Friedrich Nietzsche Quotes

He who climbs upon the highest mountains laughs at all tragedies, real or imaginary.

~ Friedrich Nietzsche

Even the most beautiful scenery is no longer assured of our love after we have lived in it for three months, and some distant coast attracts our avarice: possessions are generally diminished by possession.

~ Friedrich Nietzsche

Here and there on earth there is probably a kind of continuation of love; in which this greedy desire of two people for each other gives way to a new desire and greed, a shared higher thirst for an ideal above them. But who knows such love? who has experienced it? Its true name is friendship

~ Friedrich Nietzsche

What destroys a man more quickly than to work, think and feel without inner necessity, without any deep personal desire, without pleasure - as a mere automaton of duty?

~ Friedrich Nietzsche

What if pleasure and displeasure were so tied together that whoever wanted to have as much as possible of one must also have as much as possible of the other. You have a choice in life: either as little displeasure as possible, painlessness in brief or as much displeasure as possible as the price for an abundance of subtle pleasures and joys

~ Friedrich Nietzsche

Did you ever say yes to a pleasure? oh my friends, then you also said yes to all pain. all things are linked, entwined, in love with one another.

~ Friedrich Nietzsche

Weariness, which seeketh to get to the ultimate with one leap, with a death-leap; a poor ignorant weariness, unwilling even to will any longer: that created all Gods and backworlds.

~ Friedrich Nietzsche

Some of them will, but most of them are willed. Some of them are genuine, but most of them are bad actors.

~ Friedrich Nietzsche

One repays a teacher badly if one always remains nothing but a pupil.

~ Friedrich Nietzsche

No shepherd and one herd! Everybody wants the same, everybody is the same: whoever feels different goes voluntarily into a madhouse.

~ Friedrich Nietzsche

One must not let oneself be misled: they say 'Judge not!' but they send to Hell everything that stands in their way.

~ Friedrich Nietzsche

You know these things as thoughts, but your thoughts are not your experiences, they are an echo and after-effect of your experiences: as when your room trembles whe na carriage goes past. I however am sitting in the carriage, and often I am the carriage itself.Ina man who thinks like this, the dichotomy between thinking and feeling, intellect and passion, has really disappeared. He feels his thoughts. He can fall in love with an idea. An idea can make him ill.

~ Friedrich Nietzsche

You say 'I' and you are proud of this word. But greater than this- although you will not believe in it - is your body and its great intelligence, which does not say 'I' but performs 'I'.

~ Friedrich Nietzsche

Words are but symbols for the relations of things to one another and to us; nowhere do they touch upon absolute truth.... Through words and concepts we shall never reach beyond the wall off relations, to some sort of fabulous primal ground of things.

~ Friedrich Nietzsche

No one is accountable for existing at all, or for being constituted as he is, or for living in the circumstances and surroundings in which he lives. The fatality of his nature cannot be disentangled from the fatality of all that which has been and will be. He is not the result of a special design, a will, a purpose; he is not the subject of an attempt to attain an 'ideal of man' or an 'ideal of happiness' or an 'ideal of morality'--it is absurd to want to hand over his nature to some purpose or other. We invented the concept 'purpose': in reality purpose is lacking...One is necessary, one is a piece of fate, one belongs to the whole, one is in the whole--there exists nothing which could judge, measure, compare, condemn our being, for that would be to judge, measure, condemn the whole...

~ Friedrich Nietzsche

One is necessary, one is a piece of fate, one belongs to the whole, one is the whole – there exists nothing which could judge, measure, compare, condemn our being, for that would be to judge, measure, compare, condemn the whole…But nothing exists apart from the whole!

~ Friedrich Nietzsche

I mistrust all systematizers and avoid them. the will to a system is a lack of integrity.

~ Friedrich Nietzsche

I praise, I do not reproach, [nihilism's] arrival. I believe it is one of the greatest crises, a moment of the deepest self-reflection of humanity. Whether man recovers from it, whether he becomes master of this crisis, is a question of his strength.

~ Friedrich Nietzsche

I praise, I do not reproach, [nihilism's] arrival. I believe it is one of the greatest crises, a moment of the deepest self-reflection of humanity. Whether man recovers from it, whether he becomes master of this crisis, is a question of his strength

~ Friedrich Nietzsche

Pure logic is the impossibility by means of which science is maintained.

~ Friedrich Nietzsche

I ascended, I ascended, I dreamt, I thought,—but everything oppressed me. A sick one did I resemble, whom bad torture wearieth, and a worse dream reawakeneth out of his first sleep.—But there is something in me which I call courage: it hath hitherto slain for me every dejection. This courage at last bade me stand still and say: Dwarf! Thou! Or I!—For courage is the best slayer,—courage which attacketh: for in every attack there is sound of triumph.Man, however, is the most courageous animal: thereby hath he overcome every animal. With sound of triumph hath he overcome every pain; human pain, however, is the sorest pain.Courage slayeth also giddiness at abysses: and where doth man not stand at abysses! Is not seeing itself—seeing abysses?Courage is the best slayer: courage slayeth also fellow-suffering. Fellow-suffering, however, is the deepest abyss: as deeply as man looketh into life, so deeply also doth he look into suffering.Courage, however, is the best slayer, courage which attacketh: it slayeth even death itself; for it saith: Was that life? Well! Once more!

