Friedrich Nietzsche - The Gay Science (1882)

76 Sourced Quotes

View all Friedrich Nietzsche Quotes
The reasons and purposes for habits are always lies that are added only after some people begin to attack these habits and to ask for reasons and purposes. At this point the conservatives of all ages are thoroughly dishonest: they add lies.

Friedrich Nietzsche
Different types of dangerous lives-You have no idea what you are living through; you rush through life as if you were drunk and now and then fall down some staircase. But thanks to your drunkenness you never break a limb; your muscles are too relaxed and your brain too benighted for you to find the stones of these stairs as hard as we do.

Friedrich Nietzsche
What we do is never understood, but always merely praised or blamed.

Friedrich Nietzsche
Take a chance and try my fare! It will grow on you, I swear; Soon it will taste good to you!

Friedrich Nietzsche
No, life has not disappointed me. On the contrary, I find it truer, more desirable and mysterious every year -- ever since the day when the great liberator came to me: the idea that life could be an experiment of the seeker for knowledge -- and not a duty, not a calamity, not trickery.

Friedrich Nietzsche
The poison by which the weaker nature is destroyed is strengthening to the strong individual and he does not call it poison.

Friedrich Nietzsche
We must be physicists in order... to be creative since so far codes of values and ideals have been constructed in ignorance of physics or even in contradiction to physics.

Friedrich Nietzsche
Those who are slow to know suppose that slowness is the essence of knowledge.

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
Mathematics is merely the means to a general and ultimate knowledge of man.

Friedrich Nietzsche
It was modesty that invented the word "philosopher" in Greece and left the magnificent overweening presumption in calling oneselfwise to the actors of the spirit--the modesty of such monsters of pride and sovereignty as Pythagoras, as Plato.

Friedrich Nietzsche
Egoism is the law of perspective applied to feelings: what is closest appears large and weighty, and as one moves farther away size and weight decrease.

Friedrich Nietzsche
What is originality? To see something that has no name as yet and hence cannot be mentioned although it stares us all in the face. The way men usually are, it takes a name to make something visible for them.

Friedrich Nietzsche
What does your conscience say? — "You shall become the person you are."

Friedrich Nietzsche
I would not know what the spirit of a philosopher might wish more to be than a good dancer.

Friedrich Nietzsche
What is now decisive against Christianity is our taste, no longer our reasons.

Friedrich Nietzsche
There is something laughable about the sight of authors who enjoy the rustling folds of long and involved sentences: they are trying to cover up their feet.

Friedrich Nietzsche
For one thing is needful: that a human being should attain satisfaction with himself, whether it be by means of this or that poetry or art; only then is a human being at all tolerable to behold. Whoever is dissatisfied with himself is constantly ready for revenge, and we others will be his victims, if only by having to endure his ugly sight.

Friedrich Nietzsche
And as long as you are in any way ashamed before yourself, you do not yet belong with us.

Friedrich Nietzsche
What makes us heroic? Confronting simultaneously our supreme suffering and our supreme hope.

Friedrich Nietzsche
Worldly Wisdom Do not stay in the field! Nor climb out of sight. The best view of the world Is from a medium height.

Friedrich Nietzsche
To find everything profound — that is an inconvenient trait. It makes one strain one's eyes all the time, and in the end one finds more than one might have wished.

Friedrich Nietzsche
Mystical explanations are considered deep; the truth is, they are not even shallow.

Friedrich Nietzsche
It is true that there are men who, on the approach of severe pain, hear the very opposite call of command, and never appear more proud, more martial, or more happy than when the storm is brewing; indeed, pain itself provides them with their supreme moments! These are the heroic men, the great pain-bringers of mankind: those few and rare ones who need just the same apology as pain generally — and verily, it should not be denied them. They are forces of the greatest importance for preserving and advancing the species, be it only because they are opposed to smug ease, and do not conceal their disgust at this kind of happiness.

Friedrich Nietzsche
People who live in an age of corruption are witty and slanderous; they know that there are other kinds of murder than by dagger or assault; they also know that whatever is well said is believed...

Friedrich Nietzsche
We have no dreams at all or interesting ones. We should learn to be awake the same way — not at all or in an interesting manner.

Friedrich Nietzsche
One hears only those questions for which one is able to find answers.

Friedrich Nietzsche
But let us not forget this either: it is enough to create new names and estimations and probabilities in order to create in the long run new "things."

Friedrich Nietzsche
What makes one heroic? - Going out to meet at the same time one's highest suffering and one's highest hope.

Friedrich Nietzsche
Deeds need time, even after they are done, in order to be seen or heard.

Friedrich Nietzsche