Friedrich Nietzsche Quotes - Page 2

A friend should be a master at guessing and keeping still.
Friedrich Nietzsche
Women can form a friendship with a man very well but to preserve it a slight physical antipathy most probably helps.
Friedrich Nietzsche
Sometimes we owe a friend to the lucky circumstance that we give him no cause for envy.
Friedrich Nietzsche
That which does not kill me makes me stronger.
Friedrich Nietzsche
Family love is messy clinging and of an annoying and repetitive pattern like bad wallpaper.
Friedrich Nietzsche
The errors of great men are venerable because they are more fruitful than the truths of little men.
Friedrich Nietzsche
There are no eternal facts as there are no absolute truths.
Friedrich Nietzsche
What is evil? - Whatever springs from weakness.
Friedrich Nietzsche
He who would learn to fly one day must first learn to stand and walk and run and climb and dance one cannot fly into flying.
Friedrich Nietzsche
Necessity is not an established fact but an interpretation.
Friedrich Nietzsche
In Heaven all the interesting people are missing.
Friedrich Nietzsche
Insanity in individuals is rare - but in groups parties nations and epochs it is the rule.
Friedrich Nietzsche
When a hundred men stand together each of them loses his mind and gets another one.
Friedrich Nietzsche
Speaking generally punishment hardens and numbs it produces concentration it sharpens the consciousness of alienation it strengthens the power of resistance.
Friedrich Nietzsche
Convictions are more dangerous enemies of truth than lies.
Friedrich Nietzsche
We ought to face our destiny with courage.
Friedrich Nietzsche
Courage is the best slayer-courage which attacketh for in every attack there is the sound of triumph.
Friedrich Nietzsche
Is not life a hundred times too short for us to bore ourselves?
Friedrich Nietzsche
Either you reach a higher point today or you exercise your strength in order to be able to climb higher tomorrow.
Friedrich Nietzsche
In architecture the pride of man his triumph over gravitation his will to power assume a visible form. Architecture is a sort of oratory of power by means of forms.
Friedrich Nietzsche
Let that day be lost to us on which we did not dance once I
Friedrich Nietzsche
Science and art have that in common that everyday things seem to them new and attractive.
Friedrich Nietzsche
We are terrified by the idea of being terrified.
Friedrich Nietzsche
What does not destroy me makes me strong.
Friedrich Nietzsche
Of the spirit of women. - The spiritual power of a woman is best demonstrated by her sacrificing her own spirit to that of a man out of love of him and of his spirit but then, despite this sacrifice, immediately evolving _a new spirit_ within the new domain, originally alien to her nature, to which the man's disposition impels her. (from Assorted Opinions & Maxims 272)-- This is the first time among years of reading Nietzsche that i agree with his words on women: this aphorism captures a few quintessences of true and gallant womanhood, namely the will(ingness) to sacrifice (not only to others but also to the necessity that arises in a context), the balance between creative and reactive, the free-spiritedness out of such balance without conceit and swagger, and the malleability/fluidity without blind submission. (It is momentous to note that the man-woman dynamic is not binary, and that man/womanhood is not a given in one's biology - it's more something that evolves in a person over time.)
Friedrich Nietzsche
Almost everything we call "higher culture" is based on the spiritualization of cruelty.
