Friedrich Nietzsche Quotes

1,220 Sourced Quotes

Those people have no real interest in a science who only begin to get excited about it when they themselves have made discoveries in it.

Friedrich Nietzsche
The criminal type is the type of the strong human being under unfavorable circumstances: a strong human being made sick.

Friedrich Nietzsche
And he who must be a creator in good and evil: verily, he must be an annihilator first and demolish values.

Friedrich Nietzsche
Woman learns to hate to the extent to which her charms decrease.

Friedrich Nietzsche
We forget our guilt when we have confessed it to another, but the other does not usually forget it.

Friedrich Nietzsche
Whatever may be your desire to accomplish great deeds, the deep silence of pregnancy never comes to you! The event of the day sweeps you along like straws before the wind whilst ye lie under the illusion that ye are chasing the event,-poor fellows! If a man wishes to act the hero on the stage he must not think of forming part of the chorus; he should not even know how the chorus is made up.

Friedrich Nietzsche
Verily, I do not like them, the merciful who feel blessed in their pity: they are lacking too much in shame. If I must pity, at least I do not want it known; and if I do pity, it is preferably from a distance.

Friedrich Nietzsche
Dreadful experiences raise the question whether he who experiences them, is not something dreadful also.

Friedrich Nietzsche
Books for all the world are always foul-smelling books: the smell of small people clings to them.

Friedrich Nietzsche
The best belongs to me and mine; and if we are not given it, we take it: the best food, the purest sky, the most robust thoughts, the fairest women!

Friedrich Nietzsche
Danger alone acquaints us with our own resources, our virtues, our armor and weapons, our spirit, and forces us to be strong.

Friedrich Nietzsche
And you tell me, friends, that there is no disputing taste and tasting? But all life is a dispute over taste and tasting!

Friedrich Nietzsche
An attack on the roots of passion means an attack on the roots of life.

Friedrich Nietzsche
The genius-in work and in deed-is necessarily a squanderer: the fact that he spends himself constitutes his greatness.

Friedrich Nietzsche
Pharisaism is not a degeneration in a good man: a large portion of it is rather the condition of all being-good.

Friedrich Nietzsche
If you gaze long into an abyss, the abyss will gaze back into you.

Friedrich Nietzsche
The thirst for equality can express itself either as a desire to draw everyone down to one's level, or to raise oneself and everyone else up.

Friedrich Nietzsche
I am affected, not because you have deceived me, but because I can no longer believe in you.

Friedrich Nietzsche
Let thy virtue be too high for the familiarity of names, and if thou must speak of it, be not ashamed to stammer about it.

Friedrich Nietzsche
Art approaches as a saving sorceress, expert at healing. She alone knows how to turn these nauseous thoughts about the horror or absurdity of existence into notions with which one can live.

Friedrich Nietzsche
The man who sees little always sees less than there is to see; the man who hears badly always hears something more than there is to hear.

Friedrich Nietzsche
When I seek another word for 'music', I never find any other word than 'Venice'

Friedrich Nietzsche
If all alms were given only from pity, all beggars would have starved long ago.

Friedrich Nietzsche
To explore the whole sphere of the modern soul, to have sat in every nook- my ambition, my torture, and my happiness

Friedrich Nietzsche
But in the end one also has to understand that the needs that religion has satisfied and philosophy is now supposed to satisfy are not immutable; they can be weakened and exterminated. Consider, for example, that Christian distress of mind that comes from sighing over ones inner depravity and care for ones salvation - all concepts originating in nothing but errors of reason and deserving, not satisfaction, but obliteration.

Friedrich Nietzsche
Against the censurers of brevity. - Something said briefly can be the fruit of much long thought: but the reader who is a novice in this field, and has as yet reflected on it not at all, sees in everything said briefly something embryonic, not without censuring the author for having served him up such immature and unripened fare.

Friedrich Nietzsche
Crude men who feel themselves insulted tend to assess the degree of insult as high as possible, and talk about the offense in greatly exaggerated language, only so they can revel to their heart's content in the aroused feelings of hatred and revenge.

Friedrich Nietzsche
To have to fight the instincts - that is the definition of decadence: as long as life is ascending, happiness equals instinct.

Friedrich Nietzsche
In the whole of the New Testament there is not one joke, that fact alone would invalidate any book.

Friedrich Nietzsche
One does well to put on gloves when reading the New Testament. The proximity of so much uncleanliness almost forces one to do this.

Friedrich Nietzsche