Friedrich Nietzsche Quotes

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Nihilist and Christian. They rhyme, and do not merely rhyme...

Friedrich Nietzsche
The most vulnerable and yet most unconquerable of things is human vanity; nay, through being wounded its strength increases and can grow to giant proportions.

Friedrich Nietzsche
Insects sting, not out of malice, but because they too want to live: likewise our critics; they want, not to hurt us, but to take our blood.

Friedrich Nietzsche
A man unconsciously imagines that where he is strong, where he feels most thoroughly alive, the element of his freedom must lie.

Friedrich Nietzsche
You must climb above yourself-up and beyond, until you have even your stars under you.

Friedrich Nietzsche
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
This is the hardest of all: to close the open hand out of love, and keep modest as a giver.

Friedrich Nietzsche
In the mountains, the shortest way is from peak to peak: but for that you must have long legs

Friedrich Nietzsche
Nobody thanks a witty man for politeness when he puts himself on a par with a society in which it would not be polite to show one's wit.

Friedrich Nietzsche
The man who is guided by concepts and abstractions only succeeds by such means in warding off misfortune, without ever gaining any happiness for himself from these abstractions. And while he aims for the greatest possible freedom from pain, the intuitive man, standing in the midst of a culture, already reaps from his intuition a harvest of continually inflowing illumination, cheer, and redemption — in addition to obtaining a defense against misfortune. To be sure, he suffers more intensely, when he suffers; he even suffers more frequently, since he does not understand how to learn from experience and keeps falling over and over again into the same ditch.

Friedrich Nietzsche
Being silent is something one completely unlearns if, like him, one has been for so long a solitary mole - - -

Friedrich Nietzsche
What does your conscience say? — "You shall become the person you are."

Friedrich Nietzsche
We believe that we know something about the things themselves when we speak of trees, colors, snow, and flowers; and yet we possess nothing but metaphors for things — metaphors which correspond in no way to the original entities.

Friedrich Nietzsche
I do not know what meaning classical studies could have for our time if they were not untimely—that is to say, acting counter to our time and thereby acting on our time and, let us hope, for the benefit of a time to come.

Friedrich Nietzsche
Destination and paths. Many people are obstinate about the path once it is taken, few people about the destination.

Friedrich Nietzsche
One does not know—cannot know—the best that is in one.

Friedrich Nietzsche
Conversation with a friend will only bear good fruit of knowledge when both think only of the matter under consideration and forget that they are friends.

Friedrich Nietzsche
Every one who has ever built anywhere a "new heaven" first found the power thereto in his own hell....

Friedrich Nietzsche
All preachers of morality, as also all theologians have a bad habit in common: all of them try to persuade man that he is very ill, and that a severe, final, radical cure is necessary.

Friedrich Nietzsche
Everything which distinguishes man from the animals depends upon this ability to volatilize perceptual metaphors in a schema, and thus to dissolve an image into a concept. For something is possible in the realm of these schemata which could never be achieved with the vivid first impressions: the construction of a pyramidal order according to castes and degrees, the creation of a new world of laws, privileges, subordinations, and clearly marked boundaries — a new world, one which now confronts that other vivid world of first impressions as more solid, more universal, better known, and more human than the immediately perceived world, and thus as the regulative and imperative world.

Friedrich Nietzsche
Giving style to one's character - a great and rare art! It is exercised by those who see all the strengths and weaknesses of their own natures and then comprehend them in an artistic plan until everything appears as art and reason and even weakness delights the eye.

Friedrich Nietzsche
At times one remains faithful to a cause only because its opponents do not cease to be insipid.

Friedrich Nietzsche
What is happening to me happens to all fruits that grow ripe. It is the honey in my veins that makes my blood thicker, and my soul quieter.

Friedrich Nietzsche
To think historically is almost the same thing now as if in all ages history had been made according to theory.

Friedrich Nietzsche
It is perhaps just dawning on five or six minds that physics, too, is only an interpretation and exegesis of the world (to suit us, if I may say so!) and not a world-explanation.

Friedrich Nietzsche
Mastery.- We have reached mastery when we neither mistake nor hesitate in the achievement.

Friedrich Nietzsche
The degree and kind of a man's sexuality reach up into the ultimate pinnacle of his spirit.

Friedrich Nietzsche
Ye shall only have foes to be hated; but not foes to be despised: ye must be proud of your foes.

Friedrich Nietzsche
For the woman, the man is a means: the end is always the child.

Friedrich Nietzsche
There exists in the world a single path along which no one can go except you: whither does it lead? Do not ask, go along it.

Friedrich Nietzsche