Friedrich Nietzsche - Man Quotes

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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
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
There are ages in which the rational man and the intuitive man stand side by side, the one in fear of intuition, the other with scorn for abstraction. The latter is just as irrational as the former is inartistic. They both desire to rule over life: the former, by knowing how to meet his principle needs by means of foresight, prudence, and regularity; the latter, by disregarding these needs and, as an "overjoyed hero," counting as real only that life which has been disguised as illusion and beauty.

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

Friedrich Nietzsche
Shadow in the flame. The flame is not so bright to itself as to those on whom it shines: so too the wise man.

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
Every fact and every work exercises a fresh persuasion over every age and every new species of man. History always enunciates new truths.

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

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

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
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
As refined fare serves a hungry man as well as and no better than coarser food, the more pretentious artist will not dream of inviting the hungry man to his meal.

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
One thing a man must have: either a naturally light disposition or a disposition lightened by art and knowledge.

Friedrich Nietzsche
Whereas the man of action binds his life to reason and its concepts so that he will not be swept away and lost, the scientific investigator builds his hut right next to the tower of science so that he will be able to work on it and to find shelter for himself beneath those bulwarks which presently exist. And he requires shelter, for there are frightful powers which continuously break in upon him, powers which oppose scientific "truth" with completely different kinds of "truths" which bear on their shields the most varied sorts of emblems.

Friedrich Nietzsche
What is great in man is that he is a bridge and not a goal: what there is to love in man is that he is a going-over and a going-under.

Friedrich Nietzsche
To escape boredom, man works either beyond what his usual needs require, or else he invents play, that is, work that is designed to quiet no need other than that for working in general.

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

Friedrich Nietzsche
A man far oftener appears to have a decided character from persistently following his temperament than from persistently following his principles.

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
Comparing man and woman on the whole, one may say: woman would not possess a genius for ornamentation if she did not also possessan instinct for the secondary role.

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
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
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
The masters have been done away with; the morality of the common man has triumphed.

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