Friedrich Nietzsche Quotes

Truly, it is a blessing and not a blasphemy when I teach that "above all things there stands the heaven of chance, the heaven of innocence, the heaven of accident, the heaven of wantonness".

It is however a disgrace to pray! Not for all, but for you, and me, and whoever has his a conscience.

All philosophy is a form of confession.

Every man in creating the beautiful appearance of the dream worlds is a perfect artist.

A nation usually renews its youth on a political sick-bed, and there finds again the spirit which it had gradually lost in seeking and maintaining power.

As soon as we are shown the existence of something old in a new thing, we are pacified.

The great poet draws his creations only from out of his own reality.

The man who sees little always sees less than there is to see; the man who hears badly always hears something more than there is to hear.

A married philosopher belongs to comedy.

Systems of morals are only a sign-language of the emotions.

The Germans are incapable of any conception of greatness: proof Schumann.

Verily, I do not want to be like the ropemakers: They drag out their threads and always walk backwards.

I listened for the echo, and I heard only praise —

Perhaps man will rise ever higher as soon as he ceases to flow out into a god.

The hour-hand of life.

What verse is for the poet, dialectical thinking is for the philosopher. He grasps for it in order to get hold of his own enchantment, in order to perpetuate it.

Generally speaking, the greater a woman's beauty, the greater her modesty.

And you tell me, friends, that there is no disputing taste and tasting? But all life is a dispute over taste and tasting!

You're going to women? Don't forget your whip!

Science offends the modesty of all real women. It makes them feel as though it were an attempt to peek under their skin--or, worseyet, under their dress and ornamentation!

Out of love, women become entirely what it is that they are in the imaginations of the men who love them.

Thus do I want man and woman to be: the one fit to wage war and the other fit to give birth, but both fit to dance with head and feet.

The higher its type, the more rarely a thing succeeds.

One can lie with the mouth, but with the accompanying grimace one nevertheless tells the truth.

What good is a book that does not even transport us beyond all books?

Never to read another book that was born and baptized (with ink) at the same time.

The English are a nation of consummate cant.

Men subsequently put whatever is newly learned or experienced to use as a plowshare, perhaps even as a weapon: but women immediately include it among their ornaments.

He that writeth in blood and proverbs doth not want to be read, but learnt by heart.

So live your life of obedience and of war! What matter about long life! What warrior wisheth to be spared!

There are the spiritually consumptive ones: hardly are they born when they begin to die, and long for doctrines of lassitude and renunciation.

What really arouses indignation against suffering is not suffering as such but the senselessness of suffering...

[The] self overcoming of justice: one knows the beautiful name it has given itself--mercy...

We are unknown to ourselves, we men of knowledge--and with good reason. We have never sought ourselves--how could it happen that we should ever find ourselves?

Water is sufficient...the spirit moves over water.

Morality is the idiosyncrasy of decadents having the hidden desire to revenge themselves upon life – and being successful.

This workshop where ideals are manufactured--it seems to me it stinks of so many lies

But I need solitude--which is to say, recovery, return to myself, the breath of a free, light, playful air.

The Church today is more likely to alienate than to seduce...

Oh, my friends, that your self be in your deed as the mother is in her child - let that be your word concerning virtue!

He who has a why to live for can bear almost any how.

I assess the power of a will by how much resistance, pain, torture it endures and knows how to turn to its advantage

Madness is something rare in individuals — but in groups, parties, peoples, and ages, it is the rule.

All great things must first wear terrifying and monstrous masks in order to inscribe themselves on the hearts of humanity.

Try for once to justify the meaning of your existence as it were a posteriori by setting yourself an aim, a goal... an exalted and noble 'to this end.' Perish in pursuit of this and only this

I tell you: one must still have chaos in one, to give birth to a dancing star. I tell you: you have still chaos in you.

One must reach out and try to grasp this astonishing finesse, that the value of lif cannot be estimated.

The maturity of man—that means, to have reacquired the seriousness that one had as a child at play

Excess of strength alone is proof of strength

All that exists is just and unjust and is equally justified in both respects.