Friedrich Nietzsche Quotes - Page 7

It is true: we love life, not because we are used to living but because we are used to loving.There is always a certain madness in love. But also there is always a certain method in madness.
Friedrich Nietzsche
Living in a constant chase after gain compels people to expend their spirit to the point of exhaustion in continual pretense and overreaching and anticipating other. Virtue has come to consist of doing something in less time that someone else. Hours in which honesty is permitted have become rare, and when they arrive one is tired and does not only want to "let oneself go" but actually wishes to stretch out as long and wide and ungainly as one happens to be... Soon we may well reach the point where people can no longer give in to the desire for a vita contemplativa (that is, taking a walk with ideas and friends) without self-contempt and a bad conscience.
Friedrich Nietzsche
Without forgetting it is quite impossible to live at all.
Friedrich Nietzsche
The wreckage of stars - I built a world from this wreckage.
Friedrich Nietzsche
Gratitude pours forth continually, as if the unexpected had just happened—the gratitude of a convalescent—for convalescence was unexpected…. The rejoicing of strength that is returning, of a reawakened faith in a tomorrow and the day after tomorrow, of a sudden sense and anticipation of a future, of impending adventures, of seas that are open again.
Friedrich Nietzsche
For fanaticism is the only form of willpower that even the weak and insecure can be brought to attain.
Friedrich Nietzsche
That which does not kill us makes us stronger.
Friedrich Nietzsche
To leave is to suffer,to survive is to find some meaning in the suffering.
Friedrich Nietzsche
What do you consider the most humane? - To spare someone shame. What is the seal of liberation? - To no longer be ashamed in front of oneself.
Friedrich Nietzsche
Psychology has falsified love as surrender and altruism, while it is an appropriation or a bestowal following from a super-abundance of personality. Only the most complete persons can love. The depersonalized and objective are the worst lovers.
Friedrich Nietzsche
The desire to annoy no one, to harm no one, can equally well be the sign of a just as of an anxious disposition.
Friedrich Nietzsche
We like to be out in nature so much because it has no opinion on us.
Friedrich Nietzsche
Our crime against criminals lies in the fact that we treat them like rascals.
Friedrich Nietzsche
In individuals, insanity is rare; but in groups, parties, nations and epochs, it is the rule.
Friedrich Nietzsche
We possess art lest we perish of the truth.
Friedrich Nietzsche
We have abolished the real world: what world is left? The apparent world perhaps? . . . But no! with the real world we have also abolished the apparent world.
Friedrich Nietzsche
To predict the behavior of ordinary people in advance, you only have to assume that they will always try to escape a disagreeable situation with the smallest possible expenditure of intelligence.
Friedrich Nietzsche
As yet hath his knowledge not learned to smile, and to be without jealously ; as yet hath his gushing passion not become calm in beauty.
Friedrich Nietzsche
The deepest and most sublime hatred is a hatred which creates ideals and transforms values—something whose like has never been seen on earth
Friedrich Nietzsche
Do not make passion an argument for truth! - O you good-natured and even noble enthusiasts, I know you! You want to win your argument against us, but also against yourself, and above all against yourself!and a subtle and tender bad conscience so often incites you against your enthusiasm! How ingenious you then become in the outwitting and deadening of this conscience! How you hate the honest, the simple, the pure, how you avoid their innocent eyes! That knowing better whose representatives they are and whose voice you hear all too loudly within you, how it casts doubt on your belief- how you seek to make it suspect as a bad habit, as a sickness of the age, as neglect and infection of your own spiritual health! You drive yourself to the point of hating criticism, science, reason! You have to falsify history so that it may bear witness for you, you have to deny virtues so that they shall not cast into the shade those of your idols and ideals! Coloured pictures where what is needed is rational grounds! Ardour and power of expression! Silvery mists! Ambrosial nights! You understand how to illuminate and how to obscure, and how to obscure with light! And truly, when your passion rises to the point of frenzy, there comes a moment when you say to yourself: now I have conquered the good conscience, now I am light of heart, courageous, self-denying, magnificent, now I am honest! How you thirst for those moments when your passion bestows on you perfect self-justification and as it were innocence; when in struggle, intoxication, courage, hope, you are beside yourself and beyond all doubting; when you decree: 'he who is not beside himself as we are can in no way know what and where truth is!' How you thirst to discover people of your belief in this condition - it is that of intellectual vice - and ignite your flame at their torch! Oh your deplorable martyrdom! Oh your deplorable victory of the sanctified lie! Must you inflict so much suffering upon yourself? - Must you?
Friedrich Nietzsche
We ought to face our destiny with courage.
Friedrich Nietzsche
Giving style” to one’s character - a great and rare art! It is exercised by those who see all the strengths and weaknesses of their own natures and then comprehend them in an artistic plan until everything appears as art and reason and even weakness delights the eye.
