Friedrich Nietzsche - Man Quotes

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There exists above the "productive" man a yet higher species.

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
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
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
The homogenizing of European man … requires a justification: it lies in serving a higher sovereign species that stands upon the former which can raise itself to its task only by doing this. Not merely a master race whose sole task is to rule, but a race with its own sphere of life, with an excess of strength … strong enough to have no need of the tyranny of the virtue-imperative.

Friedrich Nietzsche
When Zarathustra was alone... he said to his heart: "Could it be possible! This old saint in the forest hath not yet heard of it, that God is dead!"Thus Spake Zarathustra [1883-1891], prologue, ch. 2 Man is a rope stretched between the animal and the Superman—a rope over an abyss.

Friedrich Nietzsche
There are few pains so grievous as to have seen, divined, or experienced how an exceptional man has missed his way and deteriorated

Friedrich Nietzsche
We ought to fear a man who hates himself, for we are at risk of becoming victims of his anger and revenge. Let us then try to lure him into self-love.

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
The earth has become small, and on it hops the last man, who makes everything small. His race can no more be exterminated than the flea can be. The last man lives the longest.

Friedrich Nietzsche
Man, full of emptiness and torn apart with homesickness for the desert has had to create from within himself an adventure, a torture-chamber, an unsafe and hazardous wilderness- this fool, this prisoner consumed with longing and despair, became the inventor of 'bad conscience'.

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

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

Friedrich Nietzsche
The rights which a man arrogates to himself are relative to the duties which he sets himself, and to the tasks which he feels capable of performing.

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
Where there have been powerful governments, societies, religions, public opinions, in short wherever there has been tyranny, there the solitary philosopher has been hated; for philosophy offers an asylum to a man into which no tyranny can force it way, the inward cave, the labyrinth of the heart.

Friedrich Nietzsche
In short, then, the religious cult is based upon the representations of sorcery between man and man, and the sorcerer is older than the priest.

Friedrich Nietzsche
There exists no more repulsive and desolate creature in the world than the man who has evaded his genius and who now looks furtively to left and right, behind him and all about him. … He is wholly exterior, without kernel, a tattered, painted bag of clothes.

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
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
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
Books that teach us to dance: There are writers who, by portraying the impossible as possible, and by speaking of morality and genius as if both were high-spirited freedom, as if man were rising up on tiptoe and simply had to dance out of inner pleasure.

Friedrich Nietzsche
Thus the man who is responsive to artistic stimuli reacts to the reality of dreams as does the philosopher to the reality of existence; he observes closely, and he enjoys his observation: for it is out of these images that he interprets life, out of these processes that he trains himself for life.

Friedrich Nietzsche
It is only because man believes himself to be free, not because he is free, that he experiences remorse and pricks of conscience.

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
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
What are man's truths ultimately?
Merely his irrefutable errors.

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

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

Friedrich Nietzsche