Friedrich Nietzsche Quotes

Everything good is instinct--and, as a result, easy, necessary, free.

It takes just such painful and terrible things to occur for the great emancipation to take place.

They would have to sing better songs for me to learn to have faith in their Redeemer; and his disciples would have to look more redeemed!

It is possible that the production of genius is reserved to a limited period of mankind's history.

If you believed more in life you would fling yourself less to the moment.

Dead are all gods: now we want the overman to live.

A sure way to irritate people and to put evil thoughts into their heads is to keep them waiting a long time. This makes them immoral.

Asceticism is the right way of thinking for those who have to extirpate their sensual drives because they are ravening beasts of prey. But only for those!

Man is a rope stretched between the animal and the Superman-a rope over an abyss. A dangerous crossing, a dangerous wayfaring, a dangerous looking-back, a dangerous trembling and halting

He who lives as children live - who does not struggle for his bread and does not believe that his actions possess any ultimate significance - remains childlike.

When gods die, they always die many sorts of death.

The perfect woman perpetrates literature as she perpetrates a small sin: as an experiment, in passing, glancing around to see whether anybody notices--and to make sure that somebody notices.

When a man has just been greatly honored and has eaten a little he is the most generous.

My humanity is a constant self-overcoming.

Evolution does not make happiness its goal; it aims simply at evolution and nothing else.

We should not talk about our friends: otherwise we will talk away the feeling of friendship.

If you have hitherto believed that life was one of the highest value and now see yourselves disappointed, do you at once have to reduce it to the lowest possible price?

[Heraclitus] concluded that coming-to-be itself could not be anything evil or unjust.

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

The hour when you say, "What does my happiness matter? It is poverty and filth, and a wretched complacency. Yet my happiness should justify existence itself!

Smooth iceis paradisefor those who dance with expertise.

Men after death ... are understood worse than men of the moment, but heard better.

There is a stupid humility that is quite common and when a person is afflicted with it, he is once and for all disqualified for being a disciple of knowledge.

The good displeases us when we are not up to it.

Whoever, at any time, has undertaken to build a new heaven has found the strength for it in his own hell.

Either one does not dream, or one does so interestingly. One should learn to spend one's waking life in the same way: not at all, or interestingly.

Man is no longer an artist, he has become a work of art.

Everything that is profound loves the mask: the profoundest things have a hatred even of figure and likeness.

We talk about taking "pleasure in a thing": but in truth it is pleasure in ourselves, mediated by a thing.

You say a good cause justifies any war; but I say a good war justifies any cause.

And I offer you this parable: Not a few who sought to cast out their devil entered into the swine themselves.

Pity is extolled as the virtue of prostitutes.

The highest type of free men should be sought where the highest resistance is constantly overcome: five steps from tyranny, close to the threshold of the danger of servitude.

The followers of a great man often put their eyes out, so that they may be the better able to sing his praise.

Illusions are certainly expensive amusements; but the destruction of illusions is still more expensive, if looked upon as an amusement, as it undoubtedly is by some people.

We count the courtesies accorded us by unpopular people as offenses.

One must know how to conserve oneself- the best test of independence.

What then in the last resort are the truths of mankind? They are the irrefutable errors of mankind.

The great wars of the present age are the effects of the study of history.

Learn to laugh at yourselves as one must laugh!

The sick woman especially: no one surpasses her in refinements for ruling, oppressing, tyrannising.

"Body am I, and soul" - so saith the child. And why should one not speak like children?

A good seat on a horse steals away your opponent's courage and your onlooker's heart-what reason is there to attack? Sit like one who has conquered?

O my brothers, am I then cruel? But I say: that which is falling should also be pushed!

To our strongest impulse, to the tyrant in us, not only our reason but also our conscience yields.

Every power draws its ultimate consequences at every moment.

The will to truth is merely the longing for a stable world.

Truth as Circe. - Error has transformed animals into men; is truth perhaps capable of changing man back into an animal?

A man who whinnies with noisy laughter, surpasses all the animals in vulgarity.

At the very moment when someone is beginning to take philosophy seriously, the whole world believes the opposite.