Friedrich Nietzsche
A promise to love someone forever, then, means, 'As long as I love you I will render unto you the actions of love; if I no longer love you, you will continue to receive the same actions from me, if for other motives.' Thus the illusion remains in the minds of one's fellow men that the love is unchanged and still the same.
Friedrich Nietzsche
One must have a good memory to be able to keep the promises one has given. One must have strong powers of imagination to be able to have pity. So closely is morality bound to the quality of the intellect.
Friedrich Nietzsche
My world has just become perfect, midnight is also noonday, pain is also joy, a curse is also a blessing, the night is also a sun – be gone, or you will learn: a wise man is also a fool.
Friedrich Nietzsche
This world, the eternally imperfect, the eternal and imperfect image of a contradiction – an intoxicating joy to its imperfect creator – that is what I once thought the world.
Friedrich Nietzsche
as if a round apple presented itself to my hand, a ripe, golden apple with a soft, cool, velvety skin - thus the world presented itself to me -tas if a tree nodded to me, a wide-branching, strong-willed tree, bent for reclining and as a footstool for the way-weary: thus the world stood upon my headland -tas if tender hands brought me a casket - a casket open for the delight of modest, adoring eyes: thus the world presented himself before me today - tnot so enigmatic as to frighten away human love, not so explicit as to put to sleep human wisdom - a good, human thing was the world to me today, this world of which so many evil things are said!
Friedrich Nietzsche
It is not the victory of science that distinguishes our nineteenth century, but the victory of scientific method over science.
Friedrich Nietzsche
What knows he of love who has not been obliged to despise just what he loved
Friedrich Nietzsche
Family love is messy, clinging, and of an annoying and repetitive pattern, like bad wallpaper.
Friedrich Nietzsche
One should hold fast one's heart; for when one letteth it go, how quickly doth one's head run away!
Friedrich Nietzsche
Music heals all forms of misery
Friedrich Nietzsche
At a certain place in Beethoven's Ninth Symphony, for example, he might feel that he is floating above the earth in a starry dome, with the dream of immortality in his heart; all the stars seem to glimmer around him, and the earth seems to sink ever deeper downwards.
Friedrich Nietzsche
In music the passions enjoy themselves.
Friedrich Nietzsche
And those who were seen dancing were thought to be insane by those who could not hear the music.
Friedrich Nietzsche
We should consider every day lost on which we have not danced at least once.
Friedrich Nietzsche
If something is to stay in the memory it must be burned in: only that which never ceases hurting stays in the memory.
Friedrich Nietzsche
How can a man become great if he does not feel in himself the force and the will to inflict great pain
Friedrich Nietzsche
And granted that your imperative, "living according to Nature," means actually the same as "living according to life"--how could you do DIFFERENTLY? Why should you make a principle out of what you yourselves are, and must be?
Friedrich Nietzsche
I love the forest.
Friedrich Nietzsche
You desire to LIVE "according to Nature"? Oh, you noble Stoics, what fraud of words! Imagine to yourselves a being like Nature, boundlessly extravagant, boundlessly indifferent, without purpose or consideration, without pity or justice, at once fruitful and barren and uncertain: imagine to yourselves INDIFFERENCE as a power—how COULD you live in accordance with such indifference? To live—is not that just endeavouring to be otherwise than this Nature? Is not living valuing, preferring, being unjust, being limited, endeavouring to be different? And granted that your imperative, "living according to Nature," means actually the same as "living according to life"—how could you do DIFFERENTLY? Why should you make a principle out of what you yourselves are, and must be? In reality, however, it is quite otherwise with you: while you pretend to read with rapture the canon of your law in Nature, you want something quite the contrary, you extraordinary stage-players and self-deluders! In your pride you wish to dictate your morals and ideals to Nature, to Nature herself, and to incorporate them therein; you insist that it shall be Nature "according to the Stoa," and would like everything to be made after your own image, as a vast, eternal glorification and generalism of Stoicism! With all your love for truth, you have forced yourselves so long, so persistently, and with such hypnotic rigidity to see Nature FALSELY, that is to say, Stoically, that you are no longer able to see it otherwise—and to crown all, some unfathomable superciliousness gives you the Bedlamite hope that BECAUSE you are able to tyrannize over yourselves—Stoicism is self-tyranny—Nature will also allow herself to be tyrannized over: is not the Stoic a PART of Nature?... But this is an old and everlasting story: what happened in old times with the Stoics still happens today, as soon as ever a philosophy begins to believe in itself. It always creates the world in its own image; it cannot do otherwise; philosophy is this tyrannical impulse itself, the most spiritual Will to Power, the will to "creation of the world," the will to the causa prima.
