Friedrich Nietzsche - On the Genealogy of Morality (1887)

21 Sourced Quotes

View all Friedrich Nietzsche Quotes
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
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
We are unknown to ourselves, we men of knowledge-and with good reason. We have never sought ourselves- how could it happen that we should ever find ourselves?

Friedrich Nietzsche
The broad effects which can be obtained by punishment in man and beast are the increase of fear, the sharpening of the sense of cunning, the mastery of the desires; so it is that punishment tames man, but does not make him "better."

Friedrich Nietzsche
O, what nowadays does science not conceal! How much, at least, it is meant to conceal!

Friedrich Nietzsche
Every one who has ever built anywhere a "new heaven" first found the power thereto in his own hell....

Friedrich Nietzsche
As is well known, the priests are the most evil enemies — but why? Because they are the most impotent. It is because of their impotence that in them hatred grows to monstrous and uncanny proportions, to the most spiritual and poisonous kind of hatred. The truly great haters in the world history have always been priests; likewise the most ingenious haters: other kinds of spirit hardly come into consideration when compared with the spirit of priestly vengefulness.

Friedrich Nietzsche
That every will must consider every other will its equal — would be a principle hostile to life, an agent of the dissolution and destruction of man, an attempt to assassinate the future of man, a sign of weariness, a secret path to nothingness.

Friedrich Nietzsche
To see others suffer does one good, to make others suffer even more: this is a hard saying but an ancient, mighty, human, all-too-human principle which even the apes might subscribe; for it has been said that in devising bizarre cruelties they anticipate man and are, as it were his "prelude."

Friedrich Nietzsche
The sick are the greatest danger for the healthy; it is not from the strongest that harm comes to the strong, but from the weakest.

Friedrich Nietzsche
The advent of the Christian God, as the maximum god attained so far, was therefore accompanied by the maximum feeling of guilty indebtedness on earth.

Friedrich Nietzsche
Ascetic ideals reveal so many bridges to independence that a philosopher is bound to rejoice and clap his hands when he hears the story of all those resolute men who one day said No to all servitude and went into some desert.

Friedrich Nietzsche
A strong and well-constituted man digests his experiences (deeds and misdeeds all included) just as he digests his meats, even when he has some tough morsels to swallow.

Friedrich Nietzsche
There still shines the most important nuance by virtue of which the noble felt themselves to be men of a higher rank. They designate themselves simply by their superiority in power (as "the powerful," "the masters," "the commanders") or by the most clearly visible signs of this superiority, for example, as "the rich," "the possessors" (this is the meaning of 'Arya,' and of corresponding words in Iranian and Slavic).

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
It is possible to imagine a society flushed with such a sense of power that it could afford to let its offenders go unpunished.

Friedrich Nietzsche
If a temple is to be erected, a temple must be destroyed.

Friedrich Nietzsche
Without cruelty there is no festival: thus the longest and most ancient part of human history teaches — and in punishment there is so much that is festive!

Friedrich Nietzsche
While every noble morality develops from a triumphant affirmation of itself, slave morality from the outset says No to what is "outside," what is "different," what is "not itself"; and this No is its creative deed.

Friedrich Nietzsche
That which Heraclitus avoided, however, is still the same at that which we shun today: the noise and democratic chatter of the Ephesians, their politics, their latest news of the Empire, … their market business of today —for we philosophers need to be spared one thing above all: everything to do with today. We reverence what is still, cold, noble, distant, past, and in general everything in the face of which the soul does not have to defend itself and wrap itself up.

Friedrich Nietzsche
Whoever is completely and wholly an artist is to all eternity separated from the "real," the actual; on the other hand, one can understand how he may sometimes weary to the point of desperation of the eternal "unreality" and falsity of his innermost existence- and that then he may well attempt what ia most forbidden him, to lay hold of actuality, for once actually to be.

Friedrich Nietzsche