Friedrich Nietzsche Quotes

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

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
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
The familiarity of superiors embitters one, because it may not be returned.

Friedrich Nietzsche
The worst readers are those who behave like plundering troops: they take away a few things they can use, dirty and confound the remainder, and revile the whole.

Friedrich Nietzsche
Ye are ugly? Well then, my brethren, take the sublime about you, the mantle of the ugly!

Friedrich Nietzsche
Error has made man so deep, sensitive, and inventive that he has put forth such blossoms as religions and arts. Pure knowledge could not have been capable of it.

Friedrich Nietzsche
What is now decisive against Christianity is our taste, no longer our reasons.

Friedrich Nietzsche
Pity is the most pleasant feeling in those who have not much pride, and have no prospect of great conquests: the easy prey - and that is what every sufferer is - is for them an enchanting thing.

Friedrich Nietzsche
If a woman possesses manly virtues one should run away from her; and if she does not possess them she runs away from herself.

Friedrich Nietzsche
For our self respect depends upon our ability to make requital, for good or for evil.

Friedrich Nietzsche
Those who know that they are profound strive for clarity. Those who would like to seem profound to the crowd strive for obscurity. For the crowd believes that if it cannot see to the bottom of something it must be profound. It is so timid and dislikes going into the water.

Friedrich Nietzsche
He who has a "Why?" in life can tolerate almost any "How?"

Friedrich Nietzsche
To go on vegetating in cowardly dependence on physicians and machinations, after the meaning of life, the right to life, has been lost, that ought to prompt a profound contempt in society.

Friedrich Nietzsche
I assess the power of a will by how much resistance, pain, torture it endures and knows how to turn to its advantage.

Friedrich Nietzsche
The architect represents neither a Dionysian nor an Apollinian condition: here it is the mighty act of will, the will which moves mountains, the intoxication of the strong will, which demands artistic expression. The most powerful men have always inspired the architects; the architect has always been influenced by power.

Friedrich Nietzsche
Different types of dangerous lives-You have no idea what you are living through; you rush through life as if you were drunk and now and then fall down some staircase. But thanks to your drunkenness you never break a limb; your muscles are too relaxed and your brain too benighted for you to find the stones of these stairs as hard as we do.

Friedrich Nietzsche
Anti-theses.- The most senile thing ever thought about man is contained in the celebrated saying 'the ego is always hateful'; the most childish is the even more celebrated 'love thy neighbor as thyself'. - In the former, knowledge of human nature has ceased, in the latter it has not yet even begun.

Friedrich Nietzsche
One is healthy when one can laugh at the earnestness and zeal with which one has been hypnotized by any single detail of one's life.

Friedrich Nietzsche
I am afraid that old women are more skeptical in their most secret heart of hearts than any man: they believe in the superficiality of existence as in its essence, and all virtue and profundity is to them merely a veil over this "truth," a most welcome veil over a pudendum--and so a matter of decency and modesty, and nothing else.

Friedrich Nietzsche
The value of a thing sometimes lies not in what one attains with it, but in what one pays for it - what it costs us

Friedrich Nietzsche
In Bach there is still too much crude Christianity, crude Germanism, crude scholasticism; he stands on the threshold of European (modern) music, but he looks back from there to the Middle Ages.

Friedrich Nietzsche
Living in a constant chase after gain compels people to expend their spirit to the point of exhaustion.

Friedrich Nietzsche
The sensible author writes for no other posterity than his own--that is, for his age--so as to be able even then to take pleasurein himself.

Friedrich Nietzsche
To demand of strength that it should not express itself as strength, that it should not be a desire to overcome, a desire to throw down, a desire to become master, a thirst for enemies and resistances and triumphs, is just as absurd as to demand of weakness that it should express itself as strength.

Friedrich Nietzsche
Why couldn't the world that concerns us- be a fiction? And if somebody asked, 'but to be a fiction there surely belongs an author?'- couldn't one answer simply: 'Why? Doesn't this "belongs" perhaps belong to the fiction, too?'

Friedrich Nietzsche
The living is merely a type of what is dead, and a very rare type.

Friedrich Nietzsche
A good aphorism is too hard for the tooth of time, and is not worn away by all the centuries, although it serves as food for every epoch.

Friedrich Nietzsche
People to whom their daily life appears too empty and monotonous easily grow religious; this is comprehensible and excusable, only they have no right to demand religious sentiments from those whose daily life is not empty and monotonous.

Friedrich Nietzsche