Top 100 Friedrich Nietzsche Quotes
#1. The charm of the Platonic mode of thought ... consisted precisely in the resistance to the obvious evidence of the senses.
Friedrich Nietzsche
#2. All good things were formerly bad things; every original sin has turned into an original virtue.
Friedrich Nietzsche
#5. We must now and then be joyful in our folly, that we may continue to be joyful in our wisdom!
Friedrich Nietzsche
#7. I started to investigate and unearth an old faith which for thousands of years we philosophers used to build on as the safest of all foundations - which we built on again and again although every previous structure fell in: I began to undermine our faith in morals . But ye do not understand me? -
Friedrich Nietzsche
#8. A change of values - that means, a change of the creators of values. He who has to be a creator always has to destroy.
Friedrich Nietzsche
#9. Evolution does not make happiness its goal; it aims simply at evolution and nothing else.
Friedrich Nietzsche
#11. O, what nowadays does science not conceal! How much, at least, it is meant to conceal!
Friedrich Nietzsche
#12. 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.
Friedrich Nietzsche
#14. How poisonous, how crafty, how bad, does every long war make one, which cannot be waged openly by means of force!
Friedrich Nietzsche
#15. But the thought is one thing, the deed is another, and another yet is the image of the deed. The wheel of causality does not roll between them.
Friedrich Nietzsche
#16. Interpreting myself, I always read
Myself into my books. I clearly need
Some help. But all who climb on their own way
Carry my image, too, into the breaking day.
Friedrich Nietzsche
#18. Blessed are the forgetful, for they get the better even of their blunders.
Friedrich Nietzsche
#21. You revere me: but what if your reverence should some day collapse? Be careful lest a statue fall and kill you!
Friedrich Nietzsche
#22. Verily, I do not like them, the merciful who feel blessed in their pity: they are lacking too much in shame. If I must pity, at least I do not want it known; and if I do pity, it is preferably from a distance.
Friedrich Nietzsche
#23. In loneliness, the lonely one eats himself; in a crowd, the many eat him. Now choose.
Friedrich Nietzsche
#24. 'God himself cannot exist without wise men' - Luther said, and was right. But 'God can exist even less without unwise men' - that good old Luther did not say.
Friedrich Nietzsche
#26. Happiness: being able to forget or, to express in a more learned fashion.
Friedrich Nietzsche
#28. To get into just those situations where sham virtues will not suffice, but rather where, as with the ropedancer on his rope, one either falls or stands
or gets down.
Friedrich Nietzsche
#29. Some die too young, some die too old; the precept sounds strange, but die at the right age.
Friedrich Nietzsche
#30. The higher you ascend, the smaller you appear to the eye of envy. But most of all they hate those who fly.
Friedrich Nietzsche
#31. The most unendurable thing, to be sure, the really terrible thing, would be a life without habits, a life which continually required improvisation.
Friedrich Nietzsche
#32. But it is the same with man as with the tree. The more he seeks to rise into the height and light, the more vigorously do his roots struggle earthword, downword, into the dark, the deep - into evil.
Friedrich Nietzsche
#33. We are doubly willing to jump into the water after some one who has fallen in, if there are people present who have not the courage to do so.
Friedrich Nietzsche
#34. But let me open up my heart to you completely, my friends: if there were gods, how could I bear not being a god! Hence, there areno gods. I drew this conclusion, to be sure
but now it draws me.
Friedrich Nietzsche
#35. The more abstract the truth you want to teach, the more you must seduce the senses to it.
Friedrich Nietzsche
#36. A man recovers best from his exceptional nature - his intellectuality - by giving his animal instincts a chance.
Friedrich Nietzsche
#37. Everything in the world displeases me: but, above all, my displeasure in everything displeases me.
Friedrich Nietzsche
#38. Against fantasists. - The fantasist denies reality to himself, the liar does so only to others.
Friedrich Nietzsche
#39. Have already in the fourth act killed all the Gods- for the sake of morality!
Friedrich Nietzsche
#42. To escape boredom, man works either beyond what his usual needs require, or else he invents play, that is, work that is designed to quiet no need other than that for working in general.
Friedrich Nietzsche
#44. When your heart overfloweth broad and full like the river, a blessing and a danger to the lowlanders: there is the origin of your virtue.
Friedrich Nietzsche
#47. Perhaps man will rise ever higher as soon as he ceases to flow out into a god.
Friedrich Nietzsche
#48. Every high degree of power always involves a corresponding degree of freedom from good and evil.
Friedrich Nietzsche
#51. Weariness is the shortest path to equality and fraternity-and finally liberty is bestowed by sleep.
Friedrich Nietzsche
#53. Are the axioms of logic adequate to reality or are they a means and measure for us to create reality, the concept "reality", for ourselves?
Friedrich Nietzsche
#54. Whatever they may think and say about their "egoism", the great majority nonetheless do nothing for their ego their whole life long: what they do is done for the phantom of their ego which has formed itself in the heads of those around them and has been communicated to them.
Friedrich Nietzsche
#55. In a friend one should have ones best enemy. You should be closest to him with your heart when you resist him.
Friedrich Nietzsche
#56. Must one first batter their ears, that they may learn to hear with their eyes? Must one clatter like kettledrums and penitential preachers? Or do they only believe the stammerer?
