Authors — Quotes

Friedrich Nietzsche Quotes: 129

Without music, life would be a mistake.
Twilight of the Idols
It is not a lack of love, but a lack of friendship that makes unhappy marriages.
That which does not kill us makes us stronger.
I'm not upset that you lied to me, I'm upset that from now on I can't believe you.
We love life, not because we are used to living but because we are used to loving.
We have art in order not to die of the truth.
He who has a why to live can bear almost any how.
Hope in reality is the worst of all evils because it prolongs the torments of man.
Not necessity, not desire - no, the love of power is the demon of men. Let them have everything - health, food, a place to live, entertainment - they are and remain unhappy and low-spirited: for the demon waits and waits and will be satisfied.
A pair of powerful spectacles has sometimes sufficed to cure a person in love.
There is always some madness in love. But there is also always some reason in madness.
Love is blind; friendship closes its eyes.
When art dresses in worn-out material it is most easily recognized as art.
For art to exist, for any sort of aesthetic activity to exist, a certain physiological precondition is indispensable: intoxication.
Admiration for a quality or an art can be so strong that it deters us from striving to possess it.
And those who were seen dancing were thought to be insane by those who could not hear the music.
It is hard enough to remember my opinions, without also remembering my reasons for them!
You have your way. I have my way. As for the right way, the correct way, and the only way, it does not exist.
Whoever fights monsters should see to it that in the process he does not become a monster. And if you gaze long enough into an abyss, the abyss will gaze back into you.
You must have chaos within you to give birth to a dancing star.
In heaven, all the interesting people are missing.
Sometimes people don't want to hear the truth because they don't want their illusions destroyed.
There are no facts, only interpretations.
We should consider every day lost on which we have not danced at least once.
The man of knowledge must be able not only to love his enemies but also to hate his friends.
The individual has always had to struggle to keep from being overwhelmed by the tribe. If you try it, you will be lonely often, and sometimes frightened. But no price is too high to pay for the privilege of owning yourself.
What do I care about the purring of one who cannot love, like the cat?
I cannot believe in a God who wants to be praised all the time.
He who has a why to live for can bear almost any how.
No one can construct for you the bridge upon which precisely you must cross the stream of life, no one but you yourself alone.
When we are tired, we are attacked by ideas we conquered long ago.
The snake which cannot cast its skin has to die. As well the minds which are prevented from changing their opinions; they cease to be mind.
In individuals, insanity is rare; but in groups, parties, nations and epochs, it is the rule.
The advantage of a bad memory is that one enjoys several times the same good things for the first time.
Success has always been a great liar.
Is man merely a mistake of God's? Or God merely a mistake of man?
I would believe only in a God that knows how to dance.
A casual stroll through the lunatic asylum shows that faith does not prove anything.
The higher we soar the smaller we appear to those who cannot fly.
Thus Spoke Zarathustra
A thinker sees his own actions as experiments and questions--as attempts to find out something. Success and failure are for him answers above all.
The true man wants two things: danger and play. For that reason he wants woman, as the most dangerous plaything.
A good writer possesses not only his own spirit but also the spirit of his friends.
Rejoicing in our joy, not suffering over our suffering, makes someone a friend.
One ought to hold on to one's heart; for if one lets it go, one soon loses control of the head too.
In truth,there was only one christian and he died on the cross.
All I need is a sheet of paperand something to write with, and thenI can turn the world upside down.
Art is the proper task of life.
There is not enough love and goodness in the world to permit giving any of it away to imaginary beings.
Human, All Too Human
Amor Fati – “Love Your Fate”, which is in fact your life.
Perhaps I know best why it is man alone who laughs; he alone suffers so deeply that he had to invent laughter.
The essence of all beautiful art, all great art, is gratitude.
One must still have chaos in oneself to be able to give birth to a dancing star.
He who would learn to fly one day must first learn to walk and run and climb and dance; one cannot fly into flying.
Ultimately, it is the desire, not the desired, that we love.
A woman may very well form a friendship with a man, but for this to endure, it must be assisted by a little physical antipathy.
Is life not a thousand times too short for us to bore ourselves?
The most perfidious way of harming a cause consists of defending it deliberately with faulty arguments.
I assess the power of a will by how much resistance, pain, torture it endures and knows how to turn to its advantage
Love is a state in which a man sees things most decidedly as they are not.
It is my ambition to say in ten sentences what others say in a whole book.
Convictions are more dangerous foes of truth than lies.
