Friedrich Nietzsche Quotes

We must remain as close to the flowers, the grass, and the butterflies as the child is who is not yet so much taller than they are.

Principle of "Christian love": it insists upon being well paid in the end.

To those human beings who are of any concern to me, I wish suffering, desolation, sickness, ill treatment, indignities, profound self-contempt, the torture of self-mistrust, and the wretchedness of the vanquished.

We love life, not because we are used to living but because we are used to loving.

Against boredom even gods struggle in vain.

Not doubt, certainty is what drives one insane.

I love the great despisers because they are the great adorers.

That little hypocrites and half-crazed people dare to imagine that on their account the laws of nature are constantly broken; such an enhancement of every kind of selfishness to infinity, to impudence, cannot be branded with sufficient contempt. And yet Christianity owes its triumph to this pitiable flattery of personal vanity.

What I really want from Music: That it be cheerful and profound like an afternoon in October.

The arrogance that accompanies merit offends us even more than the arrogance of people who are lacking in merit: since merit itself offends us.

We find nothing easier than being wise, patient, superior. We drip with the oil of forbearance and sympathy, we are absurdly just, we forgive everything. For that very reason we ought to discipline ourselves a little; for that very reason we ought to cultivate a little emotion, a little emotional vice, from time to time. It may be hard for us; and among ourselves we may perhaps laugh at the appearance we thus present. But what of that! We no longer have any other mode of self-overcoming available to us: this is our asceticism, our penance.

This crown to crown the laughing man, this rose-wreath crown: I myself have set this crown upon my head, I myself have pronounced my laughter holy.

Every man is a creative cause of what happens, a primum mobile with an original movement.

Here the spirit becomes a lion who would conquer his freedom and be master… Who is the great dragon whom the spirit will no longer call lord and go? ‘Thou shalt’ is the name of the great dragon. But the spirit of the lion says, ‘I will.

Denn was ist Freiheit? Dasz man den Willen zur Selbstverantwortlichkeit hat.

There is not enough religion in the world even to destroy religion.

The best weapon against an enemy is another enemy.

Learn to laugh at yourselves as one must laugh!

We are franker towards others than towards ourselves.

Many people wait throughout their whole lives for the chance to be good in their own fashion.

The great advantage in noble parentage is that enables one to endure poverty more easily.

I speak and the child plays: who can be more serious than we are?

That roguish and cheerful vice, politeness.

Glance into the world just as though time were gone: and everything crooked will become straight to you.

Art is the proper task of life.

Not the intensity but the duration of high feelings makes high men.

The coward does not know what it means to be alone: an enemy is always standing behind his chair.

What then is truth? A movable host of metaphors, metonymies, and anthropomorphisms: in short, a sum of human relations which have been poetically and rhetorically intensified, transferred, and embellished, and which, after long usage, seem to a people to be fixed, canonical, and binding. Truths are illusions which we have forgotten are illusions — they are metaphors that have become worn out and have been drained of sensuous force.

Objectivity and justice have nothing to do with one another.

Democracy represents the disbelief in all great men and in all elite societies: everybody is everybody's equal.

Life is the will to power; our natural desire to dominate and reshape the world to fit our own preferences and assert our personal strength to the fullest degree.

Happiness is a fata morgana. the only way to not end up unhappy is to not long for happiness.

Art is not merely an imitation of the reality of nature, but in truth a metaphysical supplement to the reality of nature, placed alongside thereof for its conquest.

All parties attempt to represent important things that have developed outside themselves as unimportant, and where they fail in this they assail those things all the more bitterly the more admirable they are.

If we lacked curiosity, we should do less for the good of our neighbor. But, under the name of duty or pity, curiosity steals into the home of the unhappy and the needy. Perhaps even in the famous mother-love there is a good deal of curiosity.

About what we neither know nor feel precisely while awake-whether we have a good or a bad conscience toward a certain person-our dreams instruct us fully and unambiguously.

Courage is the best slayer - courage which attacketh, for in every attack there is the sound of triumph.

Whatever does not kill me makes me stronger.

It is possible that the production of genius is reserved to a limited period of mankind's history.

Where the good begins.- Where the poor power of the eye can no longer see the evil impulse as such because it has become too subtle, man posits the realm of goodness; and the feeling that we have now entered the realm of goodness excites all those impulses which had been threatened and limited by the evil impulses, like the feeling of security, of comfort, of benevolence. Hence, the duller the eye, the more extensive the good. Hence the eternal cheerfulness of the common people and of children. Hence the gloominess and grief - akin to a bad conscience - of the great thinkers.

Those who are bent on revolutionizing society may be divided into those who seek something for themselves thereby and those who seek something for their children and grandchildren.

A matter that becomes clear ceases to concern us.

The shortest route is not the most direct one, but rather the one where the most favorable winds swell our sails:Mthat is the lesson that seafarers teach. Not to abide by this lesson is to be obstinate: here, firmness of character is tainted with stupidity.

When a hundred men stand together, each of them loses his mind and gets another one.

A good aphorism is too hard for the tooth of time, and is not worn away by all the centuries, although it serves as food for every epoch. Hence it is the greatest paradox in literature, the imperishable in the midst of change, the nourishment which always remains highly valued, as salt does, and never becomes stupid like salt.

The love of truth has its reward in heaven and even on earth.

Everything that has been is eternal: the sea will wash it up again.

Help thyself: then everyone will help thee too. Principle of Christian charity.