~ Friedrich Nietzsche

Youth's longing misconceived inconsistency.Those whom I deemedChanged 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

For nothing is more democratic than logic, it is no respecter of persons and makes no distinction between crooked and straight noses.

~ Friedrich Nietzsche

In order that the concept of substance could originate--which is indispensable for logic although in the strictest sense nothing real corresponds to it--it was likewise necessary that for a long time one did not see or perceive the changes in things. The beings that did not see so precisely had an advantage over those who saw everything in flux. At bottom, every high degree of caution in making inferences and every skeptical tendency constitute a great danger for life. No living beings would have survived if the opposite tendency--to affirm rather than suspend judgment, to err and make up things rather than wait, to assent rather than negate, to pass judgment rather than be just-- had not been bred to the point where it became extraordinarily strong.

~ Friedrich Nietzsche

We have to be careful that in throwing out the devil, we don't throw out the best part of ourselves.

~ Friedrich Nietzsche

There exists no more repulsive and desolate creature in the world than the man who has evaded his genius and who now looks furtively to left and right, behind him and all about him. In the end such a man becomes impossible to get hold of, since he is wholly exterior, without kernel, a tattered, painted bag of clothes, a decked-out ghost that cannot inspire even fear and certainly not pity.

~ Friedrich Nietzsche

What is Genius?- To aspire to a lofty aim and to will the means to that aim.

~ Friedrich Nietzsche

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

~ Friedrich Nietzsche

We do not place especial value on the possession of a virtue until we notice its total absence in our opponent.

~ Friedrich Nietzsche

When virtue has slept it will arise more vigorous.

~ Friedrich Nietzsche

When virtue has slept, it will arise again all the fresher.

~ Friedrich Nietzsche

One is punished most for one’s virtues.

~ Friedrich Nietzsche

Oh, my friends, that your self be in your deed as the mother is in her child - let that be your word concerning virtue!

~ Friedrich Nietzsche

And he who would not languish among men, must learn to drink out of all glasses; and he who would keep clean among men, must know how to wash himself even with dirty water.

~ Friedrich Nietzsche

The child is innocence and forgetting, a new beginning, a game, a self-rolling wheel, a first movement, a sacred Yes.

~ Friedrich Nietzsche

Perhaps he even needs to have been a critic and a sceptic and a dogmatist and an historian, and in addition a poet and collector and traveller and puzzle-solver and moralist and seer and ‘free spirit’ and nearly all things, so that he can traverse the range of human values and value-feelings and be able to look with many kinds of eyes and consciences from the heights into every distance, from the depths into every height, from the corners into every wide expanse.

~ Friedrich Nietzsche

Everything goes, everything comes back; eternally rolls the wheel of being. Everything dies, everything blossoms again; eternally runs the year of being. Everything breaks, everything is joined anew; eternally the same House of Being is built. Everything parts, everything greets every other thing again; eternally the ring of being remains faithful to itself. In every Now, being begins; round every Here rolls the sphere There. The center is everywhere. Bent is the path of eternity.

~ Friedrich Nietzsche

If, in all that you wish to do, you begin by asking yourself: am I certain that I would wish to do this an infinite number of times? This should be for you the most solid centre of gravity . . . My doctrine says, the task is to live your life in such a way that you must wish to live it again - for you will anyway! If striving gives you the highest feeling, then strive! If rest gives you the highest feeling, then rest! If fitting in, following and obeying give you the highest feeling, then obey! Only make sure you come to know what gives you the highest feeling, and then spare no means. Eternity is at stake! This doctrine is mild in its treatment of those who do not believe in it. It has neither hell nor threats. But anyone who does not believe merely lives a fugitive life in the consciousness of it.

~ Friedrich Nietzsche

And as long as you are in any way ashamed before yourself, you do not yet belong with us.

~ Friedrich Nietzsche

It is the business of the very few to be independent; it is a privilege of the strong. And whoever attempts it, even with the best right, but without being OBLIGED to do so, proves that he is probably not only strong, but also daring beyond measure. He enters into a labyrinth, he multiplies a thousandfold the dangers which life in itself already brings with it; not the least of which is that no one can see how and where he loses his way, becomes isolated, and is torn piecemeal by some minotaur of conscience. Supposing such a one comes to grief, it is so far from the comprehension of men that they neither feel it, nor sympathize with it. And he cannot any longer go back! He cannot even go back again to the sympathy of men!

~ Friedrich Nietzsche