Friedrich Nietzsche Quotes

Precisely this is godliness--that there are gods, but no God.

I love him whose soul is deep even in the wounding

To live alone one must be a beast or a god, says Aristotle. Leaving out the third case: one must be both - a philosopher.

Beware of spitting against the wind!

Learning from one's enemies is the best way to love them, for it puts one into a grateful mood toward them.

Which is it? Is man only a blunder of God? Or is God only a blunder of man?

you must be ready to burn yourself in your own flame; how could you rise anew if you have not first become ashes?

My brother, are war and battle evil? Necessary, however, is the evil; necessary are the envy and the distrust and the back-biting among the virtues.

You who hate the Jews so, why did you adopt their religion?

Sometimes in conversation the sound of our own voice distracts us and misleads us into making assertions that in no way express our true opinions.

Everything that is profound loves the mask: the profoundest things have a hatred even of figure and likeness.

Although you have so far demonstrated little faith in my ability to pay, I yet hope to demonstrate that I am somebody who pays his debts-for example, to you.

Tolerance is a proof of distrust in one's own ideals.

He who cannot command himself should obey. And many can command themselves, but much is still lacking before they can obey themselves.

One does not know - cannot know - the best that is in one.

We must learn to love, learn to be kind, and this from the earliest youth; if education or chance give us no opportunity to practice these feelings, our soul becomes dry and unsuited even to understanding the tender inventions of loving people.

In revenge and in love, woman is more barbarous than man.

Today a man of knowledge might well feel as though he were God transformed into an animal.

The discipline of suffering, of great suffering- do you not know that only this discipline has created all enhancements of man so far? That tension of the soul in unhappiness which cultivates its strength, its shudders face to face with great ruin, its inventiveness and courage in enduring, preserving, interpreting, and exploiting suffering, and whatever has been granted to it of profundity, secret, mask, spirit, cunning, greatness- was it not granted to it through suffering, through the discipline of great suffering?

To become the founder of a new religion one must be psychologically infallible in one's knowledge of a certain average type of souls who have not yet recognized that they belong together.

People who wish to numb our caution in dealing with them by means of flattery are employing a dangerous expedient, like a sleeping draught, which, if it does not put us to sleep, keeps us all the more awake.

Those you cannot teach to fly, teach to fall faster.

This demand follows from an insight that I was the first to articulate: that there are no moral facts.

I looked for great men, but all I found were the apes of their ideals.

Untroubled, scornful, outrageous - that is how wisdom wants us to be: she is a woman and never loves anyone but a warrior.

Moderation sees itself as beautiful; it is unaware that in the eye of the immoderate it appears black and sober and consequently ugly-looking.

Was that life? Well then, once more!

He who knows not how to plant his will in things at least endows them with some meaning: that is to say, he believes that a will is already present in them (A principle of faith.)

Only the most acute and active animals are capable of boredom.

One must have all the virtues to sleep well. Shall I bear false witness? Shall I commit adultery? Shall I covet my neighbor's maid? All that would go ill with good sleep.

The first opinion that occurs to us when we are suddenly asked about something is usually not our own but only the current one pertaining to our class, position, or parentage; our own opinions seldom swim on the surface.

You say that I should be your teacher! See to it that I am your pinion and not your brake.

The strong individual loves the earth so much he lusts for recurrence. He can smile in the face of the most terrible thought: meaningless, aimless existence recurring eternally. The second characteristic of such a man is that he has the strength to recognize - and to live with the recognition - that the world is valueless in itself and that all values are human ones. He creates himself by fashioning his own values; he has the pride to live by the values he wills.

I fear that, with our current veneration for the natural and the real, we have arrived at the opposite pole to all idealism, and have landed in the region of the waxworks.

To blaspheme the earth is now the most dreadful sin, and to rate the heart of the unknowable higher than the meaning of the earth!

No power can be maintained when it is only represented by hypocrites.

To forget one's purpose is the commonest form of stupidity.

Illusions are certainly expensive amusements; but the destruction of illusions is still more expensive, if looked upon as an amusement, as it undoubtedly is by some people.

Without art we would be nothing but foreground and live entirely in the spell of that perspective which makes what is closest at hand and most vulgar appear as if it were vast, and reality itself.

Children from humble families must be taught how to command just as other children must be taught how to obey.

Some people appear to be more meager in talent than they are, just because the tasks they set themselves are always too great.

There is such a thing as a hatred of lies and dissimulation, which is the outcome of a delicate sense of humor; there is also the selfsame hatred but as the result of cowardice, in so far as falsehood is forbidden by Divine law. Too cowardly to lie.

Only in war are you holy, and when you are robbers and cruel.

The mother of excess is not joy but joylessness.

Perhaps man will rise ever higher as soon as he ceases to flow out into a god.

The happiness of man is: I will. The happiness of woman is: he wills. 'Behold , just now the world ... entire love. And woman must obey and find a depth for her surface. Surface is the disposition of woman: a mobile, stormy film over shallow water. Man's disposition, however, is deep; his river roars in subterranean caves: woman feels his strength but does not comprehend it.

Watch them clamber, these swift monkeys! They clamber over one another and thus drag one another into the mud and the depth. They all want to get to the throne: that is their madness — as if happiness sat on the throne. Often, mud sits on the throne — and often the throne also on mud. Mad they all appear to me, clambering monkeys and overardent. Foul smells their idol, the cold monster: foul, they smell to me altogether, these idolators.

The tragedy is that we cannot believe the dogmas of religion and metaphysics if we have the strict methods of truth in heart and head, but on the other hand, we have become through the development of humanity so tenderly suffering that we need the highest kind of means of salvation and consolation: whence arises the danger that man may bleed to death through the truth that he realises.