Friedrich Nietzsche
The eternal child. - We think that play and fairy tales belong to childhood:how shortsighted that is! As though we would want at any time of life tolive without play and fairy tales! We give these things other names, to besure, and feel differently about them, but precisely this is the evidencethat they are the same things - for the child too regards play as his workand fairy tales as his truth. The brevity of life ought to preserve us from apedantic division of life into different stages - as though each broughtsomething new - and a poet ought for once to present a man of twohundred: one, that is, who really does live without play and fairy tales.
Friedrich Nietzsche
Without the errors which are active in every psychical pleasure and displeasrue a humanity would never have come into existence--whose fundamental feeling is and remains that man is the free being in a world of unfreedom, the external miracle worker whether he does good or ill, the astonishing exception, the superbeast and almost-god, the meaning of creation which cannot be thought away, the solution of the cosmic riddle, the mighty ruler over nature and the despiser of it, the creature which calls its history world history!--Vanitas vanitatum homo.
Friedrich Nietzsche
Man has been reared by his errors: first he never saw himself other than imperfectly, second he attributed to himself imaginary qualities, third he felt himself in a false order of rank with animal and nature, fourth he continually invented new tables of values and for a time took each of them to be eternal and unconditional...If one deducts the effect of these four errors, one has also deducted away humanity, humaneness, and 'human dignity'.
Friedrich Nietzsche
Yet tell me, my brothers: if a goal for humanity is still lacking, is there not still lacking--humanity itself?
Friedrich Nietzsche
But thus do I counsel you, my friends: distrust all in whom the impulse to punish is powerful!
Friedrich Nietzsche
People have always wanted to 'improve' human beings; for the most part, this has been called morality.
Friedrich Nietzsche
But it is the same with man as with the tree. The more he seeks to rise into the height and light, the more vigorously do his roots struggle earthword, downword, into the dark, the deep - into evil.
Friedrich Nietzsche
The levelling of the European man is the great process which cannot be obstructed; it should even be accelerated. The necessity of cleaving gulfs, distance, order of rank, is therefore imperative —not the necessity of retarding this process. This homogenizing species requires justification as soon as it is attained: its justification is that it lies in serving a higher and sovereign race which stands upon the former and can raise itself this task only by doing this. Not merely a race of masters whose sole task is to rule, but a race with its own sphere of life, with an overflow of energy for beauty, bravery, culture, and manners, even for the most abstract thought; a yea-saying race that may grant itself every great luxury —strong enough to have no need of the tyranny of the virtue-imperative, rich enough to have no need of economy or pedantry; beyond good and evil; a hothouse for rare and exceptional plants.
Friedrich Nietzsche
The conviction reigns that it is only through the sacrifices and accomplishments of the ancestors that the tribe exists--and that one has to pay them back with sacrifices and accomplishments; one thus recognizes a debt that constantly grows greater, since these forebears never cease, in their continued existence as powerful spirits, to accord the tribe new advantages and new strength.
Friedrich Nietzsche
Like a last signpost to the other path, Napoleon appeared, the most isolated and late-born man there has even been, and in him the problem of the noble ideal as such made flesh--one might well ponder what kind of problem it is; Napoleon this synthesis of the inhuman and the superhuman
Friedrich Nietzsche
Some men are born posthumously.
Friedrich Nietzsche
Some men are born posthumously.
Friedrich Nietzsche
All truly great thoughts are conceived while walking.
Friedrich Nietzsche
Just as little as a reader today reads all of the individual words (let alone syllables) on a page—rather he picks about five words at random out of twenty and "guesses" at the meaning that probably belongs to these five words—just as little do we see a tree exactly and completely with reference to leaves, twigs, color, and form; it is so very much easier for us to simply improvise some approximation of a tree. Even in the midst of the strangest experiences we will still do the same: we make up the major part of the experience and can scarcely be forced not to contemplate some event as its "inventors." All this means: basically and from time immemorial we are—accustomed to lying. Or to put it more virtuously and hypocritically, in short, more pleasantly: one is much more of an artist than one knows.
Friedrich Nietzsche
The worst readers are those who behave like plundering troops: they take away a few things they can use, dirty and confound the remainder, and revile the whole.
Friedrich Nietzsche
Art as the single superior counter-force against all will to negation of life, art as the anti-Christian, anti-Buddhist, anti-Nihilist par excellence.
Friedrich Nietzsche
[N]othing is more easily corrupted than an artist.
Friedrich Nietzsche
That is an artist as I love artists, modest in his needs: he really wants only two things, his bread and his art - panem et Circen.
Friedrich Nietzsche
Art is essentially the affirmation, the blessing, and the deification of existence.
Friedrich Nietzsche