Friedrich Nietzsche Quotes

It is obvious that all sense has gone out of modern marriage; which is, however, no objection to marriage but to modernity.

One must learn to be a sponge if one wants to be loved by hearts that overflow.

For what purpose humanity is there should not even concern us: why you are here, that you should ask yourself: and if you have no ready answer, then set for yourself goals, high and noble goals, and perish in pursuit of them!

It is perhaps just dawning on five or six minds that physics, too, is only an interpretation and exegesis of the world (to suit us, if I may say so!) and not a world-explanation.

I wish to be at any time hereafter only a yea-sayer!

Horrible experiences lead us to wonder whether the person who experiences them might not be something horrible.

Whoever no longer finds greatness in God no longer finds it anywhere--he must either deny it or create it.

Mystical explanations are thought to be deep; the truth is that they are not even shallow.

Artists may here have a more subtle scent: they know only too well that it is precisely when they cease to act 'voluntarily' and do everything of necessity that their feeling of freedom, subtlety, fullness of power, creative placing, disposing, shaping reaches its height - in short, that necessity and 'freedom of will' are then one in them.

People who have given us their complete confidence believe that they have a right to ours. The inference is false, a gift confers no rights.

One must shed the bad taste of wanting to agree with many. "Good" is no longer good when one's neighbor mouths it. And how should there be a "common good"! The term contradicts itself: whatever can be common always has little value. In the end it must be as it is and always has been: great things remain for the great, abysses for the profound, nuances and shudders for the refined, and, in brief, all that is rare for the rare.

Books for general reading always smell bad; the odor of common people hangs around them.

Without the perpetual counterfeiting of the universe by number, man could not continue to live

When good friends praise a gifted person he often appears to be delighted with them out of politeness and goodwill, but in reality he feels indifferent.

As far as Germany extends it ruins culture.

The moment Germany rises as a great power, France gains a new importance as a cultural power.

The better the state is established, the fainter is humanity. To make the individual uncomfortable, that is my task.

Laughter means: taking a mischievous delight in someone else's uneasiness, but with a good conscience.

The noble soul reveres itself

In the knowledge of truth, what really matters is the possession of it, not the impulse under which it was sought.

The deeper minds of all ages have had pity for animals.

I love him who wants to create over and beyond himself and thus perishes.

Forgetting: that is a divine capacity. And whoever aspires to the heights and wants to fly must cast off much that is heavy and make himself light--I call it a divine capacity for lightness.

On every parable you ride to every truth.

One thing a man must have: either a naturally light disposition or a disposition lightened by art and knowledge.

We can speak very much to the purpose and yet in such a way that the whole world cries out in contradiction: namely, when we are not speaking to the whole world.

No one can draw more out of things, books included, than he already knows. A man has no ears for that to which experience has given him no access.

A book is made better by good readers and clearer by good opponents.

Illness is a clumsy attempt to arrive at health: we must come to nature's aid with intellect.

What the father kept silent the son speaks out.

Everything is the same, nothing is worthwhile, the world is senseless, knowledge strangles.

Immature is the love of the youth, and immature his hatred of man and earth. His mind and the wings of his spirit are still tied down and heavy.

The value of many men and books rests solely on their faculty for compelling all to seek out the most hidden and intimate things.

Once upon a time, in some out of the way corner of that universe which is dispersed into numberless twinkling solar systems, there was a star upon which clever beasts invented knowing.

I believe only in French culture and consider everything in Europe that calls itself 'culture' a misunderstanding, not to speak of German culture.

By losing your goal, You have lost your way.

He who is not a bird should not build his nest over abysses.

Few serve truth in truth because only few have the pure will to be just, and of those again very few have the strength to be just.

In the mountains of truth, you never climb in vain.

When horror is associated with what is harmful, evil results, when disgust does, badness.

Mozart, the last chord of a centuries-old great European taste.

Go through the moral demands...one by one and you will find that man could not live up to them; the intention is not that he should become more moral, but that he should feel as sinful as possible. If man had failed to find this feeling pleasant - why should he have engendered such an idea and adhered to it for so long?... Man was by every means to be made sinful and thereby become excited, animated, enlivened in general. To excite, animate, enliven at any price.

When one is young, one venerates and despises without that art of nuances which constitutes the best gain of life, and it is only fair that one has to pay dearly for having assaulted men and things in this manner with Yes and No. Everything is arranged so that the worst of tastes, the taste for the unconditional, should be cruelly fooled and abused until a man learns to put a little art into his feelings and rather to risk trying even what is artificial — as the real artists of life do.

There is an innocence in admiration; it is found in those to whom it has never yet occurred that they, too, might be admired some day.

A nation is a detour of nature to arrive at five or six great men- yes, and then to get around them.

Most of the time in married life is taken up by talk.

Those moralists, on the other hand, who, following in the footsteps of Socrates, offer the individual a morality of self-control and temperance as a means to his own advantage, as his personal key to happiness, are the exceptions.

Every great love brings with it the cruel idea of killing the object of its love so that it may be removed once and for all from the wicked game of change: for love dreads change even more than annihilation.