Friedrich Nietzsche Quotes

In music the passions enjoy themselves.

The overman...Who has organized the chaos of his passions, given style to his character, and become creative. Aware of life's terrors, he affirms life without resentment.

In large states public education will always be mediocre, for the same reason that in large kitchens the cooking is usually bad.

For art to exist, for any sort of aesthetic activity to exist, a certain physiological precondition is indispensable: intoxication.

Is Wagner a human being at all? Is he not rather a disease? He contaminates everything he touches - he has made music sick.

We talk so abstractly about poetry because all of us are usually bad poets.

Exhaustion is the shortest way to equality and fraternity.

The elimination of the will altogether and the switching off of the emotions all and sundry, is tantamount to the elimination of reason: intellectual castration.

Even the pluckiest among us has but seldom the courage of what he really knows.

Man, a hybrid of plant and ghost.

If virtue goes to sleep, it will be more vigorous when it awakes.

Democratic institutions form a system of quarantine for tyrannical desires.

And when your soul becometh great, then doth it become haughty, and in your sublimity there is wickedness.

We become aware, however, that all customs, even the hardest, grow pleasanter and milder with time, and that the severest way of life may become a habit and therefore a pleasure.

One should never know too precisely whom one has married

To the mean all becomes mean.

This crown to crown the laughing man, this rose-wreath crown: I myself have set this crown upon my head, I myself have pronounced my laughter holy.

Where there is the tree of knowledge, there is always Paradise: so say the most ancient and most modern serpents.

From whatever you wish to know and measure you must take your leave, at least for a time. Only when you have left the town can yousee how high its towers rise above the houses.

Love forgives the lover even his lust.

If that glad message of your Bible were written in your faces, you would not need to demand belief in the authority of that book in such stiff-necked fashion.

Only the most acute and active animals are capable of boredom.

It is the business of the very few to be independent; it is a privilege of the strong.

Life is that which must overcome itself again and again

Every attainment, every step forward in knowledge, follows from courage, from hardness against oneself, from cleanliness in relation to oneself.

It is impossible to suffer without making someone pay for it; every complaint already contains revenge.

What is bad? All that proceeds from weakness

At times, our strengths propel us so far forward we can no longer endure our weaknesses and perish from them.

Reason is the cause of our falsification of the evidence of the senses. In so far as the senses show becoming, passing away, change, they do not lie.

Through searching out origins, one becomes a crab. The historian looks backwards, and finally he also believes backwards.

The mother of excess is not joy but joylessness.

Woman is essentially unpeaceful, like the cat, however well she may have trained herself to present an appearance of peace.

Whenever I climb I am followed by a dog called 'Ego'.

Style ought to prove that one believes in an idea; not only that one thinks it but also feels it.

Women's modesty generally increases with their beauty.

Mistrust those in whom the urge to punish is strong.

If you wish to understand a philosopher, do not ask what he says, but find out what he wants

If an architect wants to strengthen a decrepit arch, he increases the load laid upon it, for thereby the parts are joined more firmly together.

Do not paint a picture either of God or the devil on your walls: this will ruin both your walls and the atmosphere.

The universe without music would be madness.

We are responsible to ourselves for our own existence; consequently we want to be the true helmsman of this existence and refuse to allow our existence to resemble a mindless act of chance.

The only excuse for God is that he doesn't exist.

Dreadful experiences raise the question whether he who experiences them, is not something dreadful also.

When one is young, one venerates and despises without that art of nuances which constitutes the best gain of life.

There are two things a real man likes - danger and play; and he likes woman because she is the most dangerous of play things.

Thinking about suicide is a potent consolation: it helps us to get through many a bad night.

Whatever we think about and question a lot becomes questionable.

The same relation exists between merchant and pirate, who for a long period are one and the same person: where the one function appears to them inadvisable, they exercise the other.

All great artists and thinkers are great workers.

Not he is great who can alter matter, but he who can alter my state of mind.