Friedrich Nietzsche Quotes

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You must be ready to burn yourself in your own flame; how could you rise anew if you have not first become ashes?

Friedrich Nietzsche
At a certain place in Beethoven's Ninth Symphony, for example, he might feel that he is floating above the earth in a starry dome, with the dream of immortality in his heart; all the stars seem to glimmer around him, and the earth seems to sink ever deeper downwards.

Friedrich Nietzsche
Man is more sensitive to the contempt of others than to self-contempt.

Friedrich Nietzsche
The most spiritual human beings, assuming they are the most courageous, also experience by far the most painful tragedies: but it is precisely for this reason that they honor life, because it brings against them its most formidable weapons.

Friedrich Nietzsche
No one dies of fatal truths nowadays: there are too many antidotes.

Friedrich Nietzsche
When one gives up Christian belief one thereby deprives oneself of the right to Christian morality. For the latter is absolutely not self-evident: one must make this point clear again and again, in spite of English shallowpates.

Friedrich Nietzsche
The most common sort of lie is the one uttered to one's self.

Friedrich Nietzsche
History teaches that a race of people is best preserved where the greater number hold one common spirit in consequence of the similarity of their accustomed and indisputable principles.

Friedrich Nietzsche
No one can construct for you the bridge upon which precisely you must cross the stream of life, no one but you yourself alone.

Friedrich Nietzsche
The trodden worm curls up. This testifies to its caution. It thus reduces its chances of being trodden upon again. In the language of morality: Humility.

Friedrich Nietzsche
I now myself live, in every detail, striving for wisdom, while I formerly merely worshipped and idolized the wise.

Friedrich Nietzsche
Man does not strive after happiness; only the Englishman does that.

Friedrich Nietzsche
All names of good and evil are images; they do not speak out, they only hint. He is a fool who seeks knowledge from them.

Friedrich Nietzsche
It is certainly not the least charm of a theory that it is refutable.

Friedrich Nietzsche
You know these things as thoughts, but your thoughts are not your experiences, they are an echo and after-effect of your experiences: as when your room trembles when a carriage goes past. I however am sitting in the carriage, and often I am the carriage itself."

Friedrich Nietzsche
Speaking is a beautiful folly; with that man dances over all things.

Friedrich Nietzsche
How lovely it is that there are words and sounds. Are not words and sounds rainbows and illusive bridges between things which are eternally apart?

Friedrich Nietzsche
Sleeping is no mean art: for its sake one must stay awake all day.

Friedrich Nietzsche
One must be a sea, to receive a polluted stream without becoming impure.

Friedrich Nietzsche
"This - is now my way - where is yours"? Thus did I answer those who asked me "the way". For the way - it does not exist!

Friedrich Nietzsche
Your soul will be dead even before your body: fear nothing further.

Friedrich Nietzsche
Companions the creator seeks, not corpses, not herds and believers. Fellow creators the creator seeks — those who write new values on new tablets. Companions the creator seeks, and fellow harvesters; for everything about him is ripe for the harvest.

Friedrich Nietzsche
What actually fills you with indignation as regards suffering is not suffering in itself but the pointlessness of suffering.

Friedrich Nietzsche
When one does away with oneself one does the most estimable thing possible: one thereby almost deserves to live.

Friedrich Nietzsche
Every deep thinker is more afraid of being understood than of being misunderstood.

Friedrich Nietzsche
Good writers have two things in common: they prefer to be understood rather than admired; and they do not write for knowing and over-acute readers.

Friedrich Nietzsche
What I understand by 'philosopher': a terrible explosive in the presence of which everything is in danger.

Friedrich Nietzsche
It is nobler to declare oneself wrong than to insist on being right —especially when one is right.

Friedrich Nietzsche
How much truth does a spirit endure, how much truth does it dare?

Friedrich Nietzsche
Amor fati: that is my innermost nature. And as regards my long sickness, do I not owe to it unutterably more than I owe to my health?

Friedrich Nietzsche