Friedrich Nietzsche Quotes - Page 4

Energy wasted on negative ends.
Friedrich Nietzsche
How can we “find ourselves” again? How can man “know himself”? He is a thing obscure and veiled. If the hare has seven skins, man can cast from him seventy times seven skins, and not be able to say: “Here you truly are; there is skin no more.”Also this digging into oneself, this straight, violent descent into the pit of one’s being, is a troublesome and dangerous business to start. You may easily take such hurt, that no doctor can heal you. And what is the point: since everything bears witness to our essence — our friendships and enmities, our looks and greetings, our memories and forgetfulnesses, our books and our writing!
Friedrich Nietzsche
Our faith in others betrays that we would rather have faith in ourselves. Our longing for a friend is our betrayer. And often with our love we want merely to overcome envy. And often we attack and make ourselves enemies, to conceal that we are vulnerable.
Friedrich Nietzsche
God is dead. God remains dead. And we have killed him. How shall we comfort ourselves, the murderers of all murderers? What was holiest and mightiest of all that the world has yet owned has bled to death under our knives: who will wipe this blood off us? What water is there for us to clean ourselves? What festivals of atonement, what sacred games shall we have to invent? Is not the greatness of this deed too great for us? Must we ourselves not become gods simply to appear worthy of it?
Friedrich Nietzsche
What is familiar is what we are used to; and what we are used to is most difficult to 'Know' - that is, to see as a problem; that is, to see as strange, as distant, as 'outside us'.
Friedrich Nietzsche
Every past is worth condemning.
Friedrich Nietzsche
The craving for equality can express itself either as a desire to pull everyone down to our own level (by belittling them, excluding them, tripping them up) or as a desire to raise ourselves up along with everyone else (by acknowledging them, helping them, and rejoicing in their success).
Friedrich Nietzsche
It is invisible hands that torment and bend us the worst
Friedrich Nietzsche
to have to combat one’s instincts—that is the formula for decadence: as long as life is ascending, happiness and instinct are one.
Friedrich Nietzsche
A man who wills commands something within himself that renders obedience, or that he believes renders obedience.
Friedrich Nietzsche
One must shed the bad taste of wanting to agree with many. "Good" is no longer good when one's neighbor mouths it. And how should there be a "common good"! The term contradicts itself: whatever can be common always has little value. In the end it must be as it is and always has been: great things remain for the great, abysses for the profound, nuances and shudders for the refined, and, in brief, all that is rare for the rare.
Friedrich Nietzsche
I obviously do everything to be "hard to understand" myself
Friedrich Nietzsche
He who is a firstling is ever sacrificed.
Friedrich Nietzsche
The higher man is distinguished from the lower by his fearlessness and his readiness to challenge misfortune.
Friedrich Nietzsche
The strongest intimidation, by the way, is the invention of a hereafter with a hell everlasting.
Friedrich Nietzsche
With rope-ladders learned I to reach many a window, with nimble legs did I climb high masts: to sit on high masts of perception seemed to me no small bliss; To flicker like small flames on high masts: a small light, certainly, but a great comfort to cast-away sailors and shipwrecked ones!By diverse ways and wendings did I arrive at my truth; not by one ladder did I mount to the height where mine eye roveth into my remoteness. And unwillingly only did I ask my way - that was always counter to my taste! Rather did I question and test the ways themselves. A testing and a questioning hath been all my travelling: and verily, one must also learn to answer such questioning! That, however - is my taste: Neither a good nor a bad taste, but my taste, of which I have no longer either shame or secrecy."This is now my way - where is yours?" Thus did I answer those who asked me "the way." For "the way" - it doth not exist!
Friedrich Nietzsche
In practice it is death that works soseductively behind the image of its brother, sleep
Friedrich Nietzsche
He who fights with monsters might take care lest he thereby becomes a monster.
Friedrich Nietzsche
The vanity of others runs counter to our taste only when it runs counter to our vanity.
Friedrich Nietzsche
All things are subject to interpretation. Whichever interpretation prevails at a given time is a function of power and not truth.
Friedrich Nietzsche
I tell you: one must still have chaos in oneself to give birth to a dancing star. I tell you: you still have chaos in yourselves.
