Friedrich Nietzsche Quotes

The most fundamental form of human stupidity is forgetting what we were trying to do in the first place.

It is only when we have ceased to be the followers of our followers that we comprehend how meaningless followers are.

We seldom break our leg so long as life continues a toilsome upward climb. The danger comes when we begin to take things easily and choose the convenient paths.

But this people has deliberately made itself stupid, for nearly a millennium: nowhere have the two great European narcotics, alcohol and Christianity, been abused more dissolutely.

They devour each other and cannot even digest themselves.

People who feel insecure in social situations never miss a chance to exhibit their dominance over close, submissive friends, whomthey put down publicly, in front of everyone--by teasing, for example.

When our brain feels too weak to deal with our opponent's objections, our heart answers by casting suspicion on their underlying motives.

We forget our guilt when we have confessed it to another, but the other does not usually forget it.

The person lives most beautifully who does not reflect upon existence

Follow in the footsteps of your fathers' virtue! How could you hope to climb high unless your fathers' will climbs with you?

We must be cruel as well as compassionate: let us guard against becoming poorer than nature is!

Happiness is a fata morgana. the only way to not end up unhappy is to not long for happiness.

I am not a human being, I am dynamite.

Error has made man so deep, sensitive, and inventive that he has put forth such blossoms as religions and arts. Pure knowledge could not have been capable of it.

Why is it that wellnesses are not as contagious as illnesses--generally speaking, but also especially regarding taste? Or are there epidemics of health?

The living is a species of the dead; and not a very attractive one.

Even great spirits have only their five-fingers' breadth of experience - just beyond it their thinking ceases and their endless empty space and stupidity begins.

What if God were not exactly truth, and if this could be proved? And if he were instead the vanity, the desire for power, the ambitions, the fear, and the enraptured and terrified folly of mankind?

From people who merely pray we must become people who bless.

Not the intensity but the duration of high feelings makes high men.

Thus I spoke, more and more softly; for I was afraid of my own thoughts and the thoughts behind my thoughts.

Love, too, has to be learned.

For men are not equal: thus speaks justice.

In the end one only experiences oneself.

In almost all sciences the fundamental knowledge is either found in earliest times or is still being sought.

The beast in us must be[78] wheedled: ethic is necessary, that we may not be torn to pieces.

Whoever despises himself still esteems the despiser within himself.

If you go to see the woman, do not forget the whip.

Love is blind, friends close their eyes

It is very noble hypocrisy not to talk of one's self.

We deceive ourselves when giving respect to the person for whom we have surrendered ourselves, when we respectively expect them to be as we would wish them to be.

The man who meets with a failure attributes this failure rather to the ill will of another than to fate.

Body am I entirely, and nothing else; and soul is only a word for something about the body.

No man ever wrote more eloquently and luminously [than Heraclitus].

Some mothers need happy children; others need unhappy ones-otherwise they cannot prove their maternal virtues.

Tolerance is a proof of distrust in one's own ideals.

The disappointed one speaks. I searched for great human beings; I always found only the apes of their ideals.

The will to overcome an emotion, is ultimately only the will of another, or of several other, emotions.

On every parable you ride to every truth.

You are treading the path to your greatness: no one shall follow you here! Your passage has effaced the path behind you, and above that path stands written: Impossibility.

That whatever a man says, promises, or resolves in passion he must stick to later on when he is cold and sober--this demand is among the heaviest burdens that weigh on humankind.

In every party there is one person who, through his dotingly credulous enunciation of party principles, incites the other members to defection.

As long as you still experience the stars as something "above you", you lack the eye of knowledge.

In the last analysis, even the best man is evil: in the last analysis, even the best woman is bad.

If a woman seeks education it is probably because her sexual apparatus is malfunctioning.

Mothers easily become jealous of their sons' friends when they are particularly successful. As a rule a mother loves herself in her son more than she does the son himself.

All preachers of morality, as also all theologians have a bad habit in common: all of them try to persuade man that he is very ill, and that a severe, final, radical cure is necessary.

In order to acquire intellect one must need it. One loses it when it is no longer necessary.

When good friends praise a gifted person he often appears to be delighted with them out of politeness and goodwill, but in reality he feels indifferent.

In the knowledge of truth, what really matters is the possession of it, not the impulse under which it was sought.