Friedrich Nietzsche - Morality Quotes

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In morality, man treats himself not as individuum but as dividuum.

Friedrich Nietzsche
The refinement of morality increases together with the refinement of fear. Today the fear of disagreeable feelings in other people is almost the strongest of our own disagreeable feelings.

Friedrich Nietzsche
When one gives up the Christian faith, one pulls the right to Christian morality out from under one's feet. This morality is by no means self-evident. Christianity is a system, a whole view of things thought out together. By breaking one main concept out of it, the faith in God, one breaks the whole. It stands or falls with faith in God.

Friedrich Nietzsche
Zarathustra was the first to consider the fight of good and evil the very wheel in the machinery of things: the transposition of morality into the metaphysical realm, as a force, cause, and end in itself, is his work. [...] Zarathustra created this most calamitous error, morality; consequently, he must also be the first to recognize it.

Friedrich Nietzsche
Their usual mistaken premise is that they affirm some consensus among people, at least among tame peoples, concerning certain moral principles, and then conclude that these principles must be unconditionally binding also for you and me-or conversely, they see that among different peoples moral valuations are necessarily different and infer from this that no morality is binding-both of which are equally childish.

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
When one gives up Christian belief one thereby deprives oneself of the right to Christian morality. For the latter is absolutely not self-evident: one must make this point clear again and again, in spite of English shallowpates.

Friedrich Nietzsche
The trodden worm curls up. This testifies to its caution. It thus reduces its chances of being trodden upon again. In the language of morality: Humility.

Friedrich Nietzsche
In order for once to get a glimpse of our European morality from a distance, in order to compare it with other earlier or future moralities, one must do as the traveller who wants to know the height of the towers of a city: he leaves the city.

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

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

Friedrich Nietzsche
Morality is the best of all devices for leading mankind by the nose.

Friedrich Nietzsche
The concept of greatness is changeable, in the realm of morality as well as in that of esthetics. And so philosophy starts by legislating greatness.

Friedrich Nietzsche
An important species of pleasure, and therewith the source of morality, arises out of habit.

Friedrich Nietzsche
Suspicious.- To admit a belief merely because it is a custom - but that means to be dishonest, cowardly, lazy! - And so could dishonesty, cowardice and laziness be the preconditions for morality?

Friedrich Nietzsche
In Christianity neither morality nor religion come into contact with reality at any point.

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
Moral sensibilities are nowadays at such cross-purposes that to one man a morality is proved by its utility, while to another its utility refutes it.

Friedrich Nietzsche
The preponderance of pain over pleasure is the cause of our fictitious morality and religion.

Friedrich Nietzsche
Merchant and pirate were for a long period one and the same person. Even today mercantile morality is really nothing but a refinement of piratical morality.

Friedrich Nietzsche
It is difficult to preach, this morality of mediocrity! It may never admit what it is and what it wants! It must speak about restraint and worth and duty and love of one's neighbor.

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
To be ashamed of one's immorality: that is a step on the staircase at whose end one is also ashamed of one's morality.

Friedrich Nietzsche
The definition of morality: Morality is the idiosyncrasy of decadents having the hidden desire to revenge themselves upon life - and being successful.

Friedrich Nietzsche
Those moralists, on the other hand, who, following in the footsteps of Socrates, offer the individual a morality of self-control and temperance as a means to his own advantage, as his personal key to happiness, are the exceptions.

Friedrich Nietzsche