arranges everything in a manner that in the end will be best for us; a god who gives to us and takes from us our virtue and our happiness, so that as a whole all is meet and fit and there is no reason for us to take life sadly, let alone exclaim against it; in short, resignation and modest demands elevated to godhead

In the consciousness of the truth he has perceived, man now sees everywhere only the awfulness or the absurdity of existence and loathing seizes him.

My conception of freedom. — The value of a thing sometimes does not lie in that which one attains by it, but in what one pays for it — what it costs us. Liberal institutions cease to be liberal as soon as they are attained: later on, there are no worse and no more thorough injurers of freedom than liberal institutions.