Top 93 Friedrich Nietzsche Philosophy Quotes
#2. Only when he has attained a final knowledge of all things will man have come to know himself. For things are only the boundaries of man.
Friedrich Nietzsche
#3. My philosophy is inverted Platonism: the further a thing is from true being, the purer, the lovelier, the better it is. Living inillusion as a goal!
Friedrich Nietzsche
#4. Our way is upward, from the species across to the super-species. But the degenerate mind which says 'All for me' is a horror to us.
Friedrich Nietzsche
#5. Socrates ... is the first philosopher of life [Lebensphilosoph], ... Thinking serves life, while among all previous philosophers life had served thought and knowledge ... Thus Socratic philosophy is absolutely practical: it is hostile to all knowledge unconnected to ethical implications.
Friedrich Nietzsche
#7. 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.
Friedrich Nietzsche
#8. 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.
Friedrich Nietzsche
#9. At the very moment when someone is beginning to take philosophy seriously, the whole world believes the opposite.
Friedrich Nietzsche
#10. 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.
Friedrich Nietzsche
#13. Which is it? Is man only a blunder of God? Or is God only a blunder of man?
Friedrich Nietzsche
#14. How I understand the philosopher - as a terrible explosive, endangering everthing ... my concept of the philosopher is worlds removed from any concept that would include even a Kant, not to speak of academic "ruminants" and other professors of philosophy ...
Friedrich Nietzsche
#15. 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
Friedrich Nietzsche
#16. All great things must first wear terrifying and monstrous masks, in order to inscribe themselves on the hearts of humanity.
Friedrich Nietzsche
#17. Pure logic is the impossibility by means of which science is maintained.
Friedrich Nietzsche
#18. What is familiar is what we are used to; and what we are used to is most difficult to 'Know' - that is, to see as a problem; that is, to see as strange, as distant, as 'outside us'.
Friedrich Nietzsche
#19. 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.
Friedrich Nietzsche
#20. One must reach out and try to grasp this astonishing finesse, that the value of lif cannot be estimated.
Friedrich Nietzsche
#21. A good book is made better by good readers and clearer by good opponents.
Friedrich Nietzsche
#22. This crown of the laughter, the rosary crown: to you, my brothers, I throw this crown! I pronounced laughter holy: you higher men, learn - to laugh!
Friedrich Nietzsche
#23. 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.
Friedrich Nietzsche
#25. He who cannot obey himself will be commanded. That is the nature of living creatures.
Friedrich Nietzsche
#26. Nihilism is ... not only the belief that everything deserves to perish; but one actually puts one shoulder to the plough; one destroys.
Friedrich Nietzsche
#27. 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.
Friedrich Nietzsche
#28. He who fights with monsters might take care lest he thereby becomes a monster.
Friedrich Nietzsche
#29. You have made your way from worm to man, and much in you is still worm.
Friedrich Nietzsche
#30. Nietzsche, an infinitely harder and more courageous intellect, was incapable of any such confusion of ideas; he seldom allowed sentimentality to turn him from the glaring fact.
H.L. Mencken
#31. That the world is a divine game and beyond good and evil:Min this the Vedanta philosophy and Heraclitus are my predecessors.
Friedrich Nietzsche
#32. The maturity of man - that means, to have reacquired the seriousness that one had as a child at play
Friedrich Nietzsche
#33. 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
#34. Healthy introspection, without undermining oneself; it is a rare gift to venture into the unexplored depths of the self, without delusions or fictions, but with an uncorrupted gaze.
Friedrich Nietzsche
#35. Socrates condemned art because he preferred philosophy and only after much internal struggle did Plato accept this judgment.
Friedrich Nietzsche
#36. Ah, ye brethren, that God whom I created was human work and human madness, like all the Gods!
Friedrich Nietzsche
#37. Whenever a great thinker wants to make of himself a binding institution for future mankind, one may be certain that he is past the peak of his powers and is very weary, very close to the setting of his sun.
Friedrich Nietzsche
#39. One of the subtlest means of deceiving, at least as long as possible, and of successfully representing oneself to be stupider than one really is - which in everyday life is often as desirable as an umbrella,- is called ENTHUSIASM, including what belongs to it, for instance, virtue.
Friedrich Nietzsche
#40. As soon as a religion comes to dominate it has as its opponents all those who would have been its first disciples.
Friedrich Nietzsche
#41. 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.
Friedrich Nietzsche
#42. Gradually it has become clear to me what every great philosophy so far has been: namely, the personal confession of its author and a kind of involuntary and unconscious memoir.
Friedrich Nietzsche
#43. All that exists is just and unjust and is equally justified in both respects.
Friedrich Nietzsche
#44. Moderation sees itself as beautiful; it is unaware that in the eye of the immoderate it appears black and sober and consequently ugly-looking
Friedrich Nietzsche
#46. Accordingly, I do not believe that an "impulse to knowledge" is the father of philosophy; but that another impulse, here as elsewhere, has only made use of knowledge (and mistaken knowledge!) as an instrument.
Friedrich Nietzsche
#47. The life of the enemy . Whoever lives for the sake of combating an enemy has an interest in the enemy's staying alive.
Friedrich Nietzsche
#48. Every means hitherto employed with the intention of making mankind moral has been thoroughly immoral.
Friedrich Nietzsche
#49. The most perfidious way of harming a cause consists of defending it deliberately with faulty arguments.
Friedrich Nietzsche
#50. The sum of the inner movements which a man finds easy and as a consequence performs gracefully and with pleasure, one calls his soul; if these inner movements are plainly difficult and an effort for him, he is considered soulless.
