Friedrich Nietzsche Quotes

For all things are baptized at the font of eternity, and beyond good and evil; good and evil themselves, however, are but intervening shadows and damp afflictions and passing clouds.

I am really very, very tired of everything - more than tired.

I want to speak to the despisers of the body. I would not have them learn and teach differently, but merely say farewell to their own bodies-- and thus become silent.

One should steal only where one cannot rob.

We must be physicists in order to be creative since so far codes of values and ideals have been constructed in ignorance of physics or even in contradiction to physics.

Dead are all gods: now we want the overman to live.

He who possesseth little is so much the less possessed. Blessed be moderate poverty!

The purpose of punishment is to improve those who do the punishing--that is the final recourse of those who support punishment.

Folk music is the original melody of man; it is the musical mirror of the world.

Hope, in its stronger forms, is a great deal more powerful stimulans to life than any sort of realized joy can ever be. Man must be sustained in suffering by a hope so high that no conflict with actuality can dash it - so high, indeed, that no fulfilment can satisfy it: a hope reaching out beyond this world.

Only he who is man enough will release the woman in woman.

For it is only as an aesthetic phenomenon that existence and the world are eternally justified.

Enjoying praise is in some people merely a civility of the heart--and just the opposite of a vanity of the spirit.

Science offends the modesty of all real women. It makes them feel as though it were an attempt to peek under their skin--or, worseyet, under their dress and ornamentation!

He who despises himself esteems himself as a self-despiser.

The wheel and the brake have different duties, but also one in common: to hurt one another.

The real question is: How much truth can I stand?

Where is the lightning to lick you with its tongue? Where is the madness with which you should be cleansed? Behold, I show you the Superman. He is this lightning, he is this madness.

The universe without music would be madness.

He who has a why to live can bear almost any how.

When we have a great goal we are superior even to justice, not merely to our deeds and our judges.

God is Dead; but given the way of men, there may still be caves for thousands of years in which his shadow will be shown. And we - we still have to vanquish his shadow, too.

Women are quite able to make friends with a man; but to preserve such a friendship - that no doubt requires the assistance of a slight physical antipathy

In every ascetic morality man worships a part of himself as God and for that he needs to diabolize the other part.

We deceive ourselves when giving respect to the person for whom we have surrendered ourselves, when we respectively expect them to be as we would wish them to be.

Truth as Circe. - Error has transformed animals into men; is truth perhaps capable of changing man back into an animal?

A martyr's disciples suffer more than the martyr.

Reckoned physiologically, everything ugly weakens and afflicts man. It recalls decay, danger, impotence; he actually suffers a loss of energy in its presence. The effect of the ugly can be measured with a dynamometer. Whenever man feels in any way depressed, he senses the proximity of something ugly. His feeling of power, his will to power, his courage, his pride - they decline with the ugly, they increase with the beautiful.

You lovers of knowledge! So what have you done out of your love of knowledge up to now? Have you already stolen and murdered so as to know how a thief and a murderer feels?

We are, all of us, growing volcanoes that approach the hour of their eruption, but how near or distant that is, nobody knows- not even God.

Little prigs and three-quarter madmen may have the conceit that the laws of nature are constantly broken for their sakes.

The philosopher believes that the value of his philosophy lies in the whole, in the building: posterity discovers it in the bricks with which he built and which are then often used again for better building: in the fact, that is to say, that building can be destroyed and nonetheless possess value as material.

In music the passions enjoy themselves.

And once you are awake, you shall remain awake eternally.

The priest knows, as every one knows, that there is no longer any "God," or any "sinner," or any "Saviour" that "free will" and the "moral order of the world" are lies : serious reflection, the profound self conquest of the spirit, allow no man to pretend that he does not know it.

What? You seek something? You wish to multiply yourself tenfold, a hundredfold? You seek followers? Seek zeros!

We talk about taking "pleasure in a thing": but in truth it is pleasure in ourselves, mediated by a thing.

Chastity is a virtue with some, but with many it is almost a vice.

Wherever progress is to ensue, deviating natures are of greatest importance.

Virtues are dangerous as vices insofar as they are allowed to rule over one as authorities and not as qualities one develops oneself.

We count the courtesies accorded us by unpopular people as offenses.

Wisdom sets bounds even to knowledge.

On the heights it is warmer than people in the valley suppose, especially in winter. The thinker recognizes the full import of this simile.

With one more talent one frequently stands with greater instability than with one less, as a table stands better on three legs than on four.

Mathematics would certainly have not come into existence if one had known from the beginning that there was in nature no exactly straight line, no actual circle, no absolute magnitude.

At the bottom of all these noble races the beast of prey, the splendid blond beast, prowling about avidly in search of spoil and victory.

Wherever primitive man put up a word, he believed he had made a discovery. How utterly mistaken he really was! He had touched a problem, and while supposing he had solved it, he had created and obstacle to its solution. Now, with every new knowledge we stumble over flint-like and petrified words and, in so doing, break a leg sooner than a word.

The most unendurable thing, to be sure, the really terrible thing, would be a life without habits, a life which continually required improvisation.