Friedrich Nietzsche
#57. 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.
Friedrich Nietzsche
#58. The individual has always had to struggle to keep from being overwhelmed by the tribe.
Friedrich Nietzsche
#59. I teach you beyond Man (superman). Man is something that shall be surpassed. What have you done to surpass him?
Friedrich Nietzsche
#62. Books that teach us to dance: There are writers who, by portraying the impossible as possible, and by speaking of morality and genius as if both were high-spirited freedom, as if man were rising up on tiptoe and simply had to dance out of inner pleasure.
Friedrich Nietzsche
#63. Formerly it was perceived in a person that on some occasion he wanted to think-it was perhaps the exception !-that he now wanted to become wiser and collected his mind on a thought:
Friedrich Nietzsche
#65. If we make sacrifices in doing good or in doing ill, it does not alter the ultimate value of our actions; even if we stake our life in the cause, as martyrs do for the sake of our church : it is a sacrifice to our longing for power, or for the purpose of conserving our sense of power.
Friedrich Nietzsche
#66. Great indebtedness does not make men grateful, but vengeful; and if a little charity is not forgotten, it turns into a gnawing worm.
Friedrich Nietzsche
#68. Good manners disappear in proportion as the influence of a Court and an exclusive aristocracy lessens; this decrease can be plainly observed from decade to decade by those who have an eye for public behavior, which grows visibly.
Friedrich Nietzsche
#69. To love those who despise us, and to give one's hand to the phantom who tries to frighten us?
Friedrich Nietzsche
#71. All preachers of morality, as also all theologians have a bad habit in common: all of them try to persuade man that he is very ill, and that a severe, final, radical cure is necessary.
Friedrich Nietzsche
#73. The most dangerous physicians are those born actors who imitate born physicians with a perfectly deceptive guile.
Friedrich Nietzsche
#74. Once blasphemy again God was the greatest blasphemy; but God died, and thereupon those blasphemers died too.
Friedrich Nietzsche
#75. Be your self! All you are now doing, thinking, desiring, is not you yourself.
Friedrich Nietzsche
#76. Whoever knows he is deep, strives for clarity; whoever would like to appear deep to the crowd, strives for obscurity. For the crowd considers anything deep if only it cannot see to the bottom: the crowd is so timid and afraid of going into the water.
Friedrich Nietzsche
#77. Many too many are born: for the superfluous ones was the state devised!
Friedrich Nietzsche
#78. I found life easy, easiest, when it demanded the most difficult things of me.
Friedrich Nietzsche
#79. Many short follies - that is called love by you. And your marriage putteth an end to many short follies, with one long stupidity.
Friedrich Nietzsche
#81. So far no one had had enough courage and intelligence to reveal me to my dear Germans. My problems are new, my psychological horizon frighteningly comprehensive, my language bold and clear; there may well be no books written in German which are richer in ideas and more independent than mine.
Friedrich Nietzsche
#82. One has been a poor spectator of life if one has not witnessed the hand - that kills from mercy.
Friedrich Nietzsche
#83. What is love but understanding and rejoicing that another lives, works, and feels in a different and opposite way to ourselves? That love may be able to bridge over the contrasts by joys, we must not remove or deny those contrasts.
Friedrich Nietzsche
#84. The rights which a man arrogates to himself are relative to the duties which he sets himself, and to the tasks which he feels capable of performing.
Friedrich Nietzsche
#85. Judgments, value judgments concerning life, for or against, can in the last resort never be true: they possess value only as symptoms, they come into consideration only as symptoms - in themselves such judgments are stupidities.
Friedrich Nietzsche
#87. Society tames the wolf into a dog. And man is the most domesticated animal of all.
Friedrich Nietzsche
#88. 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!
Friedrich Nietzsche
#90. The men with whom we live resemble a field of ruins of the most precious sculptural designs where everything shouts at us: come, help, perfect ... we yearn immeasurably to become whole.
Friedrich Nietzsche
#91. I demand from a book harmony as unity and moderation; that determines the choice of words, the type and number of metaphors, the development and conclusion
Friedrich Nietzsche
#92. He who writes in blood and aphorisms does not want to be read, he wants to be learned by heart.
Friedrich Nietzsche
#93. Life is an instinct for growth, for survival, for the accumulation of forces, for power.
Friedrich Nietzsche
#95. Where there is the tree of knowledge, there is always Paradise: so say the most ancient and most modern serpents.
Friedrich Nietzsche
#96. O my brothers, am I then cruel? But I say: that which is falling should also be pushed!
Friedrich Nietzsche
#97. I am of today and of the has-been (he said then); but there is something in me that is of tomorrow and of the day-after-tomorrow and of the shall-be.
Friedrich Nietzsche
#99. But what if pleasure and pain should be so closely connected that he who wants the greatest possible amount of the one must also have the greatest possible amount of the other, that he who wants to experience the "heavenly high jubilation," must also be ready to be "sorrowful unto death"?
Friedrich Nietzsche
#100. Whoever commits to paper what he suffers becomes a melancholy author: but he becomes a serious author when he tells us what he suffered and why he now reposes in joy.
Friedrich Nietzsche
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