Friedrich Nietzsche Quotes

Precisely this is godliness--that there are gods, but no God.

The way to transmute your iron duty into gold in everyone's eyes is this: always deliver more than you promise.

He who possesses greatness is cruel towards his secondary virtues and considerations.

When we have a great goal we are superior even to justice, not merely to our deeds and our judges.

For some natures, changing their opinions is just as much a requirement of cleanliness as changing their clothes: for others, however, it is merely a requirement of vanity.

The purpose of punishment is to improve those who do the punishing--that is the final recourse of those who support punishment.

This mother needs happy, reputable children, and that one needs unhappy ones: otherwise she cannot show her kindness as a mother.

Yes, life is a woman!

Do not be deceived! The busiest people harbor the greatest weariness, their restlessness is weakness--they no longer have the capacity for waiting and idleness.

Whether in conversation we generally agree or disagree with others is largely a matter of habit: the one tendency makes as much sense as the other.

And so do you suppose it must be a piece-work because it has been given to you (and could only be given to you) in pieces?

Sometimes we remain true to a cause simply because its opponents are unfailingly tasteless.

When a man reaches his maturity in understanding and in years, the feeling comes over him that his father was wrong to beget him.

I admire the courage and wisdom of Socrates in everything he did, said--and did not say.

We feign pity when we want to demonstrate our ascendancy over feelings of hostility: but usually in vain. Whenever we notice this,there is an accompanying surge in those hostile sensations.

Nothing can be done about it: every master has but a single pupil--and he will not stay loyal to him--for he is also destined to become a master.

[Heraclitus' language] dispenses with lightness and artificial decoration, foremost out of disgust for humanity and out of [his own] defiant feeling.

Is man God's biggest blunder, or is man's God?

Many die too late, and some die too early. Yet strangers soundeth the precept: "Die at the right time!"

Master-morality and Slave-morality.

Whoever gives advice to a sick person acquires a feeling of superiority over him, whether the advice be accepted or rejected.

To be moral, correct, and virtuous is to be obedient to an old established law and custom.

Without the errors which lie in the assumption of morality, man would have remained an animal.

Whoever thinks much and to good purpose easily forgets his own experiences, but not the thoughts which these experiences have called forth.

Inexperienced girls flatter themselves with the notion that it is in their power to make a man happy.

We are more pained when one of our friends is guilty of something shameful than when we do it ourselves.

The Refinement of Shame. People are not ashamed to think something foul, but they are ashamed when they think these foul thoughts are attributed to them.

One unconsciously takes it for granted that doer and sufferer think and feel alike, and according to this supposition we measure the guilt of the one by the pain of the other.

The job of rearing a child consists of making conscious activities unconscious.

Most of the time in married life is taken up by talk.

If married couples did not live together, happy marriages would be more frequent.

A beautiful woman seductively dressed will never catch cold no matter how low-cut her gown.

The happiness of man is: I will. The happiness of woman is: he wills.

Life, and you, and I, and all of us together became for a while interesing to ourselves once more.

The relatives of a suicide hold it against him that out of consideration for their reputation he did not remain alive.

"State," I call it, where they all drink poison, the good and the wicked; "state," where they all lose themselves, the good and the wicked; "state," where they all call their slow suicide-"life."

God created woman. And boredom did indeed cease from that moment-but many other things ceased as well!

Good prose is written only face to face with poetry.

Christianity is a metaphysics of the hangman.

That grand drama in a hundred acts, which is reserved for the next two centuries of Europe-the most terrible, most questionable and perhaps also the most hopeful of all dramas.

I am not bigoted enough for a system-and not even for my system.

You lovers of knowledge! So what have you done out of your love of knowledge up to now? Have you already stolen and murdered so as to know how a thief and a murderer feels?

Active, successful natures act, not according to the maxim, "know thyself," but as if prompted by the commandment: will a self, and so become a self.

Childhood and youth are ends in themselves, not stages.

The dyed-in-the-wool teacher takes everything seriously only with respect to his students--himself included.

In morality, man treats himself not as individuum but as dividuum.

In the end we love our desire and not what it is that we desire.

The criminal type is the type of the strong human being under unfavorable circumstances: a strong human being made sick.

What doesn't kill you make you stronger.

He who laughs best today, will also laughs last.