Friedrich Nietzsche
I keep having the same experience and keep resisting it every time. I do not want to believe it although it is palpable: the great majority of people lacks an intellectual conscience. Indeed, it has often seemed to me as if anyone calling for an intellectual conscience were as lonely in the most densely populated cities as if he were in a desert. Everybody looks at you with strange eyes and goes right on handling his scales, calling this good and that evil. Nobody even blushes when you intimate that their weights are underweight; nor do people feel outraged; they merely laugh at your doubts. I mean: the great majority of people does not consider it contemptible to believe this or that and to live accordingly, without first having given themselves an account of the final and most certain reasons pro and con, and without even troubling themselves about such reasons afterward: the most gifted men and the noblest women still belong to this "great majority." But what is goodheartedness, refinement, or genius to me, when the person who has these virtues tolerates slack feelings in his faith and judgments and when he does not account the desire for certainty as his inmost craving and deepest distress—as that which separates the higher human beings from the lower.Among some pious people I found a hatred of reason and was well disposed to them for that; for this at least betrayed their bad intellectual conscience. But to stand in the midst of this rerum concordia discors and of this whole marvelous uncertainty and rich ambiguity of existence without questioning, without trembling with the craving and the rapture of such questioning, without at least hating the person who questions, perhaps even finding him faintly amusing—that is what I feel to be contemptible, and this is the feeling for which I look first in everybody. Some folly keeps persuading me that every human being has this feeling, simply because he is human. This is my type of injustice.
Friedrich Nietzsche
Generally speaking, punishment makes men hard and cold; it concentrates; it sharpens the feeling of alienation; it strengthens the power of resistance
Friedrich Nietzsche
And if your friend does evil to you, say to him, ''I forgive you for what you did to me, but how can I forgive you for what you did to yourself?
Friedrich Nietzsche
Every habit makes our hand more witty, and out wit more handy.
Friedrich Nietzsche
The wittiest authors raise the very slightest of smiles.
Friedrich Nietzsche
They are now informing me that not only are they better than the powerful, the masters of the world whose spittle they have to lick (not from fear, not at all from fear! but because God orders them to honour those in authority) – not only are they better, but they have a “better time”, or at least will have a better time one day. But enough! enough! I can’t bear it any longer. Bad air! Bad air! This workshop where ideals are fabricated – it seems to me just to stink of lies.
Friedrich Nietzsche
In order that there may be institutions, there must be a kind of will, instinct, or imperative, which is anti-liberal to the point of malice: the will to tradition, to authority, to responsibility for centuries to come, to the solidarity of chains of generations, forward and backward ad infinitum.
Friedrich Nietzsche
I love the great despisers, because they are the great adorers, and arrows of longing for the other shore.
Friedrich Nietzsche
Still am I the richest and most to be envied - I, the lonesomest one!
Friedrich Nietzsche
It is certainly not the least charm of a theory that it is refutable; it is precisely thereby that it attracts the more subtle minds. It seems that the hundred-times-refuted theory of the "free will" owes its persistence to this charm alone; some one is always appearing who feels himself strong enough to refute it.
Friedrich Nietzsche
...we are concluding falsely that we can deduce the justification, the rational admissibility of displeasure, from the fact that it exists; and from this false deduction Schopenhauer arrives at his fantastic conclusion of so-called intelligible freedom. But displeasure after the deed need not be rational at all: in fact, it certainly is not rational, for it rests on the erroneous assumption that the deed did not have to follow necessarily. Thus, because he thinks he is free (but not because he is free), man feels remorse and the pangs of conscience.Furthermore, this displeasure is a habit that can be given up; many men do not feel it at all, even after the same actions that cause many other men to feel it. Tied to the development of custom and culture, it is a very changeable thing, and present perhaps only within a relatively short period of world history.No one is responsible for his deeds, no one for his nature; to judge is to be unjust. This is also true when the individual judges himself. The tenet is as bright as sunlight, and yet everyone prefers to walk back into the shadow and untruth - for fear of the consequences.
Friedrich Nietzsche
With hard men intimacy is a thing of shame- and something precious.
Friedrich Nietzsche
To vigorous men intimacy is a matter of shame--and something precious.
Friedrich Nietzsche
There is an innocence in admiration: it occurs in one who has not yet realized that they might one day be admired.
Friedrich Nietzsche
Anarchists are mouthpieces of a declining stratum of society; when they work themselves into a state of righteous indignation demanding 'rights', 'justice', 'equal rights', they are just acting under the pressure of their own lack of culture, which has no way of grasping why they really suffer, or what they lack in life.