Friedrich Nietzsche
Let the young soul survey its own life with a view of the following question: ‘What have you truly loved thus far? What has ever uplifted your soul, what has dominated and delighted it at the same time?
Friedrich Nietzsche
The Christian church is an encyclopaedia of prehistoric cults and conceptions of the most diverse orgiin and that is why it is so capable of proselytising: it always could and it can still go wherever it pleases and it always found and it always finds something similar to itself to which it can adapt itself and gradually impose upon it a Christian meaning.
Friedrich Nietzsche
The Church today is more likely to alienate than to seduce...
Friedrich Nietzsche
Physician, heal thyself: then wilt thou also heal thy patient. Let it be his best cure to see with his eyes him who maketh himself whole.
Friedrich Nietzsche
In the end we are always rewarded for our good will, our patience, fair-mindedness, and gentleness with what is strange.
Friedrich Nietzsche
Solitude is a virtue for us, since it is a sublime inclination and impulse to cleanliness which shows that contact between people, “society”, inevitably makes things unclean. Somewhere, sometime, every community makes people—“base.
Friedrich Nietzsche
Where solitude endeth, there beginneth the market-place; and where the market-place beginneth, there beginneth also the noise of the great actors, and the buzzing of the poison-flies.
Friedrich Nietzsche
Every moment of life wants to tell us something, but we do not want to hear what it has to say: when we are alone and quiet we are afraid that something will be whispered into our ear and hence we despise quiet and drug ourselves with sociability.
Friedrich Nietzsche
Healthy introspection, without undermining oneself; it is a rare gift to venture into the unexplored depths of the self, without delusions or fictions, but with an uncorrupted gaze.
Friedrich Nietzsche
Believe me, friend Hellishnoise: the greatest events—they are not our loudest but our stillest hours.
Friedrich Nietzsche
But I need solitude--which is to say, recovery, return to myself, the breath of a free, light, playful air.
Friedrich Nietzsche
Your bad love of yourselves makes solitude a prison to you.
Friedrich Nietzsche
There are many good inventions on earth, some useful, some pleasing: for their sake, the earth is to be loved. And there is such a variety of well-invented things that the earth is like the breasts of a woman: useful as well as pleasing.
Friedrich Nietzsche
Only those thoughts which come from walking have any value
Friedrich Nietzsche
We have to cease to think, if we refuse to do it in the prison house of language; for we cannot reach further than the doubt which asks whether the limit we see is really a limit.
Friedrich Nietzsche
A thought, even a possibility, can shatter and transform us.
Friedrich Nietzsche
A thought comes when it will, not when I will.
Friedrich Nietzsche
The misunderstanding of passion and reason, as if the latter were an independent entity and not rather a system of relations between various passions and desires; and as if every passion did not possess its quantum of reason
Friedrich Nietzsche
Writers whose thoughts are expressed with clarity and precision are assumed by readers to be superficial. Where the meaning is obscured, then readers give more attention and consider the fruit of their labour more valuable
Friedrich Nietzsche
He who writes in blood and aphorisms does not want to be read, he wants to be learned by heart.
Friedrich Nietzsche
Be not virtuous beyond your powers! And seek nothing from yourselves opposed to probability!...Shy, ashamed, awkward, like the tiger whose spring hath failed—thus, ye higher men, have I often seen you slink aside. A cast which ye made had failed...The higher its type, always the seldomer doth a thing succeed. Ye higher men here, have ye not all—been failures?Be of good cheer; what doth it matter? How much is still possible! Learn to laugh at yourselves, as ye ought to laugh!What wonder even that ye have failed and only half-succeeded, ye half-shattered ones! Doth not—man's future strive and struggle in you?Man's furthest, profoundest, star-highest issues, his prodigious powers—do not all these foam through one another in your vessel?What wonder that many a vessel shattereth! Learn to laugh at yourselves, as ye ought to laugh! Ye higher men, Oh, how much is still possible!
Friedrich Nietzsche
The end of a melody is not its goal: but nonetheless, had the melody not reached its end it would not have reached its goal either. A parable.
Friedrich Nietzsche
Sometimes, you have to love beyond yourself! And that's how you learn to love! That's why you had to drink the bitter glass of your love.
Friedrich Nietzsche
Early in the morning, at break of day, in all the freshness and dawn of one’s strength, to read a book – I call that viciousness!
