Friedrich Nietzsche Quotes

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With regard to philosophical metaphysics, I always see increasing numbers who have attained to the negative goal, but as yet few who climb a few rungs backwards; one ought to look out, perhaps, over the last steps of the ladder, but not try to stand upon them.

Friedrich Nietzsche

Once upon a time, in some out of the way corner of that universe which is dispersed into numberless twinkling solar systems, there was a star upon which clever beasts invented knowing.

Friedrich Nietzsche

Assuming that he believes at all, the everyday Christian is a pitiful figure, a man who really cannot count up to three, and who besides, precisely because of his mental incompetence, would not deserve such a punishment as Christianity promises him.

Friedrich Nietzsche

That which an age considers evil is usually an unseasonable echo of what was formerly considered good - the atavism of an old ideal.

Friedrich Nietzsche

Has there ever been anything filthier on earth than the saints in the wilderness? Around them was not only the devil loose around them- but also the swine.

Friedrich Nietzsche

If God had wanted to become an object of love, he would first of all have had to forgo judging and justice : a judge, and even a gracious judge, is no object of love.

Friedrich Nietzsche

What separates two people most profoundly is a different sense and degree of cleanliness.

Friedrich Nietzsche

Before the effect one believes in other causes than after the effect.

Friedrich Nietzsche

I am driven out of fatherlands and motherlands. Thus I now love only my children's land, yet undiscovered, in the farthest sea; for this I bid my sails search and search.

Friedrich Nietzsche

To call a thing good not a day longer than it appears to us good, and above all not a day earlier - that is the only way to keep joy pure.

Friedrich Nietzsche

When one gives up the Christian faith, one pulls the right to Christian morality out from under one's feet. This morality is by no means self-evident. Christianity is a system, a whole view of things thought out together. By breaking one main concept out of it, the faith in God, one breaks the whole. It stands or falls with faith in God.

Friedrich Nietzsche

You call yourself free? I want to hear your ruling thought and not that you have escaped a yoke. Are you such a one as was permitted to escape a yoke? There are some who threw away their ultimate worth when they threw away their servitude. Free from what? What is that to Zarathustra! But your eyes should announce to me brightly: free for what?

Friedrich Nietzsche

You gave him an opportunity of showing greatness of character and he did not seize it. He will never forgive you for that.

Friedrich Nietzsche

Alas! There cometh the time when man will no longer give birth to any star. Alas! There cometh the time of the most despicable man, who can no longer despise himself.

Friedrich Nietzsche

He that writeth in blood and proverbs doth not want to be read, but learnt by heart.

Friedrich Nietzsche

The concepts "soul", "spirit" and last of all the concept "immortal soul" were invented in order to despise the body, in order to make it sick - "holy" - in order to cultivate an attitude of appalling disrespect for all things in life which deserve to be treated seriously i.

Friedrich Nietzsche

Men use a new lesson or experience later on as a ploughshare or perhaps also as a weapon; women at once make it into an ornament.

Friedrich Nietzsche

A refined nature is vexed by knowing that some one owes it thanks, a coarse nature by knowing that it owes thanks to some one.

Friedrich Nietzsche

Poets and writers who are in love with the superlative all want to do more than they can.

Friedrich Nietzsche

Every characteristic absence of spirituality, every piece of common vulgarity, is due to an inability to resist a stimulus - you have to react, you follow every impulse.

Friedrich Nietzsche

Everywhere resoundeth the voices of those who preach death; and the earth is full of those to whom death hath to be preached.

Friedrich Nietzsche

Away from God and gods did this will lure me: what would there be to create if gods existed?

Friedrich Nietzsche

Every great love brings with it the cruel idea of killing the object of its love so that it may be removed once and for all from the wicked game of change: for love dreads change even more than annihilation.

Friedrich Nietzsche

The disappointed one speaks. I searched for great human beings; I always found only the apes of their ideals.

Friedrich Nietzsche

At every step one has to wrestle for truth; one has to surrender for it almost everything to which the heart, to which our love, our trust in life, cling otherwise. That requires greatness of soul: the service of truth is the hardest service. What does it mean, after all, to have integrity in matters of the spirit? That one is severe against one's heart...that one makes of every Yes and No a matter of conscience.

Friedrich Nietzsche

I shall repeat a hundred times; we really ought to free ourselves from the seduction of words!

Friedrich Nietzsche

I know the hatred and envy of your hearts. Ye are not great enough not to know of hatred and envy. Then be great enough not to be ashamed of them!

Friedrich Nietzsche

I love him who loveth his virtue: for virtue is the will to down-going, and an arrow of longing.

Friedrich Nietzsche

Ah, there are so many things betwixt heaven and earth of which only the poets have dreamed!

Friedrich Nietzsche

What verse is for the poet, dialectical thinking is for the philosopher. He grasps for it in order to get hold of his own enchantment, in order to perpetuate it.

Friedrich Nietzsche