Friedrich Nietzsche
What? A great man? I only ever see the ape of his own ideal.
Friedrich Nietzsche
Visiting the sick' is an orgasm of superiority in the contemplation of our neighbor's helplessness
Friedrich Nietzsche
Every kind of contempt for sex, every impurification of it by means of the concept "impure", is the crime par excellence against life--is the real sin against the holy spirit of life
Friedrich Nietzsche
Invisible threads are the strongest ties.
Friedrich Nietzsche
A thing can only live through a pious illusion.
Friedrich Nietzsche
Perhaps no one has yet been truthful enough about what 'truthfulness' is.
Friedrich Nietzsche
Even on this level, it is at bottom not deception [men] hate but the dire, inimical consequences of certain kinds of deception
Friedrich Nietzsche
What does our great historical hunger signify, our clutching about us of countless cultures, our consuming desire for knowledge, if not the loss of myth, of a mythic home, the mythic womb?
Friedrich Nietzsche
Admiration for a quality or an art can be so strong that it deters us from striving to possess it.
Friedrich Nietzsche
Around the hero, everything becomes a tragedy.Around God, everything becomes what? a world?
Friedrich Nietzsche
No one can build you the bridge on which you, and only you, must cross the river of life. There may be countless trails and bridges and demigods who would gladly carry you across; but only at the price of pawning and forgoing yourself. There is one path in the world that none can walk but you. Where does it lead? Don’t ask, walk!
Friedrich Nietzsche
It is the evening that questions thus from within me.
Friedrich Nietzsche
It is the business of the very few to be independent; it is a privilege of the strong. And whoever attempts it, even with the best right, but without being OBLIGED to do so, proves that he is probably not only strong, but also daring beyond measure. He enters into a labyrinth, he multiplies a thousandfold the dangers which life in itself already brings with it; not the least of which is that no one can see how and where he loses his way, becomes isolated, and is torn piecemeal by some minotaur of conscience. Supposing such a one comes to grief, it is so far from the comprehension of men that they neither feel it, nor sympathize with it. And he cannot any longer go back! He cannot even go back again to the sympathy of men!
Friedrich Nietzsche
Be careful when you cast out your demons that you don’t throw away the best of yourself.
Friedrich Nietzsche
And as long as you are in any way ashamed before yourself, you do not yet belong with us.
Friedrich Nietzsche
Should not the giver be thankful that the receiver received? Is not giving a need? Is not receiving mercy?
Friedrich Nietzsche
I am a wanderer and mountain-climber, said he to his heart, I love not the plains, and it seemeth I cannot long sit still.And whatever may still overtake me as fate and experience—a wandering will be therein, and a mountain-climbing: in the end one experienceth only oneself.
Friedrich Nietzsche
If, in all that you wish to do, you begin by asking yourself: am I certain that I would wish to do this an infinite number of times? This should be for you the most solid centre of gravity . . . My doctrine says, the task is to live your life in such a way that you must wish to live it again - for you will anyway! If striving gives you the highest feeling, then strive! If rest gives you the highest feeling, then rest! If fitting in, following and obeying give you the highest feeling, then obey! Only make sure you come to know what gives you the highest feeling, and then spare no means. Eternity is at stake! This doctrine is mild in its treatment of those who do not believe in it. It has neither hell nor threats. But anyone who does not believe merely lives a fugitive life in the consciousness of it.
Friedrich Nietzsche
Everything goes, everything comes back; eternally rolls the wheel of being. Everything dies, everything blossoms again; eternally runs the year of being. Everything breaks, everything is joined anew; eternally the same House of Being is built. Everything parts, everything greets every other thing again; eternally the ring of being remains faithful to itself. In every Now, being begins; round every Here rolls the sphere There. The center is everywhere. Bent is the path of eternity.
Friedrich Nietzsche