Friedrich Nietzsche
#51. Is the world really beautified by the fact that man thinks it beautiful? He has humanized it, that is all.
Friedrich Nietzsche
#52. as soon as any philosophy begins to believe in itself. It always creates the world in its own image; it cannot do otherwise. Philosophy
Friedrich Nietzsche
#53. The good men of every age are those who go to the roots of the old thoughts and bear fruit with them.
Friedrich Nietzsche
#54. There have been two great narcotics in European civilisation: Christianity and alcohol.
Friedrich Nietzsche
#55. It is hard enough to remember my opinions, without also remembering my reasons for them!
Friedrich Nietzsche
#56. Madness is something rare in individuals - but in groups, parties, peoples, and ages, it is the rule.
Friedrich Nietzsche
#57. Where are we headed? Are we not endlessly plunging - backwards, sideways, forwards, in all directions? Is there an up and a down anymore? Do we not wander as if through an endless nothingness? Do we not feel the breath of empty space? Hasn't it grown colder?
Friedrich Nietzsche
#58. I assess the power of a will by how much resistance, pain, torture it endures and knows how to turn to its advantage
Friedrich Nietzsche
#59. Almost everything we call "higher culture" is based on the spiritualization of cruelty.
Friedrich Nietzsche
#60. From the beginning, nothing has been more alien, repugnant, and hostile to woman than truth
her great art is the lie, her highest concern is mere appearance of beauty.
Friedrich Nietzsche
#61. You may lie with your mouth, but with the mouth you make as you do so you none the less tell the truth.
Friedrich Nietzsche
#63. Said ye ever Yea to one joy? O my friends, then said ye Yea also unto ALL woe. All things are enlinked, enlaced and enamoured.
Friedrich Nietzsche
#64. Philosophers are in the habit of setting themselves before life and experience.
Friedrich Nietzsche
#65. Did I seek where the wind bites keenest, learn to live where no one lives, in the desert where only the polar bear lives, unlearn to pray and curse, unlearn man and god, become a ghost flitting across the glaciers?
Friedrich Nietzsche
#66. If a man has character, he has also his typical experience, which always recurs.
Friedrich Nietzsche
#69. There is a point in every philosophy at which the "conviction" of the philosopher appears on the scene; or, to put it in the words of an ancient mystery: adventavit asinus, / pulcher et fortissimus. (Translation: The ass arrives, beautiful and most brave.)
Friedrich Nietzsche
#70. 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.
Friedrich Nietzsche
#71. The men of the period of corruption are witty and calumnious; they know that there are yet other ways of murdering than by the dagger and ambush
they know also that all that is well said is believed in.
Friedrich Nietzsche
#72. Rational thought is interpretation according to a scheme which we cannot escape.
Friedrich Nietzsche
#73. Nothing stands so much in the way of the production and propagation of the great philosopher by nature as does the bad philosopher who works for the state.
Friedrich Nietzsche
#74. The Greeks, with their truly healthy culture, have once and for all justified philosophy simply by having engaged in it, and having engaged in it more fully than any other people.
Friedrich Nietzsche
#75. It is so little true that martyrs offer any support to the truth of a cause that
I am inclined to deny that any martyr has ever had anything to do with the
truth at all.
Friedrich Nietzsche
#76. Thus the man who is responsive to artistic stimuli reacts to the reality of dreams as does the philosopher to the reality of existence; he observes closely, and he enjoys his observation: for it is out of these images that he interprets life, out of these processes that he trains himself for life.
Friedrich Nietzsche
#77. Youth's longing misconceived inconsistency.
Those whom I deemed
Changed to my kin, the friends of whom I dreamed,
Have aged and lost our old affinity:
One has to change to stay akin to me.
Friedrich Nietzsche
#78. The most common sort of lie is that by which a man deceives himself: the deception of others is a relatively rare offense.
Friedrich Nietzsche
#80. Here is the hell for solitaries' thoughts: here great thoughts are boiled alive and then cooked down small. Here all the great feelings decay: here only tiny skin-and-bone feelings are allowed to rattle!
Friedrich Nietzsche
#81. 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.
Friedrich Nietzsche
#82. Every moment of life wants to tell us something, but we do not want to hear what it has to say: when we are alone and quiet we are afraid that something will be whispered into our ear and hence we despise quiet and drug ourselves with sociability.
Friedrich Nietzsche
#83. So far there has been no philosopher in whose hands philosophy has not grown into an apology for knowledge; on this point, at least, every one is an optimist, that the greatest usefulness must be ascribed to knowledge. They are all tyrannized over by logic, and this is optimism in its essence.
Friedrich Nietzsche
#84. Man is something that hath to be surpassed: and therefore shalt thou love thy virtues, - for thou wilt succumb by them.
Friedrich Nietzsche
#85. One has to take a somewhat bold and dangerous line with this existence: especially as, whatever happens, we are bound to lose it.
Friedrich Nietzsche
#86. A nation is a detour of nature to arrive at five or six great men- yes, and then to get around them.
Friedrich Nietzsche
#88. And finally, to call to mind the enormous influence which "German philosophy"
I hope you understand its right to inverted commas-
Friedrich Nietzsche
#89. Three metamorphoses of the spirit have I designated to you: how the
spirit became a camel, the camel a lion, and the lion at last a child.
Friedrich Nietzsche
#90. All modern philosophizing is political, policed by governments, churches, academics, custom, fashion, and human cowardice, all off which limit it to a fake learnedness.
Friedrich Nietzsche
#91. At the moment when anyone begins to take philosophy seriously, all the world believes the opposite."
- Human, All Too Human, "Assorted Opinions and Maxims,
Friedrich Nietzsche
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