Sleeping is no mean art: for its sake one must stay awake all day.
Madness is something rare in individuals — but in groups, parties, peoples, and ages, it is the rule.
Beyond Good and Evil
The author must keep his mouth shut when his work starts to speak.
I am one thing, my writings are another.
Two great European narcotics, alcohol and Christianity.
The spiritualization of sensuality is called love: it is a great triumph over Christianity.
Plato was a bore.
All great things must first wear terrifying and monstrous masks, in order to inscribe themselves on the hearts of humanity.
If a man has character, he has also his typical experience, which always recurs.
Poets are shameless with their experiences: they exploit them.
You say, it's dark. And in truth, I did place a cloud before your sun. But do you not see how the edges of the cloud are already glowing and turning light.
The life of the enemy . Whoever lives for the sake of combating an enemy has an interest in the enemy's staying alive.
You look up when you wish to be exalted. And I look down because I am exalted.
Thus Spoke Zarathustra
Sensuality often hastens the "Growth of Love"so much that the roots remain weak and are easily torn up.
The Portable Nietzsche
Dancing in all its forms cannot be excluded from the curriculum of all noble education; dancing with the feet, with ideas, with words, and, need I add that one must also be able to dance with the pen?
one does not only wish to be understood when one writes; one wishes just as surely not to be understood.
Arrogance on the part of the meritorious is even more offensive to us than the arrogance of those without merit: for merit itself is offensive.
Belief means not wanting to know what is true.
There is a certain right by which we many deprive a man of life, but none by which we may deprive him of death; this is mere cruelty.
Human, All Too Human
They're so cold, these scholars!May lightning strike their foodso that their mouths learn howto eat fire!
The overman...Who has organized the chaos of his passions, given style to his character, and become creative. Aware of life's terrors, he affirms life without resentment.
Knowledge kills action; action requires the veils of illusion.
The Birth of Tragedy
As soon as a religion comes to dominate it has as its opponents all those who would have been its first disciples.
Human, All Too Human
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.
Beyond Good and Evil
One has to take a somewhat bold and dangerous line with this existence: especially as, whatever happens, we are bound to lose it.
Untimely Meditations
At times one remains faithful to a cause only because its opponents do not cease to be insipid.
I consist of body and soul - in the worlds of a child. And why shouldn't we speak like children? But the enlightened, the knowledgealbe would say: I am body through and through, nothing more; and the soul is just a word for something on the body.
I have forgotten my umbrella.
It is a self-deception of philosophers and moralists to imagine that they escape decadence by opposing it. That is beyond their will; and, however little they acknowledge it, one later discovers that they were among the most powerful promoters of decadence.
The Will to Power
The desire for a strong faith is not the proof of a strong faith, rather the opposite. If one has it one may permit oneself the beautiful luxury of skepticism: one is secure enough, fixed enough for it.
Twilight of the Idols
Those who know that they are profound strive for clarity. Those who would like to seem profound to the crowd strive for obscurity. For the crowd believes that if it cannot see to the bottom of something it must be profound. It is so timid and dislikes going into the water.
The Gay Science: with a Prelude in Rhymes and an Appendix of Songs
In some remote corner of the universe, poured out and glittering among innumerable solar systems, there once was a star on which clever animals invented knowledge.
You tell me: 'Life is hard to bear.' But if it were otherwise why should you have your pride in the morning and your resignation in the evening?Life is hard to bear: but do not pretend to be so tender! We are all of us pretty fine asses and asseses of burden!
Thus Spoke Zarathustra
I tell you: one must still have chaos in one, to give birth to a dancing star. I tell you: you have still chaos in you.
Thus Spoke Zarathustra
The maturity of man—that means, to have reacquired the seriousness that one had as a child at play
Beyond Good and Evil
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.
Thus Spoke Zarathustra
Let us beware of saying that death is the opposite of life. The living being is only a species of the dead, and a very rare species.
The Gay Science: with a Prelude in Rhymes and an Appendix of Songs
We talk so abstractly about poetry because all of us are usually bad poets.
What is happening to me happens to all fruits that grow ripe. It is the honey in my veins that makes my blood thicker, and my soul quieter.
A nation is a detour of nature to arrive at five or six great men- yes, and then to get around them.
