Friedrich Nietzsche Quotes

1,220 Sourced Quotes

Indeed, what forces us at all to suppose that there is an essential opposition of 'true' and 'false'? Is it not sufficient to assume degrees of apparentness and, as it were, lighter and darker shadows and shades of appearance- different 'values', to use the language of painters?

Friedrich Nietzsche
Where is the lightning to lick you with its tongue? Where is the madness with which you should be cleansed? Behold, I show you the Superman. He is this lightning, he is this madness.

Friedrich Nietzsche
Zarathustra was the first to consider the fight of good and evil the very wheel in the machinery of things: the transposition of morality into the metaphysical realm, as a force, cause, and end in itself, is his work. [...] Zarathustra created this most calamitous error, morality; consequently, he must also be the first to recognize it.

Friedrich Nietzsche
The reasons for which 'this' world has been characterized as 'apparent' are the very reasons which indicate its reality; any other kind of reality is absolutely indemonstrable.

Friedrich Nietzsche
One hears - one does not seek; one takes - one does not ask who gives.

Friedrich Nietzsche
The moral earth, too, is round! The moral earth, too, has its antipodes! The antipodes, too, have their right to exist! There is still another world to be discovered--and more than one! Set sail, you philosophers!

Friedrich Nietzsche
Many die too late, and some die too early. Yet strangers soundeth the precept: "Die at the right time!"

Friedrich Nietzsche
Winter, a bad guest, sitteth with me at home; blue are my hands with his friendly handshaking

Friedrich Nietzsche
The surest aid in combating the male's disease of self-contempt is to be loved by a clever woman.

Friedrich Nietzsche
There is a universal need to exercise some kind of power, or to create for one's self the appearance of some power, if only temporarily, in the form of intoxication.

Friedrich Nietzsche
Another Christian concept, no less crazy, has passed even more deeply into the tissue of modernity: the concept of the 'equality of souls before God.' This concept furnishes the prototype of all theories of equal rights...

Friedrich Nietzsche
The god on the cross is a curse on life, a signpost to seek redemption from life; Dionysus cut to pieces is a promise of life: it will be eternally reborn and return again from destruction

Friedrich Nietzsche
Every virtue has its privilege: for example, that of contributing its own little bundle of wood to the funeral pyre of one condemned.

Friedrich Nietzsche
A nation usually renews its youth on a political sick-bed, and there finds again the spirit which it had gradually lost in seeking and maintaining power.

Friedrich Nietzsche
So live your life of obedience and of war! What matter about long life! What warrior wisheth to be spared!

Friedrich Nietzsche
The so called unconscious inferences can be traced back to the all-preserving memory, which presents us with parallel experiences and hence already knows the consequences of an action. It is not anticipation of the effects; rather, it is the feeling: identical causes, identical effects...

Friedrich Nietzsche
The "religion of pity" to which people would like to convert us- oh, we know well enough the hysterical little men and women who need this religion at present as a veil and an adornment!

Friedrich Nietzsche
Christianity in particular should be dubbed a great treasure-chamber of ingenious consolations, such a store of refreshing, soothing, deadening drugs has it accumulated within itself.

Friedrich Nietzsche
Pity aims just as little at the pleasure of others as malice at the pain of others Per-Se.

Friedrich Nietzsche
Prejudice of the learned. - The learned judge correctly that people of all ages have believed they know what is good and evil, praise- and blameworthy. But it is a prejudice of the learned that we now know better than any other age.

Friedrich Nietzsche
Such men alone are my readers, my proper readers, my preordained readers. Of what account are the rest? The rest are simply... humanity. One must be superior to humanity in power, in loftiness of soul- in contempt.

Friedrich Nietzsche
From the Sun I learned this: when he goes down, overrich; he pours gold into the sea out of inexhaustible riches, so that even the poorest fisherman still rows with golden oars. For this I once saw and I did not tire of my tears as I watched it.

Friedrich Nietzsche
I live in my own place - have never copied anyone even half, and at any master who lacks the grace - to laugh at himself - I laugh.

Friedrich Nietzsche
The good-they cannot create; they are always the beginning of the end.

Friedrich Nietzsche
Here one must think profoundly to the very basis and resist all sentimental weakness: life itself is essentially appropriation, injury, conquest of the strange and weak, suppression, severity, obtrusion of peculiar forms, incorporation, and at the least, putting it mildest, exploitation - but why should one for ever use precisely these words on which for ages a disparaging purpose has been stamped?

Friedrich Nietzsche
Everything that has been is eternal: the sea will wash it up again.

Friedrich Nietzsche
'He who seeks may easily get lost himself. It is a crime to go apart and be alone.' Thus speaks the herd.

Friedrich Nietzsche
Modern science has as its object as little pain as possible, as long a life as possible - hence a sort of eternal blessedness, but of a very limited kind in comparison with the promises of religion.

Friedrich Nietzsche
A physician who treated me as a nervous case for a while said in the end "No! It is not a matter of your nerves; it is I who am nervous".

Friedrich Nietzsche
There was at all events one advantage in the choice of this day to my birth; my birthday throughout the whole of my childhood was a day of public rejoicing.

Friedrich Nietzsche