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Quotes by Friedrich Nietzsche


In individuals, insanity is rare; but in groups, parties, nations and epochs, it is the rule.
– Friedrich Nietzsche

Sometimes people don't want to hear the truth because they don't want their illusions destroyed.
– Friedrich Nietzsche
A casual stroll through the lunatic asylum shows that faith does not prove anything.
– Friedrich Nietzsche
A great value of antiquity lies in the fact that its writings are the only ones that modern men still read with exactness.
– Friedrich Nietzsche
A letter is an unannounced visit, the postman the agent of rude surprises. One ought to reserve an hour a week for receiving letters and afterwards take a bath.
– Friedrich Nietzsche
A pair of powerful spectacles has sometimes sufficed to cure a person in love.
– Friedrich Nietzsche
A subject for a great poet would be God's boredom after the seventh day of creation.
– Friedrich Nietzsche
A woman may very well form a friendship with a man, but for this to endure, it must be assisted by a little physical antipathy.
– Friedrich Nietzsche
After coming into contact with a religious man I always feel I must wash my hands.
– Friedrich Nietzsche
Ah, women. They make the highs higher and the lows more frequent.
– Friedrich Nietzsche
All credibility, all good conscience, all evidence of truth come only from the senses.
– Friedrich Nietzsche
All in all, punishment hardens and renders people more insensible; it concentrates; it increases the feeling of estrangement; it strengthens the power of resistance.
– Friedrich Nietzsche
All of life is a dispute over taste and tasting.
– Friedrich Nietzsche
All sciences are now under the obligation to prepare the ground for the future task of the philosopher, which is to solve the problem of value, to determine the true hierarchy of values.
– 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
All truly great thoughts are conceived by walking.
– Friedrich Nietzsche
All truth is simple... is that not doubly a lie?
– Friedrich Nietzsche
Altered opinions do not alter a man's character (or do so very little); but they do illuminate individual aspects of the constellation of his personality which with a different constellation of opinions had hitherto remained dark and unrecognizable.
– Friedrich Nietzsche
Although the most acute judges of the witches and even the witches themselves, were convinced of the guilt of witchery, the guilt nevertheless was non-existent. It is thus with all guilt.
– Friedrich Nietzsche
An artist has no home in Europe except in Paris.
– Friedrich Nietzsche
And be on they guard against the good and the just! They would fain curcify those who devise their own virtue - they hate the lonesome ones.
– Friedrich Nietzsche
Arrogance on the part of the meritorious is even more offensive to us than the arrogance of those without merit: for merit itself is offensive.
– Friedrich Nietzsche
Art is not merely an imitation of the reality of nature, but in truth a metaphysical supplement to the reality of nature, placed alongside thereof for its conquest.
– Friedrich Nietzsche
Art is the proper task of life.
– Friedrich Nietzsche
Art raises its head where creeds relax.
– Friedrich Nietzsche
At bottom every man knows well enough that he is a unique being, only once on this earth; and by no extraordinary chance will such a marvelously picturesque piece of diversity in unity as he is, ever be put together a second time.
– Friedrich Nietzsche
Blessed are the forgetful: for they get the better even of their blunders.
– Friedrich Nietzsche
Can an ass be tragic? To perish under a burden one can neither bear nor throw off? The case of the philosopher.
– Friedrich Nietzsche
Character is determined more by the lack of certain experiences than by those one has had.
– Friedrich Nietzsche
Christianity gave Eros poison to drink; he did not die of it but degenerated into vice.
– Friedrich Nietzsche
Convictions are more dangerous foes of truth than lies.
– Friedrich Nietzsche
Courageous, untroubled, mocking and violent-that is what Wisdom wants us to be. Wisdom is a woman, and loves only a warrior.
– Friedrich Nietzsche
Distrust everyone in whom the impulse to punish is powerful!
– Friedrich Nietzsche
Does wisdom perhaps appear on the earth as a raven which is inspired by the smell of carrion?
– Friedrich Nietzsche
Egoism is the very essence of a noble soul.
– Friedrich Nietzsche
Enduring habits I hate... Yes, at the very bottom of my soul I feel grateful to all my misery and bouts of sickness and everything about me that is imperfect, because this sort of thing leaves me with a hundred backdoors through which I can escape from enduring habits.
– Friedrich Nietzsche
'Evil men have no songs.' How is it that the Russians have songs?
– Friedrich Nietzsche
Existence really is an imperfect tense that never becomes a present.
– Friedrich Nietzsche
Experience, as a desire for experience, does not come off. We must not study ourselves while having an experience.
– Friedrich Nietzsche
Extreme positions are not succeeded by moderate ones, but by contrary extreme positions.
– Friedrich Nietzsche
Faith: not wanting to know what is true.
– Friedrich Nietzsche
Fanatics are picturesque, mankind would rather see gestures than listen to reasons.
– Friedrich Nietzsche
Fear is the mother of morality.
– Friedrich Nietzsche
For art to exist, for any sort of aesthetic activity to exist, a certain physiological precondition is indispensable: intoxication.
– Friedrich Nietzsche
For the woman, the man is a means: the end is always the child.
– Friedrich Nietzsche
God is a thought who makes crooked all that is straight.
– Friedrich Nietzsche
Great indebtedness does not make men grateful, but vengeful; and if a little charity is not forgotten, it turns into a gnawing worm.
– Friedrich Nietzsche
He that humbleth himself wishes to be exalted.
– Friedrich Nietzsche
He who cannot give anything away cannot feel anything either.
– Friedrich Nietzsche
He who has a strong enough why can bear almost any how.
