Friedrich Nietzsche Quotes

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If that glad message of your Bible were written in your faces, you would not need to demand belief in the authority of that book in such stiff-necked fashion.

Friedrich Nietzsche
Christianity is a metaphysics of the hangman...

Friedrich Nietzsche
As a genius of construction man raises himself far above the bee in the following way: whereas the bee builds with wax that he gathers from nature, man builds with the far more delicate conceptual material which he first has to manufacture from himself.

Friedrich Nietzsche
For this remains as I have already pointed out the essential difference between the two religions of decadence : Buddhism promises nothing, but actually fulfils; Christianity promises everything, but fulfils nothing.

Friedrich Nietzsche
Whoever fights monsters should see to it that in the process he does not become a monster. And when you look long into an abyss, the abyss also looks into you.

Friedrich Nietzsche
I am a disciple of the philosopher Dionysus, I would rather be a satyr than a saint.

Friedrich Nietzsche
One must shed the bad taste of wanting to agree with many. "Good" is no longer good when one's neighbor mouths it. And how should there be a "common good"! The term contradicts itself: whatever can be common always has little value. In the end it must be as it is and always has been: great things remain for the great, abysses for the profound, nuances and shudders for the refined, and, in brief, all that is rare for the rare.

Friedrich Nietzsche
What is good? All that heightens the feeling of power in man, the will to power, power itself. What is bad? All that is born of weakness. What is happiness? The feeling that power is growing, that resistance is overcome.

Friedrich Nietzsche
Truth as Circe. - Error has transformed animals into men; is truth perhaps capable of changing man back into an animal?

Friedrich Nietzsche
The great epochs of our life come when we gain the courage to rechristen our evil as what is best in us.

Friedrich Nietzsche
You should seek your enemy, you should wage your war - a war for your opinions. And when your opinion is defeatedy our honesty should still cry triumph over that!

Friedrich Nietzsche
The higher man is distinguished from the lower by his fearlessness and his readiness to challenge misfortune.

Friedrich Nietzsche
If you believed more in life you would fling yourself less to the moment.

Friedrich Nietzsche
What is new, however, is always evil, being that which wants to conquer and overthrow the old boundary markers and the old pieties; and only what is old is good. The good men are in all ages those who dig the old thoughts, digging deep and getting them to bear fruit - the farmers of the spirit. But eventually all land is depleted, and the ploughshare of evil must come again and again.

Friedrich Nietzsche
What if God were not exactly truth, and if this could be proved? And if he were instead the vanity, the desire for power, the ambitions, the fear, and the enraptured and terrified folly of mankind?

Friedrich Nietzsche
Bad cooks - and the utter lack of reason in the kitchen - have delayed human development longest and impaired it most.

Friedrich Nietzsche
It is possible that the production of genius is reserved to a limited period of mankind's history.

Friedrich Nietzsche
There still shines the most important nuance by virtue of which the noble felt themselves to be men of a higher rank. They designate themselves simply by their superiority in power (as "the powerful," "the masters," "the commanders") or by the most clearly visible signs of this superiority, for example, as "the rich," "the possessors" (this is the meaning of 'Arya,' and of corresponding words in Iranian and Slavic).

Friedrich Nietzsche
The modern scientific counterpart to belief in God is the belief in the universe as an organism: this disgusts me. This is to make what is quite rare and extremely derivative, the organic, which we perceive only on the surface of the earth, into something essential, universal, and eternal! This is still an anthropomorphizing of nature!

Friedrich Nietzsche
Sit as little as possible. Give no credence to any thought that
was not born outdoors while moving about freely.

Friedrich Nietzsche
When one has a great deal to put into it, a day has a hundred pockets.

Friedrich Nietzsche
It is not in our hands to prevent our birth; but we can correct this mistake - for in some cases it is a mistake.

Friedrich Nietzsche
There is only nobility of birth, only nobility of blood. When one speaks of "aristocrats of the spirit," reasons are usually not lacking for concealing something. As is well known, it is a favorite term among ambitious Jews. For spirit alone does not make noble. Rather, there must be something to ennoble the spirit. What then is required? Blood.

Friedrich Nietzsche
Christianity remains to this day the greatest misfortune of humanity.

Friedrich Nietzsche
History belongs above all to the man...who needs models, teachers, comforters and cannot find them among his contemporaries.

Friedrich Nietzsche
There is nothing more necessary than truth, and in comparison with it everything else has only secondary value. This absolute will to truth: what is it? Is it the will to not allow ourselves to be deceived? Is it the will not to deceive? One does not want to be deceived, under the supposition that it is injurious, dangerous, or fatal to be deceived.

Friedrich Nietzsche
Talking much about oneself can also be a means to conceal oneself.

Friedrich Nietzsche
When virtue has slept, she will get up more refreshed.

Friedrich Nietzsche
A strong and well-constituted man digests his experiences (deeds and misdeeds all included) just as he digests his meats, even when he has some tough morsels to swallow.

Friedrich Nietzsche
That lies should be necessary to life is part and parcel of the terrible and questionable character of existence.

Friedrich Nietzsche