Friedrich Nietzsche Quotes

Oh, how much is today hidden by science! Oh, how much it is expected to hide!

Stupidity in a woman is unfeminine.

Weariness that wants to reach the ultimate with one leap, with one fatal leap, a poor ignorant weariness that does not want to want any more: this created all gods and afterworlds.

The strongest have their moments of fatigue.

Anything which is a living and not a dying body... will have to be an incarnate will to power, it will strive to grow, spread, seize, become predominant - not from any morality or immorality but because it is living and because life simply is will to power... 'Exploitation'... belongs to the essence of what lives, as a basic organic function; it is a consequence of the will to power, which is after all the will to life.

I obviously do everything to be "hard to understand" myself

The Great Man... is colder, harder, less hesitating, and without fear of 'opinion'; he lacks the virtues that accompany respect and 'respectability,' and altogether everything that is the 'virtue of the herd.' If he cannot lead, he goes alone... He knows he is incommunicable: he finds it tasteless to be familiar... When not speaking to himself, he wears a mask. There is a solitude within him that is inaccessible to praise or blame.

One can lie with the mouth, but with the accompanying grimace one nevertheless tells the truth.

We seldom break a leg as long as we are climbing wearily upwards in our lives, instead we do it when we start going easy on ourselves and choosing the comfortable paths.

Whoever turns away from us might not offend us in doing so perhaps, but he certainly offends our followers.

Your educators can only be your liberators.

The great poet draws his creations only from out of his own reality.

I have found strength where one does not look for it: in simple, mild, and pleasant people, without the least desire to rule -- and, conversely, the desire to rule has often appeared to me a sign of inward weakness: they fear their own slave soul and shroud it in a royal cloak (in the end, they still become the slaves of their followers, their fame, etc.)

The masters have been done away with; the morality of the common man has triumphed.

Every attainment, every step forward in knowledge, follows from courage, from hardness against oneself, from cleanliness in relation to oneself.

My formula for greatness in a human being is amor fati: that one wants nothing to be different, not forward, not backward, not in all eternity. Not merely bear what is necessary, still less conceal it—all idealism is mendaciousness in the face of what is necessary—but love it

Weariness is the shortest path to equality and fraternity-and finally liberty is bestowed by sleep.

A bad conscience is easier to cope with than a bad reputation.

A small revenge is more human than no revenge at all.

Women are constituted in such a way that all truth (regarding men, love, children, society, the purpose of life) disgusts them, and in such a way that they try to revenge themselves on anyone who opens their eyes.

It is not doubt,is certitude that drives you mad.

All idealists imagine that the causes they serve are fundamentally better than any other causes in the world, and they refuse to believe that if their cause is to flourish at all it requires precisely the same foul-smelling manure that is necessary to all other human undertakings.

As a result, nature is something entirely different from what comes to mind when we invoke its name.

When a nation is on the downward path, when it feels its belief in its own future, its hope of freedom slipping from it, when it begins to see submission as a first necessity and the virtues of submission as measures of self-preservation, then it must overhaul its God.

If you wish to understand a philosopher, do not ask what he says, but find out what he wants

A thought comes when it will, not when I will.

Christianity has a hunter's instinct for finding out all those who by one means or another may be driven to despair -although only a part of mankind is capable of such despair. Christianity lies in wait for such as those and pursues them

For our self respect depends upon our ability to make requital, for good or for evil.

As soon as we are shown the existence of something old in a new thing, we are pacified.

The existence of forgetting has never been proved: We only know that some things don't come to mind when we want them.

Pharisaism is not a degeneration in a good man: a large portion of it is rather the condition of all being-good.

Disobedience- that is the nobility of slaves.

From which stars have we fallen to meet each other here?

It is certainly not the least charm of a theory that it is refutable.

Man demands truth and fulfills this demand in moral intercourse with other men; this is the basis of all social life. One anticipates the unpleasant consequences of reciprocal lying. From this there arises the duty of truth. We permit epic poets to lie because we expect no detrimental consequences in this case. Thus the lie is permitted where it is considered something pleasant. Assuming that it does no harm, the lie is beautiful and charming.

Lust and self-mutilation are closely related impulses. There are also self-mutilators among knowers: they do not want to be creators under any circumstances.

Brave people may be persuaded to an action by representing it as being more dangerous than it really is.

Error has made animals into men; is truth in a position to make men into animals again?

The strongest and most evil spirits have to date advanced mankind the most: they always rekindled the sleeping passions - all orderly arranged society lulls the passions to sleep; they always reawakened the sense of comparison, of contradiction, of delight in the new, the adventurous, the untried; they compelled men to set opinion against opinion, ideal plan against ideal plan.

The life of the enemy . Whoever lives for the sake of combating an enemy has an interest in the enemy's staying alive.

Clever people are never credited with their follies: what a deprivation of human rights!

The newspaper reader says: this party will ruin itself if it makes errors like this. My higher politics says: a party which makes errors like this is already finished -- it is no longer secure in its instincts.

Man does not strive for happiness; only the Englishman does that.

If there were gods, how could I endure not to be a god? Therefore there are no gods.

Both classically- and romantically-minded spirits-inasmuch as these two species always exist-occupy themselves with a vision of the future: but the former do so out of a strength of their age, the latter out of its weakness.

How do you expect to learn to dance when you have not even learned to walk! And above the dancer is still the flyer and his bliss.

The most serious parody I have ever heard was this: In the beginning was nonsense, and the nonsense was with God, and the nonsense was God.

The degree and kind of a man's sexuality reach up into the ultimate pinnacle of his spirit.