Friedrich Nietzsche Quotes

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There is an innocence in admiration; it is found in those to whom it has never yet occurred that they, too, might be admired some day.

Friedrich Nietzsche
It was Christianity which first painted the devil on the worlds walls; It was Christianity which first brought sin into the world. Belief in the cure which it offered has now been shaken to it's deepest roots; but belief in the sickness which it taught and propagated continues to exists.

Friedrich Nietzsche
Youth is an unpleasant period; for then it is not possible or not prudent to be productive in any sense whatsoever.

Friedrich Nietzsche
To be moral, correct, and virtuous is to be obedient to an old established law and custom.

Friedrich Nietzsche
It is only because man believes himself to be free, not because he is free, that he experiences remorse and pricks of conscience.

Friedrich Nietzsche
It is my ambition to say in ten sentences what everyone else says in a whole book — what everyone else does not say in a whole book.

Friedrich Nietzsche
Something might be true while being harmful and dangerous in the highest degree. Indeed, it might be a basic characteristic of existence that those who know it completely would perish, in which case the strength of a spirit should be measured according to how much of the 'truth' one could still barely endure- or to put it more clearly, to what degree one would require it to be thinned down, shrouded, sweetened, blunted, falsified.

Friedrich Nietzsche
Cynicism is the only form in which base souls approach honesty.

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

Friedrich Nietzsche
Wherever Germany extends her sway, she ruins culture.

Friedrich Nietzsche
What is originality? To see something that has no name as yet and hence cannot be mentioned although it stares us all in the face. The way men usually are, it takes a name to make something visible for them.

Friedrich Nietzsche
If you have hitherto believed that life was one of the highest value and now see yourselves disappointed, do you at once have to reduce it to the lowest possible price?

Friedrich Nietzsche
Even the pluckiest among us has but seldom the courage of what he really knows.

Friedrich Nietzsche
He who fights with monsters should look to it that he himself does not become a monster. And when you gaze long into an abyss the abyss also gazes into you.

Friedrich Nietzsche
Christianity gave Eros poison to drink; he did not die of it, certainly, but degenerated to Vice.

Friedrich Nietzsche
It is only possible through the fact that sympathy for the general life and suffering of mankind is very weakly developed in the individual.

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
And I offer you this parable: Not a few who sought to cast out their devil entered into the swine themselves.

Friedrich Nietzsche
The irrationality of a thing is no argument against its existence, rather a condition of it.

Friedrich Nietzsche
What is it: is man only a blunder of God, or God only a blunder of man?

Friedrich Nietzsche
I have somehow something like "influence" … In the Anti-Semitic Correspondence … my name is mentioned in almost every issue. Zarathustra … has charmed the anti-Semites; there is a special anti-Semitic interpretation of it that made me laugh very much.

Friedrich Nietzsche
These same institutions produce quite different effects while they are still being fought for; then they really promote freedom in a powerful way. On closer inspection it is war that produces these effects, the war for liberal institutions, which, as a war, permits illiberal instincts to continue. And war educates for freedom. For what is freedom? That one has the will to self-responsibility. That one maintains the distance which separates us. That one becomes more indifferent to difficulties, hardships, privation, even to life itself. That one is prepared to sacrifice human beings for one's cause, not excluding oneself.

Friedrich Nietzsche
What makes us heroic? Confronting simultaneously our supreme suffering and our supreme hope.

Friedrich Nietzsche
There was really only one Christian, and he died on the cross.

Friedrich Nietzsche
My formula for greatness in a human being is amor fati: that one wants nothing to be different, not forward, not backward, not in all eternity. Not merely bear what is necessary, still less conceal it—all idealism is mendaciousness in the face of what is necessary—but love it

Friedrich Nietzsche
The patient. The pine tree seems to listen, the fir tree to wait: and both without impatience: - they give no thought to the little people beneath them devoured by their impatience and their curiosity.

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

Friedrich Nietzsche
Since Copernicus, man seems to have got himself on an inclined plane-now he is slipping faster and faster away from the center into-what? into nothingness? into a 'penetrating sense of his nothingness?'... all science, natural as well as unnatural-which is what I call the self-critique of knowledge-has at present the object of dissuading man from his former respect for himself, as if this had been but a piece of bizarre conceit.

Friedrich Nietzsche
Woe to the thinker who is not the gardener but only the soil of the plants that grow in him!

Friedrich Nietzsche
We set no special value on the possession of a virtue until we percieve that it is entirely lacking in our adversary.

Friedrich Nietzsche