Friedrich Nietzsche Quotes

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Oh, those Greeks! They knew how to live. What is required for that is to stop courageously at the surface, the fold, the skin, to adore appearance, to believe in forms, tones, words, in the whole Olympus of appearance. Those Greeks were superficial—out of profundity.

Friedrich Nietzsche
What then is truth? A movable host of metaphors, metonymies, and anthropomorphisms: in short, a sum of human relations which have been poetically and rhetorically intensified, transferred, and embellished, and which, after long usage, seem to a people to be fixed, canonical, and binding.

Friedrich Nietzsche
Sometimes it is harder to accede to a thing than it is to see its truth.

Friedrich Nietzsche
The concept of greatness is changeable, in the realm of morality as well as in that of esthetics. And so philosophy starts by legislating greatness.

Friedrich Nietzsche
If each us had a different kind of sense perception — if we could only perceive things now as a bird, now as a worm, now as a plant, or if one of us saw a stimulus as red, another as blue, while a third even heard the same stimulus as a sound — then no one would speak of such a regularity of nature, rather, nature would be grasped only as a creation which is subjective in the highest degree. After all, what is a law of nature as such for us? We are not acquainted with it in itself, but only with its effects, which means in its relation to other laws of nature — which, in turn, are known to us only as sums of relations. Therefore all these relations always refer again to others and are thoroughly incomprehensible to us in their essence.

Friedrich Nietzsche
Pity is the most agreeable feeling among those who have little pride and no prospects of great conquests.

Friedrich Nietzsche
The task is not to overcome opponents in general but only those opponents against whom one has to summon all one's strength, one's skill and one's swordsmanship-in fact to master opponents who are one's equals.

Friedrich Nietzsche
Life as the product of life. However far man may extend himself with his knowledge, however objective he may appear to himself - ultimately he reaps nothing but his own biography.

Friedrich Nietzsche
And like a wind shall I one day blow amongst them and with my spirit take away their soul's breath: thus my future wills it.

Friedrich Nietzsche
The best author will be the one who is ashamed to become a writer.

Friedrich Nietzsche
To be incapable of taking one's enemies, one's accidents, even one's misdeeds seriously for very long—that is the sign of strong, full natures in whom there is an excess of the power to form, to mold, to recuperate and to forget[...] Such a man shakes off with a single shrug many vermin that eat deep into others; here alone genuine 'love of one's enemies' is possible—supposing it to be possible at all on earth. How much reverence has a noble man for his enemies!—and such reverence is a bridge to love.—For he desires his enemy for himself, as his mark of distinction; he can endure no other enemy than one in whom there is nothing to despise and very much to honor!

Friedrich Nietzsche
Success has always been the greatest liar - and the "work" itself is a success; the great statesman, the conqueror, the discoverer is disguised by his creations, often beyond recognition; the "work," whether of the artist or the philosopher, invents the man who has created it, who is supposed to have create it; "great men," as they are venerated, are subsequent pieces of wretched minor fiction.

Friedrich Nietzsche
The demand to be loved is the greatest of all arrogant presumptions.

Friedrich Nietzsche
A man as he ought to be: that sounds to us as insipid as "a tree as it ought to be."

Friedrich Nietzsche
What was silent in the father speaks in the son, and often I found in the son the unveiled secret of the father.

Friedrich Nietzsche
Where there is happiness, there is found pleasure in nonsense. The transformation of experience into its opposite, of the suitable into the unsuitable, the obligatory into the optional (but in such a manner that this process produces no injury and is only imagined in jest), is a pleasure;...

Friedrich Nietzsche
The value of many men and books rests solely on their faculty for compelling all to speak out the most hidden and intimate things.

Friedrich Nietzsche
The advent of the Christian God, as the maximum god attained so far, was therefore accompanied by the maximum feeling of guilty indebtedness on earth.

Friedrich Nietzsche
Objection, evasion, joyous distrust, and love of irony are signs of health; everything absolute belongs to pathology.

Friedrich Nietzsche
If there is something to pardon in everything, there is also something to condemn.

Friedrich Nietzsche
Madness is rare in individuals - but in groups, parties, nations, and ages it is the rule.

Friedrich Nietzsche
Freedom means that the manly instincts which delight in war and victory dominate over other instincts, for example, over those of "pleasure." The human being who has become free — and how much more the spirit who has become free — spits on the contemptible type of well-being dreamed of by shopkeepers, Christians, cows, females, Englishmen, and other democrats. The free man is a warrior. —

Friedrich Nietzsche
The beautiful exists just as little as the true. In every case it is a question of the conditions of preservation of a certain type of man: thus the herd-man will experience the value feeling of the true in different things than will the overman.

Friedrich Nietzsche
So long as you are praised think only that you are not yet on your own path but on that of another.

Friedrich Nietzsche
There are people who want to make men's lives more difficult for no other reason than the chance it provides them afterwards to offer their prescription for alleviating life; their Christianity, for instance.

Friedrich Nietzsche
When good friends praise a gifted person he often appears to be delighted with them out of politeness and goodwill, but in reality he feels indifferent.

Friedrich Nietzsche
Morality is the best of all devices for leading mankind by the nose.

Friedrich Nietzsche
Of all that is written, I love only what a person has written with his own blood.

Friedrich Nietzsche
The Christian faith from the beginning, is sacrifice the sacrifice of all freedom, all pride, all self-confidence of spirit, it is at the same time subjection, self-derision, and self-mutilation.

Friedrich Nietzsche
Not their love of humanity, but the impotence of their love, prevents the Christians of today - burning us.

Friedrich Nietzsche