Friedrich Nietzsche Quotes

1,220 Sourced Quotes

To do great things is difficult; but to command great things is more difficult.

Friedrich Nietzsche
It is not the struggle of opinions that has made history so violent, but rather the struggle of belief in opinions, that is, the struggle of convictions.

Friedrich Nietzsche
It is not enough to prove something, one has also to seduce or elevate people to it. That is why the man of knowledge should learn how to speak his wisdom: and often in such a way that it sounds like folly!

Friedrich Nietzsche
We operate with nothing but things which do not exist, with lines, planes, bodies, atoms, divisible time, divisible space - how should explanation even be possible when we first make everything into an image, into our own image!

Friedrich Nietzsche
A lack of the historical sense is the hereditary fault of all philosophers.

Friedrich Nietzsche
Curiosity creeps into the houses of the unfortunate and the needy under the name of duty or of pity.

Friedrich Nietzsche
Truth will have no gods before it.- The belief in truth begins with the doubt of all truths in which one has previously believed.

Friedrich Nietzsche
From the sun did I learn this, when it goeth down, the exuberant one: gold doth it then pour into the sea, out of inexhaustible riches, -So that the poorest fisherman roweth even with golden oars! For this did I once see, and did not tire of weeping in beholding it. - Like the sun will also Zarathustra go down: now sitteth he here and waiteth, old broken tables around him, and also new tables half-written.

Friedrich Nietzsche
All beings so far have created something beyond themselves; and do you want to be the ebb of this great flood and even go back to the beasts rather than overcome man? What is the ape to man? A laughingstock or a painful embarrassment. And man shall be just that for the overman: a laughingstock or a painful embarrassment…

Friedrich Nietzsche
The hypocrite who always plays one and the same part ceases at last to be a hypocrite.

Friedrich Nietzsche
Man is the cruelest animal. At tragedies, bullfights, and crucifixions he has so far felt best on earth; and when he invented hell for himself, behold, that was his very heaven.

Friedrich Nietzsche
The rising and falling of the scales of pride and humility sustain the brooding mind as well as the alternations of desire and peace of the soul.

Friedrich Nietzsche
Philological considerations have slowly but surely taken the place of profound explorations of eternal problems. The question becomes: What did this or that philosopher think or not think? And is this or that text rightly ascribed to him or not? And even: Is this variant of a classical text preferable to that other? Students in university seminars today are encouraged to occupy themselves with such emasculated inquiries. As a result, of course, philosophy itself is banished from the university altogether.

Friedrich Nietzsche
A very popular error: having the courage of one's convictions; rather it is a matter of having the courage for an attack on one's convictions.

Friedrich Nietzsche
Stupid as a man, say the women: cowardly as a woman, say the men. Stupidity in a woman is unwomanly.

Friedrich Nietzsche
Profundity of thought belongs to youth, clarity of thought to old age.

Friedrich Nietzsche
Love is a state in which a man sees things most decidedly as they are not.

Friedrich Nietzsche
The discipline of suffering, of great suffering - do you not know that it is this discipline alone that has produced all the elevations of humanity so far?

Friedrich Nietzsche
Everything about woman is a riddle, and everything about woman has a single solution: that is, pregnancy

Friedrich Nietzsche
Compulsion precedes morality, indeed morality itself is compulsion for a time, to which one submits for the avoidance of pain.

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

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

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
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
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
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
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