– Friedrich Nietzsche
He who has a why to live can bear almost any how.
– Friedrich Nietzsche
He who laughs best today, will also laughs last.
– 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
Hope in reality is the worst of all evils because it prolongs the torments of man.
– Friedrich Nietzsche
I assess the power of a will by how much resistance, pain, torture it endures and knows how to turn to its advantage.
– Friedrich Nietzsche
I cannot believe in a God who wants to be praised all the time.
– Friedrich Nietzsche
I do not know what the spirit of a philosopher could more wish to be than a good dancer. For the dance is his ideal, also his fine art, finally also the only kind of piety he knows, his divine service.
– Friedrich Nietzsche
I love those who do not know how to live for today.
– Friedrich Nietzsche
I wish to be at any time hereafter only a yea-sayer!
– Friedrich Nietzsche
I would believe only in a God that knows how to Dance.
– Friedrich Nietzsche
Idleness is the parent of psychology.
– Friedrich Nietzsche
If a woman possesses manly virtues one should run away from her; and if she does not possess them she runs away from herself.
– Friedrich Nietzsche
In every real man a child is hidden that wants to play.
– Friedrich Nietzsche
In heaven, all the interesting people are missing.
– Friedrich Nietzsche
In large states public education will always be mediocre, for the same reason that in large kitchens the cooking is usually bad.
– Friedrich Nietzsche
In music the passions enjoy themselves.
– Friedrich Nietzsche
In the consciousness of the truth he has perceived, man now sees everywhere only the awfulness or the absurdity of existence and loathing seizes him.
– Friedrich Nietzsche
Is man one of God's blunders? Or is God one of man's blunders?
– Friedrich Nietzsche
It is not a lack of love, but a lack of friendship that makes unhappy marriages.
– Friedrich Nietzsche
It says nothing against the ripeness of a spirit that it has a few worms.
– Friedrich Nietzsche
Judgments, value judgments concerning life, for or against, can in the last resort never be true: they possess value only as symptoms, they come into consideration only as symptoms - in themselves such judgments are stupidities.
– Friedrich Nietzsche
Let us beware of saying that death is the opposite of life. The living being is only a species of the dead, and a very rare species.
– Friedrich Nietzsche
Love is blind; friendship closes its eyes.
– Friedrich Nietzsche
Love matches, so called, have illusion for their father and need for their mother.
– Friedrich Nietzsche
Madness is rare in individuals - but in groups, parties, nations, and ages it is the rule.
– Friedrich Nietzsche
Many a man fails as an original thinker simply because his memory it too good.
– Friedrich Nietzsche
Many are stubborn in pursuit of the path they have chosen, few in pursuit of the goal.
– Friedrich Nietzsche
Necessity is not an established fact, but an interpretation.
– Friedrich Nietzsche
No one lies so boldly as the man who is indignant.
– Friedrich Nietzsche
Not by wrath does one kill, but by laughter.
– Friedrich Nietzsche
Not necessity, not desire - no, the love of power is the demon of men. Let them have everything - health, food, a place to live, entertainment - they are and remain unhappy and low-spirited: for the demon waits and waits and will be satisfied.
– Friedrich Nietzsche
Nothing has been purchased more dearly than the little bit of reason and sense of freedom which now constitutes our pride.
– Friedrich Nietzsche
Nothing is beautiful, only man: on this piece of naivete rests all aesthetics, it is the first truth of aesthetics. Let us immediately add its second: nothing is ugly but degenerate man - the domain of aesthetic judgment is therewith defined.
– Friedrich Nietzsche
Of all that is written, I love only what a person has written with his own blood.
– Friedrich Nietzsche
On the mountains of truth you can never climb in vain: either you will reach a point higher up today, or you will be training your powers so that you will be able to climb higher tomorrow.
– Friedrich Nietzsche
Once spirit was God, then it became man, and now it is even becoming mob.
– Friedrich Nietzsche
One has to pay dearly for immortality; one has to die several times while one is still alive.
– Friedrich Nietzsche
One may sometimes tell a lie, but the grimace that accompanies it tells the truth.
– Friedrich Nietzsche
One must still have chaos in oneself to be able to give birth to a dancing star.
– Friedrich Nietzsche
One often contradicts an opinion when what is uncongenial is really the tone in which it was conveyed.
– Friedrich Nietzsche
Our treasure lies in the beehive of our knowledge. We are perpetually on the way thither, being by nature winged insects and honey gatherers of the mind.
– Friedrich Nietzsche
Out of damp and gloomy days, out of solitude, out of loveless words directed at us, conclusions grow up in us like fungus: one morning they are there, we know not how, and they gaze upon us, morose and gray. Woe to the thinker who is not the gardener but only the soil of the plants that grow in him.
– Friedrich Nietzsche
People who have given us their complete confidence believe that they have a right to ours. The inference is false, a gift confers no rights.
– Friedrich Nietzsche
Perhaps I know best why it is man alone who laughs; he alone suffers so deeply that he had to invent laughter.
– Friedrich Nietzsche
Plato was a bore.
– Friedrich Nietzsche
Precisely the least, the softest, lightest, a lizard's rustling, a breath, a flash, a moment - a little makes the way of the best happiness.
– Friedrich Nietzsche
Shared joys make a friend, not shared sufferings.
– Friedrich Nietzsche
Sleeping is no mean art: for its sake one must stay awake all day.
– Friedrich Nietzsche
Success has always been a great liar.
– Friedrich Nietzsche
The kingdom of Heaven is a condition of the heart - not something that comes upon the earth or after death.
– Friedrich Nietzsche