Friedrich Nietzsche Quotes

Memory says, 'I did that.' Pride replies, 'I could not have done that.' Eventually, memory yields.

The reasons for which 'this' world has been characterized as 'apparent' are the very reasons which indicate its reality; any other kind of reality is absolutely indemonstrable.

What I understand by "philosopher": a terrible explosive in the presence of which everything is in danger.

Many brief follies--that is what you call love. And your marriage puts an end to many brief follies, with a single long stupidity.

I am the leading strings of the ego and the prompter of its concepts.

It is not your sin - it is your moderation that cries to heaven; your very sparingness in sin cries to heaven!

The disgust with dirt can be so great that it keeps us from cleaning ourselves--from "justifying" ourselves.

Every living body continuously eliminates feces, it rejects what is not serviceable to the assimilating organism: what man despises, what arouses his disgust, what he calls evil, are excrements.

We must repay goodness and wickedness: but why exactly to the person who has done us a good or a wicked turn?

Whoever turns away from us might not offend us in doing so perhaps, but he certainly offends our followers.

What is the ape to man? A laughing-stock or a painful embarrassment. And just that shall man be for the superman: a laughing-stock or a painful embarrassment.

I can still stand on life's narrowest footing: but who would I be were I to show you this art. Would you like to see a ropedancer?

Out of a brotherly love we occasionally embrace this or that somebody (because we cannot embrace everybody): but we must never letour somebody know it.

Although you have so far demonstrated little faith in my ability to pay, I yet hope to demonstrate that I am somebody who pays his debts-for example, to you.

I fear that, with our current veneration for the natural and the real, we have arrived at the opposite pole to all idealism, and have landed in the region of the waxworks.

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

Of what is great one must either be silent or speak with greatness. With greatness--that means cynically and with innocence.

That for which we find words is something already dead in our hearts.

When man does not have firm, calm lines on the horizon of his life- mountain and forest lines, as it were- then a man's innermost will becomes agitated, preoccupied, and wistful.

Are you one who looks on? or lends a hand? - or who looks away, sidles off?...Third question for the conscience.

But every soil becomes finally exhausted, and the ploughshare of evil must always come once more.

A soul which knows that it is loved, but does not itself love, betrays its sediment: its dregs come up.

Thinking evil is making evil.

A book is made better by good readers and clearer by good opponents.

The courage of all one really knows comes but late in life.

He who recites dramatic works makes discoveries about his own character.

Every master has but one disciple, and that one becomes unfaithful to him, for he too is destined for master-ship.

The less men are fettered by tradition, the greater becomes the inward activity of their motives, and greater again in proportion to their outer restlessness.

Philosophers are in the habit of setting themselves before life and experience.

The form of a work of art, which gives speech to their thoughts and is, therefore, their mode of talking, is always somewhat uncertain, like all kinds of speech.

He who denies his own vanity usually possesses it in so brutal a form that he instinctively shuts his eyes to avoid the necessity of despising himself.

Strideth over all mountains, and laugheth at all tragedies

Youth is an unpleasant period; for then it is not possible or not prudent to be productive in any sense whatsoever.

He who has always spared himself much will in the end become sickly of so much consideration. Praised be what hardens!

"Faith" as an imperative is a veto against science-in praxi, it means lies at any price.

The better the state is established, the fainter is humanity. To make the individual uncomfortable, that is my task.

Are you visiting women? Do not forget your whip

For our self respect depends upon our ability to make requital, for good or for evil.

Our writing equipment takes part in forming our thoughts.

All prejudices may be traced back to the intestines. A sedentary life is the real sin against the Holy Ghost.

Man wishes woman to be peaceable, but in fact she is essentially warlike, like the cat.

I want to teach men the sense of their existence, which is the Superman, the lightning out of the dark cloud man.

In certain pious people I have found a hatred of reason, and have been favourably disposed to them for it: their bad intellectual conscience was at least exposed by that!

Whoever reaches his ideal transcends it eo ipso.

In song and dance, man forgets how to walk and speak and is on the way into flying into the air, dancing... his very gestures express enchantment.

But eternal liveliness is what counts: what does "eternal life" matter, or life at all?

When horror is associated with what is harmful, evil results, when disgust does, badness.

Animals know nothing of themselves, and they also know nothing of the world.

Unresolved dissonances between the characters and dispositions of the parents continue to reverberate in the nature of the child and make up the history of its inner sufferings.

And if a man goes through fire for his doctrine - what does that prove? Verily, it is more if your own doctrine comes out of your own fire.