Success has always been the greatest liar - and the "work"itself is a success; the great statesman, the conqueror, the discoverer is disguised by his creations, often beyond recognition; the "work,"whether of the artist or the philosopher, invents the man who has created it, who is supposed to have create it; "great men,"as they are venerated, are subsequent pieces of wretched minor fiction
Beyond Good and Evil
Try for once to justify the meaning of your existence as it were a posteriori by setting yourself an aim, a goal... an exalted and noble 'to this end.' Perish in pursuit of this and only this
Untimely Meditations
Your educators can only be your liberators.
Untimely Meditations
It was a subtle refinement of God to learn Greek when he wished to write a book – and that he did not learn it better.
You may lie with your mouth, but with the mouth you make as you do so you none the less tell the truth.
How much truth does a spirit endure, how much truth does it dare?
Ecce Homo
For truth to tell, dancing in all its forms cannot be excluded from the curriculum of all noble education: dancing with the feet, with ideas, with words, and, need I add that one must also be able to dance with pen- that one must learn how to write
Twilight of the Idols
We are unknown to ourselves, we men of knowledge - and with good reason. We have never sought ourselves - how could it happen that we should ever find ourselves? It has rightly been said: "Where your treasure is, there will your heart be also"; our treasure is where the beehives of our knowledge are.
On the Genealogy of Morals
All beings so far have created something beyond themselves; and do you want to be the ebb of this great flood and even go back to the beasts rather than overcome man? What is the ape to man? A laughingstock or a painful embarrassment. And man shall be just that for the overman: a laughingstock or a painful embarrassment…
Thus Spoke Zarathustra
In some remote corner of the universe, poured out and glittering in innumerable solar systems, there once was a star on which clever animals invented knowledge. That was the haughtiest and most mendacious minute of "world history"- yet only a minute. After nature had drawn a few breaths the star grew cold, and the clever animals had to die.
On Truth and Untruth: Selected Writings
The believer in magic and miracles reflects on how to impose a law on nature--: and, in brief, the religious cult is the outcome of this reflection.
A Nietzsche Reader
All modern philosophizing is political, policed by governments, churches, academics, custom, fashion, and human cowardice, all off which limit it to a fake learnedness.
Philosophy in the Tragic Age of the Greeks
Their [philosophers] thinking is, in fact, far less a discovery than a re-recognizing, a remembering, a return and a home-coming to a far-off, ancient common-household of the soul, out of which those ideas formerly grew: philosophizing is so far a kind of atavism of the highest order.
Beyond Good and Evil
Every philosophy is a foreground philosophy — that is a hermit's judgment: "There is something arbitrary in his stopping here to look back and look around, in his not digging deeper here but laying his spade aside; there is also something suspicious about it."Every philosophy also conceals a philosophy; every opinion is also a hideout, every word also a mask.
Beyond Good and Evil
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.
Happiness: being able to forget or, to express in a more learned fashion.
On the Advantage and Disadvantage of History for Life
One thing a man must have: either a naturally light disposition or a disposition lightened by art and knowledge.
Human, All Too Human
love as a passion—it is our European specialty—must absolutely be of noble origin; as is well known, its invention is due to the Provencal poet-cavaliers, those brilliant, ingenious men of the "gai saber,"to whom Europe owes so much, and almost owes itself.
Beyond Good and Evil
Business people - Your business - is your greatest prejudice: it ties you to your locality, to the company you keep, to the inclinations you feel. Diligent in business - but indolent in spirit, content with your inadequacy, and with the cloak of duty hung over this contentment: that is how you live, that is how you want your children to live!
Daybreak: Thoughts on the Prejudices of Morality
All that exists is just and unjust and is equally justified in both respects.
Popular medicine and popular morality belong together and ought not to be evaluated so differently as they still are: both are the most dangerous pseudo-sciences.
Daybreak: Thoughts on the Prejudices of Morality
One must reach out and try to grasp this astonishing finesse, that the value of lif cannot be estimated.
Twilight of the Idols
Three metamorphoses of the spirit have I designated to you: how thespirit became a camel, the camel a lion, and the lion at last a child.
Thus Spoke Zarathustra
Quiconque lutte contre des monstres devrait prendre garde, dans le combat, à ne pas devenir monstre lui-même. Et quant à celui qui scrute le fond de l'abysse, l'abysse le scrute à son tour.
Excess of strength alone is proof of strength
Dove la moralità è troppo forte l'intelletto perisce.
Ah, ye brethren, that God whom I created was human work and human madness, like all the Gods!
Thus Spoke Zarathustra
Plus d'un qui n'a pu liberer ses propres chaines a su pourtant en liberer son ami.