Friedrich Nietzsche Quotes

That which does not kill us makes us stronger.

~ Friedrich Nietzsche

It is not a lack of love, but a lack of friendship that makes unhappy marriages.

~ Friedrich Nietzsche

There is always some madness in love. But there is also always some reason in madness.

~ Friedrich Nietzsche

The man of knowledge must be able not only to love his enemies but also to hate his friends.

~ Friedrich Nietzsche

One ought to hold on to one's heart; for if one lets it go, one soon loses control of the head too.

~ Friedrich Nietzsche

Amor Fati – “Love Your Fate”, which is in fact your life.

~ Friedrich Nietzsche

Ultimately, it is the desire, not the desired, that we love.

~ Friedrich Nietzsche

The spiritualization of sensuality is called love: it is a great triumph over Christianity.

~ Friedrich Nietzsche

Love, too, has to be learned.

~ Friedrich Nietzsche

He who has a why to live for can bear almost any how.

~ Friedrich Nietzsche

What, if some day or night a demon were to steal after you into your loneliest loneliness and say to you: 'This life as you now live it and have lived it, you will have to live once more and innumerable times more' ... Would you not throw yourself down and gnash your teeth and curse the demon who spoke thus? Or have you once experienced a tremendous moment when you would have answered him: 'You are a god and never have I heard anything more divine.

~ Friedrich Nietzsche

Is life not a thousand times too short for us to bore ourselves?

~ Friedrich Nietzsche

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.

~ Friedrich Nietzsche

In the end things must be as they are and have always been--the great things remain for the great, the abysses for the profound, the delicacies and thrills for the refined, and, to sum up shortly, everything rare for the rare.

~ Friedrich Nietzsche

Without music, life would be a mistake.

~ Friedrich Nietzsche

The higher we soar the smaller we appear to those who cannot fly.

~ Friedrich Nietzsche

One must still have chaos in oneself to be able to give birth to a dancing star.

~ Friedrich 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?

~ Friedrich Nietzsche

Convictions are prisons.

~ Friedrich Nietzsche

To those human beings who are of any concern to me I wish suffering, desolation, sickness, ill-treatment, indignities—I wish that they should not remain unfamiliar with profound self-contempt, the torture of self-mistrust, the wretchedness of the vanquished: I have no pity for them, because I wish them the only thing that can prove today whether one is worth anything or not—that one endures.

~ Friedrich Nietzsche

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.

~ Friedrich Nietzsche

It is hard enough to remember my opinions, without also remembering my reasons for them!

~ Friedrich Nietzsche

A joke is an epigram on the death of a feeling.

~ Friedrich Nietzsche

When we are tired, we are attacked by ideas we conquered long ago.

~ Friedrich Nietzsche

The true man wants two things: danger and play. For that reason he wants woman, as the most dangerous plaything.

~ Friedrich Nietzsche

Doubt as sin. — Christianity has done its utmost to close the circle and declared even doubt to be sin. One is supposed to be cast into belief without reason, by a miracle, and from then on to swim in it as in the brightest and least ambiguous of elements: even a glance towards land, even the thought that one perhaps exists for something else as well as swimming, even the slightest impulse of our amphibious nature — is sin! And notice that all this means that the foundation of belief and all reflection on its origin is likewise excluded as sinful. What is wanted are blindness and intoxication and an eternal song over the waves in which reason has drowned.

~ Friedrich Nietzsche

The most perfidious way of harming a cause consists of defending it deliberately with faulty arguments.

~ Friedrich Nietzsche

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

Madness is something rare in individuals — but in groups, parties, peoples, and ages, it is the rule.

~ Friedrich Nietzsche

All great things must first wear terrifying and monstrous masks in order to inscribe themselves on the hearts of humanity.

~ Friedrich Nietzsche

If a man has character, he has also his typical experience, which always recurs.

~ Friedrich Nietzsche

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

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.

~ Friedrich Nietzsche

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

As soon as a religion comes to dominate it has as its opponents all those who would have been its first disciples.

~ Friedrich Nietzsche

Because we have for millenia made moral, aesthetic, religious demands on the world, looked upon it with blind desire, passion or fear, and abandoned ourselves to the bad habits of illogical thinking, this world has gradually become so marvelously variegated, frightful, meaningful, soulful, it has acquired color - but we have been the colorists: it is the human intellect that has made appearances appear and transported its erroneous basic conceptions into things.

~ Friedrich Nietzsche

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

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

A nation is a detour of nature to arrive at five or six great men- yes, and then to get around them.

~ Friedrich Nietzsche

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