Friedrich Nietzsche - Man Quotes

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In the consciousness of the truth he has perceived, man now sees everywhere only the awfulness or the absurdity of existence,... and loathing seizes him.

Friedrich Nietzsche
What destroys a man more quickly than to work, think and feel without inner necessity, without any deep personal desire, without pleasure - as a mere automaton of duty?

Friedrich Nietzsche
Life as the product of life. However far man may extend himself with his knowledge, however objective he may appear to himself - ultimately he reaps nothing but his own biography.

Friedrich Nietzsche
No one can draw more out of things, books included, than he already knows. A man has no ears for that to which experience has given him no access.

Friedrich Nietzsche
Do not forget, man, consumed by lust:
you—are the stone, the desert, are death...

Friedrich Nietzsche
All instincts that do not discharge themselves outwardly turn inward — this is what I call the internalization of man: thus it was that man first developed what was later called his "soul."

Friedrich Nietzsche
The perfect woman is a higher type of humanity than the perfect man, and also something much rarer. The natural history of animals furnishes grounds in support of this theory.

Friedrich Nietzsche
Without the errors involved in the assumptions of ethics, man would have remained an animal. Thus has he taken himself as something higher and imposed rigid laws upon himself.

Friedrich Nietzsche
I enquire now as to the genesis of a philologist and assert the following: 1. A young man cannot possibly know what Greeks and Romans are. 2. He does not know whether he is suited for finding out about them.

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
No one is such a liar as the indignant man.

Friedrich Nietzsche
History belongs above all to the man...who needs models, teachers, comforters and cannot find them among his contemporaries.

Friedrich Nietzsche
All things considered, I could never have survived my youth without Wagnerian music. For I seemed condemned to the society of Germans. If a man wishes to rid himself of a feeling of unbearable oppression, he may have to take to hashish. Well, I had to take to Wagner...

Friedrich Nietzsche
A man who has depths in his shame meets his destiny and his delicate decisions upon paths which few ever reach...

Friedrich Nietzsche
What is good? All that heightens the feeling of power in man, the will to power, power itself. What is bad? All that is born of weakness. What is happiness? The feeling that power is growing, that resistance is overcome.

Friedrich Nietzsche
The man who is guided by concepts and abstractions only succeeds by such means in warding off misfortune, without ever gaining any happiness for himself from these abstractions. And while he aims for the greatest possible freedom from pain, the intuitive man, standing in the midst of a culture, already reaps from his intuition a harvest of continually inflowing illumination, cheer, and redemption — in addition to obtaining a defense against misfortune. To be sure, he suffers more intensely, when he suffers; he even suffers more frequently, since he does not understand how to learn from experience and keeps falling over and over again into the same ditch.

Friedrich Nietzsche
The infuriating thing about an individual way of living. People are always angry at anyone who chooses very individual standards for his life; because of the extraordinary treatment which that man grants to himself, they feel degraded, like ordinary beings.

Friedrich Nietzsche
The higher man is distinguished from the lower by his fearlessness and his readiness to challenge misfortune.

Friedrich Nietzsche
A man unconsciously imagines that where he is strong, where he feels most thoroughly alive, the element of his freedom must lie.

Friedrich Nietzsche
I teach you the Overman. Man is something which shall be surpassed.

Friedrich Nietzsche
The rights a man arrogates to himself are related to the duties he imposes on himself, to the tasks to which he feels equal. The great majority of men have no right to existence, but are a misfortune to higher men.

Friedrich Nietzsche
In every ascetic morality man worships a part of himself as God and for that he needs to diabolize the other part.

Friedrich Nietzsche
Perhaps man will rise ever higher as soon as he ceases to flow out into a god.

Friedrich Nietzsche
Man is not equally moral at all hours, this is well known. If his morality is judged to be the capability for great self-sacrificing resolutions and self-denial (which, when continuous and grown habitual, are called holiness)

Friedrich Nietzsche
Truth as Circe. - Error has transformed animals into men; is truth perhaps capable of changing man back into an animal?

Friedrich Nietzsche
For such is man: a Theological Dogma might be refuted to him a thousand times - provided however, that he had need of it, he would again and again accept it as true. Belief is always most desired, most pressingly needed where there is a lack of will. Fanaticism is the sole "volitional strength" to which the weak and irresolute can be excited, as a sort of hypnotising of the entire sensory-intellectual system.

Friedrich Nietzsche
Once you were apes, yet even now man is more of an ape than any of the apes.

Friedrich Nietzsche
It may be that until now there has been no more potent means for beautifying man himself than piety: it can turn man into so much art, surface, play of colors, graciousness that his sight no longer makes one suffer.—

Friedrich Nietzsche
The earth... hath a skin; and this skin hath diseases. One of these diseases, for example, is called "man".

Friedrich Nietzsche
Once spirit was God, then it became man, and now it is even becoming mob.

Friedrich Nietzsche