Friedrich Nietzsche Quotes

Someone said: "I have been prejudiced against myself from my earliest childhood: hence I find some truth in all blame and some stupidity in all praise. I generally estimate praise too poorly and blame too highly.

Wherever Germany extends her sway, she ruins culture.

If a woman seeks education it is probably because her sexual apparatus is malfunctioning.

I fly in dreams, I know it is my privilege, I do not recall a single situation in dreams when I was unable to fly. To execute every sort of curve and angle with a light impulse, a flying mathematics - that is so distinct a happiness that it has permanently suffused my basic sense of happiness.

The sensible author writes for no other posterity than his own--that is, for his age--so as to be able even then to take pleasurein himself.

Our faith in others betrays that we would rather have faith in ourselves. Our longing for a friend is our betrayer. And often with our love we want merely to overcome envy. And often we attack and make ourselves enemies, to conceal that we are vulnerable.

What is evil?-Whatever springs from weakness.

Follow in the footsteps of your fathers' virtue! How could you hope to climb high unless your fathers' will climbs with you?

What separates two people most profoundly is a different sense and degree of cleanliness.

Everything matters. Nothing's important.

Man is not equally moral at all hours, this is well known. If his morality is judged to be the capability for great self-sacrificing resolutions and self-denial (which, when continuous and grown habitual, are called holiness)

Man's maturity: to have regained the seriousness that he had as a child at play.

The golden age, when rambunctious spirits were regarded as the source of evil.

To learn to see- to accustom the eye to calmness, to patience, and to allow things to come up to it; to defer judgment, and to acquire the habit of approaching and grasping an individual case from all sides. This is the first preparatory schooling of intellectuality. One must not respond immediately to a stimulus; one must acquire a command of the obstructing and isolating instincts.

You have your way. I have my way. As for the right way, the correct way, and the only way, it does not exist.

Compassion for the friend should conceal itself under a hard shell.

Original minds are not distinguished by being the first to see a new thing, but instead by seeing the old, familiar thing that is over-looked as something new.

Our destiny exercises its influence over us even when, as yet, we have not learned its nature: it is our future that lays down the law of our today

A book full of brilliance imparts some of it even to its opponents.

Whether we immoralists do any harm to virtue?-Just as little as anarchists do to princes. It is only because they have been shot at that they once again sit securely on their thrones. Moral: we must shoot at morals.

Our greatest experiences are our quietest moments.

After coming into contact with a religious man I always feel I must wash my hands.

New ways I go, a new speech comes to me; weary I grow, like all creators, of the old tongues. My spirit no longer wants to walk on worn soles.

There are men who desire power simply for the sake of the happiness it will bring; these belong chiefly to political parties.

We praise or blame as one or the other affords more opportunity for exhibiting our power of judgement.

I want to know whether you are a person devoted to creating or to exchanging in some respect or other: as a creator you belong tothe free, as an exchanger you are their slave and instrument.

They devour each other and cannot even digest themselves.

To use the same words is not a sufficient guarantee of understanding; one must use the same words for the same genus of inward experience; ultimately one must have one's experiences in common.

Is life not a thousand times too short for us to bore ourselves?

Verily, I do not want to be like the ropemakers: They drag out their threads and always walk backwards.

As long as you still experience the stars as something "above you", you lack the eye of knowledge.

[Heraclitus' language] dispenses with lightness and artificial decoration, foremost out of disgust for humanity and out of [his own] defiant feeling.

Nothing in life possesses value except the degree of power--assuming that life itself is the will to power.

Living in a constant chase after gain compels people to expend their spirit to the point of exhaustion.

To recognize untruth as a condition of life--that certainly means resisting accustomed value feelings in a dangerous way; and a philosophy that risks this would by that token alone place itself beyond good and evil.

Here one must think profoundly to the very basis and resist all sentimental weakness: life itself is essentially appropriation, injury, conquest of the strange and weak, suppression, severity, obtrusion of peculiar forms, incorporation, and at the least, putting it mildest, exploitation - but why should one for ever use precisely these words on which for ages a disparaging purpose has been stamped?

There is a stupid humility that is quite common and when a person is afflicted with it, he is once and for all disqualified for being a disciple of knowledge.

the voice of beauty speaks softly; it creeps only into the most fully awakened souls

It is certainly not the least charm of a theory that it is refutable; it is precisely thereby that it attracts the more subtle minds. It seems that the hundred-times-refuted theory of the "free will" owes its persistence to this charm alone; some one is always appearing who feels himself strong enough to refute it.

And it is the great noon when man stands at the midpoint of his course between beast and superman and celebrates his way to the evening as his highest hope: for it is the way to a new morning.

The Christian faith from the beginning, is sacrifice the sacrifice of all freedom, all pride, all self-confidence of spirit, it is at the same time subjection, self-derision, and self-mutilation.

Marriage was contrived for ordinary people, for people who are capable of neither great love nor great friendship, which is to say, for most people--but also for those exceptionally rare ones who are capable of love as well as of friendship.

The moral earth, too, is round! The moral earth, too, has its antipodes! The antipodes, too, have their right to exist! There is still another world to be discovered--and more than one! Set sail, you philosophers!

As soon as a religion comes to dominate it has as its opponents all those who would have been its first disciples.

The courage of all one really knows comes but late in life.

The growth of wisdom may be gauged exactly by the diminution of ill-temper.

Men who think deeply appear to be comedians in their dealings with others because they always have to feign superficiality in order to be understood.

Good deeds shun the light as anxiously as evil deeds: the latter fear that disclosure will bring on pain (as punishment), while the former fear that disclosure will take away pleasure (that pure pleasure, that pleasure per se, which immediately ceases once the vanity's satisfaction is added).