Friedrich Nietzsche
Pity is the most agreeable feeling among those who have little pride and no prospects of great conquests.
Friedrich Nietzsche
One sticks to an opinion because he prides himself on having come to it on his own, and another because he has taken great pains to learn it and is proud to have grasped it: and so both do so out of vanity.
Friedrich Nietzsche
O happiness! O happiness! Wilt thou perhaps sing, O my soul? Thou liest in the grass. But this is the secret, solemn hour, when no shepherd playeth his pipe.Take care! Hot noontide sleepeth on the fields. Do not sing! Hush! The world is perfect.Do not sing, thou prairie-bird, my soul! Do not even whisper! Lo—hush! The old noontide sleepeth, it moveth its mouth: doth it not just now drink a drop of happiness——An old brown drop of golden happiness, golden wine? Something whisketh over it, its happiness laugheth. Thus—laugheth a God. Hush!"For happiness, how little sufficeth for happiness!" Thus spoke I once and thought myself wise. But it was a blasphemy: that have I now learned. Wise fools speak better.The least thing precisely, the gentlest thing, the lightest thing, a lizard's rustling, a breath, a whisk, an eye-glance—little maketh up the best happiness. Hush!
Friedrich Nietzsche
The surest way of ruining a youth is to teach him to respect those who think as he does more highly than those who think differently from him.
Friedrich Nietzsche
When one is young, one venerates and despises without that art of nuances which constitutes the best gain of life, and it is only fair that one has to pay dearly for having assaulted men and things in this manner with Yes and No. Everything is arranged so that the worst of tastes, the taste for the unconditional, should be cruelly fooled and abused until a man learns to put a little art into his feelings and rather to risk trying even what is artificial — as the real artists of life do.
Friedrich Nietzsche
The surest way to corrupt a youth is to instruct him to hold in higher esteem those who think alike than those who think differently.
Friedrich Nietzsche
I beseech you, my brothers, remain faithful to the earth, and do not believe those who speak to you of otherworldly hopes! Poison-mixers are they, whether they know it or not. Despisers of life are they, decaying and poisoned themselves, of whom the earth is weary: so let them go. Once the sin against God was the greatest sin; but God died, and these sinners died with him. To sin against the earth is now the most dreadful thing, and to esteem the entrails of the unknowable higher than the meaning of the earth... What is the greatest experience you can have? It is the hour of the great contempt. The hour when your happiness, too, arouses your disgust, and even your reason and your virtue.
Friedrich Nietzsche
Everyone who has ever built anywhere a new heaven first found the power thereto in his own hell.
Friedrich Nietzsche
Men of profound sadness betray themselves when they are happy: they have a mode of seizing upon happiness as though they would choke and strangle it, out of jealousy--ah, they know only too well that it will flee from them!
Friedrich Nietzsche
Thus the man who is responsive to artistic stimuli reacts to the reality of dreams as does the philosopher to the reality of existence; he observes closely, and he enjoys his observation: for it is out of these images that he interprets life, out of these processes that he trains himself for life.
Friedrich Nietzsche
The person who fights monsters should make sure that in the process, he does not become a monster himself. Because when you stare down at an abyss, the abyss stares back at you.
Friedrich Nietzsche
The solitary speaks."One receives as a reward for much ennui , ill-humour and boredom, such as a solitude without friends, books, duties or passions must entail, one harvests those quarters of an hour of the deepest immersion in oneself and nature. He who completely entrenches himself against boredom also entrenches himself against himself: he will never get to drink the most potent refreshing draught from the deepest well of his own being.
Friedrich Nietzsche
There is only a perspective seeing, only a perspective "knowing"; and the more affects we allow to speak about one thing, the more eyes, different eyes, we can use to observe one thing, the more complete will our "concept" of this thing, our "objectivity," be.
Friedrich Nietzsche
A: But why this solitude? - B: I am not at odds with anyone. But when I am alone I seem to see my friends in a clearer and fairer light than when I am with them; and when I loved and appreciated music the most, I lived far from it. It seems I need a distant perspective if I am to think well of things.
Friedrich Nietzsche
When the gratitude that many owe to one discards all modesty, then there is fame.
Friedrich Nietzsche