Friedrich Nietzsche Quotes

The criminal is quite frequently not equal to his deed: he belittles and slanders it.

Faith actually moves no mountains, but instead raises them up where there were none before.

The golden age, when rambunctious spirits were regarded as the source of evil.

The spiritual activity of millennia is deposited in language.

We only hear questions that we are able to answer.

We criticize a thinker more acutely when he advances a proposition that is disagreeable to us; and yet it would be more reasonableto do so when his proposition is agreeable to us.

In laughter all that is evil comes together, but is pronounced holy and absolved by its own bliss.

If there is to be art, if there is to be any aesthetic doing and seeing, one physiological condition is indispensable: frenzy.

The view that honesty is something, and even a virtue, belongs, it is true, to those private opinions which are forbidden in this age of public opinions.

The earth has become small, and on it hops the last man, who makes everything small. His race can no more be exterminated than the flea can be. The last man lives the longest.

Narrow souls I cannot abide; There's almost no good or evil inside

When somebody dies we usually need reasons for consolation, not so much to alleviate our pain as to excuse ourselves for so readily feeling consoled.

Even truthfulness is but one means to knowledge, a ladder--but not the ladder.

If ye would go up high, then use your own legs! Do not get yourselves carried aloft; do not seat yourselves on other people's backs and heads!

What is the greatest thing ye can experience? It is the hour of great contempt. The hour in which even your happiness becometh loathsome unto you, and so also your reason and virtue.

My wisdom has long accumulated like a cloud, it becomes stiller and darker. So does all wisdom which shall one day bear lightnings.

Not their love of humanity, but the impotence of their love, prevents the Christians of today - burning us.

You want to be paid as well, you virtuous! You want reward for virtue, and heaven for earth, and eternity for your today?

And nobody lies as much as the indignant do.

The best of all things is something entirely outside your grasp: not to be born, not to be, to be nothing. But the second-best thing for you - is to die soon.

The usual false conclusions of mankind are these: a thing exists, therefore it has a right to exist.

Man alone resists the direction of gravitation: he constantly wants to fall--upwards.

He who attains his ideal, precisely thereby surpasses it.

Shackled heart, free spirit.--Whoever binds his heart tightly and imprisons it may indulge his spirit in many liberties: I have already said that once. But no one believes me unless he already knows.

I looked for great men, but all I found were the apes of their ideals.

One had better put on gloves before handling the New Testament. The presence of so much filth makes it highly advisable.

Desire is happiness: satisfaction as happiness is merely the ultimate moment of desire. To be wish and wish alone is happiness, and a new wish over and over again.

Sometimes in conversation the sound of our own voice distracts us and misleads us into making assertions that in no way express our true opinions.

Lightning and thunder need time, the light of the stars needs time, deeds need time, even after they are done, to be seen and heard.

I understand by 'freedom of spirit' something quite definite - the unconditional will to say No, where it is dangerous to say No.

Man, however, is the most courageous animal: thereby has he overcome every animal. With sound of triumph has he overcome every pain; human pain, however, is the sorest pain.

Every virtue has its privilege: for example, that of contributing its own little bundle of wood to the funeral pyre of one condemned.

Alas, where is there still a sea in which one could drown: thus our lament resounds – across shallow swamps.

We want to be poets of our life first of all in the smallest most everyday matters.

Concerning great things one should either be silent or speak loftily.

I feel all those human beings to be pernicious who can no longer oppose what they love: they thereby ruin the best things and people.

If all alms were given only from pity, all beggars would have starved long ago.

One has to know the size of one's stomach.

I have not the capability to give you my loyalty, nor do I have the vanity to appear as if I did.

Books for general reading always smell bad; the odor of common people hangs around them.

The wheel and the brake have different duties, but also one in common: to hurt one another.

What is it that you love in others?--My hopes.

Illness is a clumsy attempt to arrive at health: we must come to nature's aid with intellect.

Whoever possesses abundant joy must be a good man: but he is probably not the cleverest man, although he achieves exactly what it is that the cleverest man strives with all his cleverness to achieve.

Tragedy is dead! Poetry itself died with it! Away, away with you, puny, stunted imitators! Away with you to Hades, and eat your fill of the old masters' crumbs!

Wherever on earth the religious neurosis has appeared we find it tied to three dangerous dietary demands: solitude, fasting, and sexual abstinence.

That is an artist as I would have an artist be, modest in his needs: he really wants only two things, his bread and his art--panemet Circen.

One is punished best for one's virtues.

It is our taste that decides against Christianity now, no longer our reasons.

Science rushes headlong, without selectivity, without "taste," at whatever is knowable, in the blind desire to know all at any cost.