Friedrich Nietzsche Quotes

1,220 Sourced Quotes

In the consciousness of the truth he has perceived, man now sees everywhere only the awfulness or the absurdity of existence,... and loathing seizes him.

Friedrich Nietzsche
What does not kill me, makes me stronger.

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
Existence really is an imperfect tense that never becomes a present.

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

Friedrich Nietzsche
We have seen how it is originally language which works on the construction of concepts, a labor taken over in later ages by science. Just as the bee simultaneously constructs cells and fills them with honey, so science works unceasingly on this great columbarium of concepts, the graveyard of perceptions.

Friedrich Nietzsche
Not the intensity but the duration of high feelings makes high men.

Friedrich Nietzsche
Buddhism is a hundred times as realistic as Christianity it is part of its living heritage that it is able to face problems objectively and coolly; it is the product of long centuries of philosophical speculation.

Friedrich Nietzsche
The masters have been done away with; the morality of the common man has triumphed.

Friedrich Nietzsche
Truths are illusions which we have forgotten are illusions — they are metaphors that have become worn out and have been drained of sensuous force, coins which have lost their embossing and are now considered as metal and no longer as coins.

Friedrich Nietzsche
Everyone wants to be foremost in this future-and yet death and the stillness of death are the only things certain and common to all in this future! How strange that this sole thing that is certain and common to all, exercises almost no influence on men, and that they are the furthest from regarding themselves as the brotherhood of death! It makes me happy to see that men do not want to think at all of the idea of death!

Friedrich Nietzsche
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
People who live in an age of corruption are witty and slanderous; they know that there are other kinds of murder than by dagger or assault; they also know that whatever is well said is believed...

Friedrich Nietzsche
Books for general reading always smell badly; the odor of common people hangs about them.

Friedrich Nietzsche
The stronger becomes master of the weaker, in so far as the latter cannot assert its degree of independence — here there is no mercy, no forbearance, even less a respect for "laws."

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
THE SUFFERING OF GENIUS AND ITS VALUE. The artistic genius desires to give pleasure, but if his mind is on a very high plane he does not easily find anyone to share his pleasure; he offers entertainment but nobody accepts it. That gives him, in certain circumstances, a comically touching pathos; for he has no right to force pleasure on men. He pipes, but none will dance: can that be tragic?

Friedrich Nietzsche
Or shall I go out as a light does, not first blown out by the wind, but grown tired and weary of itself - a burnt out light? Or finally, shall I blow myself out, so as not to burn out?

Friedrich Nietzsche
Mystical explanations are considered deep; the truth is, they are not even shallow.

Friedrich Nietzsche
The highest type of free men should be sought where the highest resistance is constantly overcome: five steps from tyranny, close to the threshold of the danger of servitude.

Friedrich Nietzsche
The very reason [the Greeks] got so far is that they knew how to pick up the spear and throw it onward from the point where others had left it. Their skill in the art of fruitful learning was admirable. We ought to be learning from our neighbors precisely as the Greeks learned from theirs, not for the sake of learned pedantry but rather using everything we learn as a foothold which will take us up as high, and higher, than our neighbor.

Friedrich Nietzsche
That every will must consider every other will its equal — would be a principle hostile to life, an agent of the dissolution and destruction of man, an attempt to assassinate the future of man, a sign of weariness, a secret path to nothingness.

Friedrich Nietzsche
The 'kingdom of God' is not something one waits for; it has no yesterday or tomorrow, it does not come 'in a thousand years' — it is an experience within a heart; it is everywhere, it is nowhere...

Friedrich Nietzsche
Our vanity desires that what we do best should be considered what is hardest for us.

Friedrich Nietzsche
More natural is our position in politics: We see problems of power, of one quantum of power against another. We do not believe in any right that is not supported by the power of enforcement: we feel all rights to be conquests.

Friedrich Nietzsche
Although the most acute judges of the witches and even the witches themselves, were convinced of the guilt of witchery, the guilt nevertheless was non-existent. It is thus with all guilt.

Friedrich Nietzsche
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
Oh great star! What would your happiness be if you did not have us to shine for?

Friedrich Nietzsche
To see others suffer does one good, to make others suffer even more: this is a hard saying but an ancient, mighty, human, all-too-human principle which even the apes might subscribe; for it has been said that in devising bizarre cruelties they anticipate man and are, as it were his "prelude."

Friedrich Nietzsche