Friedrich Nietzsche Quotes

The problem of culture is seldom grasped correctly. The goal of a culture is not the greatest possible happiness of a people, noris it the unhindered development of all their talents; instead, culture shows itself in the correct proportion of these developments. Its aim points beyond earthly happiness: the production of great works is the aim of culture.

A few hours of mountain climbing make a blackguard and a saint two rather similar creatures.

But thus I counsel you, my friends: Mistrust all in whom the impulse to punish is powerful. They are people of a low sort and stock; the hangmen and the bloodhound look out of their faces. Mistrust all who talk much of their justice! Verily, their souls lack more than honey. And when they call themselves the good and the just, do not forget that they would be pharisees, if only they had-power.

Every profound spirit needs a mask.

Society tames the wolf into a dog. And man is the most domesticated animal of all.

The consequence is that every man comes to know himself solely in terms of his power for defence and attack.

Those who are slow to know suppose that slowness is the essence of knowledge.

When you look into an abyss, the abyss also looks into you.

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 henceforth! I do not want to wage war against what is ugly. I do not want to accuse; I do not even want to accuse those who accuse. Looking away shall be my only negation. And all in all and on the whole: some day I wish to be only a Yes-sayer.

I am not a human being, I am dynamite.

Those who are failures from the start, downtrodden, crushed -- it is they, the weakest, who must undermine life among men, who call into question and poison most dangerously our trust in life, in man, and in ourselves.

The best author will be the one who is ashamed to become a writer.

"God", "the immortality of the soul", "salvation", "the beyond"-even as a child I had no time for such notions, I do not waste any time upon them-maybe I was never childish enough for that?

Man is the cruelest animal. At tragedies, bullfights, and crucifixions he has so far felt best on earth; and when he invented hell for himself, behold, that was his very heaven.

Whoever, at any time, has undertaken to build a new heaven has found the strength for it in his own hell.

When the gratitude of many to one throws away all shame, we behold fame.

Intoxicating joy is it for the sufferer to look away from his suffering and forget himself. Intoxicating joy and self-forgetting, did the world once seem to me.

The various languages placed side by side show that with words it is never a question of truth, never a question of adequate expression; otherwise, there would not be so many languages. The 'thing in itself' (which is precisely what the pure truth, apart from any of its consequences, would be) is likewise something quite incomprehensible to the creator of language and something not in the least worth striving for.

Active, successful natures act, not according to the maxim, "know thyself," but as if prompted by the commandment: will a self, and so become a self.

When one is young, one venerates and despises without that art of nuances which constitutes the best gain of life.

Mastery.- We have reached mastery when we neither mistake nor hesitate in the achievement.

Women are considered deep - why? Because one can never discover any bottom to them. Women are not even shallow.

It is the privilege of greatness to confer intense happiness with insignificant gifts.

We must beware of one who is in a passion against us as of one who has once sought our life; for the fact that we still live is due to the absence of power to kill, - if looks could kill, we should have been dead long ago.

The disappointed one speaks. I searched for great human beings; I always found only the apes of their ideals.

Giving style” to one’s character - a great and rare art! It is exercised by those who see all the strengths and weaknesses of their own natures and then comprehend them in an artistic plan until everything appears as art and reason and even weakness delights the eye.

Industriousness and conscientiousness are often at odds, because industriousness wants to pick the still sour fruit from the tree,while conscientiousness lets it hang there too long, until it falls and bruises.

The condition that gives birth to a rule is not the same as the condition to which the rule gives birth.

Has anyone...any distinct notion of what poets of a stronger age understood by the word inspiration? ... There is an ecstasy such that the immese strain of it is sometimes relaxed by a flood of tears, along with which one's steps either rush or involuntarily lag, alternately. There is the feeling that one is completely out of hand, with the very distinct consciousness of an endless number of fine thrills and quiverings to the very toes... Everything happens quite involuntarily, as if in a tempestuous outburst of freedom, of absoluteness, of power and divinity.

To the mean all becomes mean.

There is no better soporific and sedative than skepticism.

For out of fear and need each religion is born, creeping into existence on the byways or reason.

Certitude drives people mad.

Strideth over all mountains, and laugheth at all tragedies

I have exposed myself and am not ashamed to stand there naked. "Shame" is what we call the monster that attached itself to men when they aspired beyond the animals.

There is in general good reason to suppose that in several respects the gods could all benefit from instruction by us human beings. We humans are - more humane.

If one seeks relief from unbearable pressure, one is to eat hashish.

The world is beautiful, but has a disease called man.

The most welcome joke to me is the one that takes the place of a heavy, not altogether innocuous thought, at once a cautionary hint of the finger and a flash of the eye.

The doctrine of equality! There exists no more poisonous poison: for it seems to be preached by justice itself, while it is the end of justice.

When anyone apologizes to us he has to do it very expertly: otherwise we might easily come to see ourselves as the guilty party and experience unpleasant feelings.

I could only believe in a God who could dance... And now a God dances through me.

My abyss speaks, I have turned my ultimate depth inside out into the light.

I love him who is ashamed when the dice fall in his favour, and who then asketh: "Am I a dishonest player?" - for he is willing to succumb.

One lives for the day, one lives very fast, one lives very irresponsibly: precisely this is called "freedom."

In a seriously intended intellectual emancipation a person's mute passions and cravings also hope to find their advantage.

Every church is a stone on the grave of a god-man: it does not want him to rise up again under any circumstances.

What really raises one's indignation against suffering is not suffering intrinsically, but the senselessness of suffering