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Quotes by Friedrich Nietzsche

The aphorism in which I am the first master among Germans, are the forms of eternity; my ambition is to say in ten sentences what everyone else says in a book - what everyone else does not say in a book.
– Friedrich Nietzsche
The best weapon against an enemy is another enemy.
– Friedrich Nietzsche
The desire to create continually is vulgar and betrays jealousy, envy, ambition. If one is something one really does not need to make anything --and one nonetheless does very much. There exists above the productive man a yet higher species.
– Friedrich Nietzsche
The doer alone learneth.
– Friedrich Nietzsche
The future influences the present just as much as the past.
– Friedrich Nietzsche
The growth of wisdom may be gauged exactly by the diminution of ill temper.
– Friedrich Nietzsche
The irrationality of a thing is no argument against its existence, rather a condition of it.
– Friedrich Nietzsche
The lie is a condition of life.
– Friedrich Nietzsche
The most common lie is that which one lies to himself; lying to others is relatively an exception.
– Friedrich Nietzsche
The most spiritual human beings, assuming they are the most courageous, also experience by far the most painful tragedies: but it is precisely for this reason that they honor life, because it brings against them its most formidable weapons.
– Friedrich Nietzsche
The newspaper reader says: this party will ruin itself if it makes errors like this. My higher politics says: a party which makes errors like this is already finished - it is no longer secure in its instincts.
– Friedrich Nietzsche
The press, the machine, the railway, the telegraph are premises whose thousand-year conclusion no one has yet dared to draw.
– Friedrich Nietzsche
The true man wants two things: danger and play. For that reason he wants woman, as the most dangerous plaything.
– Friedrich Nietzsche
The word Christianity is already a misunderstanding - in reality there has been only one Christian, and he died on the Cross.
– Friedrich Nietzsche
There are no eternal facts, as there are no absolute truths.
– Friedrich Nietzsche
There is in general good reason to suppose that in several respects the gods could all benefit from instruction by us human beings. We humans are - more humane.
– Friedrich Nietzsche
There is more wisdom in your body than in your deepest philosophy.
– Friedrich Nietzsche
This is the hardest of all: to close the open hand out of love, and keep modest as a giver.
– Friedrich Nietzsche
This secret spoke Life herself unto me: Behold, said she, I am that which must ever surpass itself.
– Friedrich Nietzsche
Thoughts are the shadows of our sensations - always darker, emptier, simpler than these.
– Friedrich Nietzsche
To die proudly when it is no longer possible to live proudly. Death of one's own free choice, death at the proper time, with a clear head and with joyfulness, consummated in the midst of children and witnesses: so that an actual leave-taking is possible while he who is leaving is still there.
– Friedrich Nietzsche
To exercise power costs effort and demands courage. That is why so many fail to assert rights to which they are perfectly entitled - because a right is a kind of power but they are too lazy or too cowardly to exercise it. The virtues which cloak these faults are called patience and forbearance.
– Friedrich Nietzsche
To forget one's purpose is the commonest form of stupidity.
– Friedrich Nietzsche
To give style to one's character - a great and rare art! He exercises it who surveys all that his nature presents in strength and weakness and then moulds it to an artistic plan until everything appears as art and reason, and even the weaknesses delight the eye.
– Friedrich Nietzsche
To use the same words is not a sufficient guarantee of understanding; one must use the same words for the same genus of inward experience; ultimately one must have one's experiences in common.
– Friedrich Nietzsche
Two great European narcotics, alcohol and Christianity.
– Friedrich Nietzsche
Undeserved praise causes more pangs of conscience later than undeserved blame, but probably only for this reason, that our power of judgment are more completely exposed by being over praised than by being unjustly underestimated.
– Friedrich Nietzsche
War has always been the grand sagacity of every spirit which has grown too inward and too profound; its curative power lies even in the wounds one receives.
– Friedrich Nietzsche
We have art in order not to die of the truth.
– Friedrich Nietzsche
We love life, not because we are used to living but because we are used to loving.
– Friedrich Nietzsche
We must be physicists in order to be creative since so far codes of values and ideals have been constructed in ignorance of physics or even in contradiction to physics.
– Friedrich Nietzsche
We should consider every day lost on which we have not danced at least once. And we should call every truth false which was not accompanied by at least one laugh.
– Friedrich Nietzsche
What does not destroy me, makes me stronger.
– Friedrich Nietzsche
What really raises one's indignation against suffering is not suffering intrinsically, but the senselessness of suffering.
– Friedrich Nietzsche
What someone is, begins to be revealed when his talent abates, when he stops showing us what he can do.
– Friedrich Nietzsche
What then in the last resort are the truths of mankind? They are the irrefutable errors of mankind.
– Friedrich Nietzsche
When a hundred men stand together, each of them loses his mind and gets another one.
– Friedrich Nietzsche
When marrying, ask yourself this question: Do you believe that you will be able to converse well with this person into your old age? Everything else in marriage is transitory.
– Friedrich Nietzsche
When one does away with oneself one does the most estimable thing possible: one thereby almost deserves to live.
– Friedrich Nietzsche
When one has a great deal to put into it a day has a hundred pockets.
– Friedrich Nietzsche
When one has finished building one's house, one suddenly realizes that in the process one has learned something that one really needed to know in the worst way - before one began.
– Friedrich Nietzsche
When one has not had a good father, one must create one.
– Friedrich Nietzsche
Whenever I climb I am followed by a dog called 'Ego'.
– Friedrich Nietzsche
Wit is the epitaph of an emotion.
– Friedrich Nietzsche
Without music, life would be a mistake.
– Friedrich Nietzsche
Woman was God's second mistake.
– Friedrich Nietzsche
Women are considered deep - why? Because one can never discover any bottom to them. Women are not even shallow.
– Friedrich Nietzsche
You have your way. I have my way. As for the right way, the correct way, and the only way, it does not exist.
– Friedrich Nietzsche
The most spiritual men, as the strongest, find their happiness where others would find their destruction: in the labyrinth, in hardness against themseleves and others, in experiments. Their joy is self-conquest. Difficult tasks are a priviledge to them; to play with burdens that crush others, a recreation. They are the most venerable kind of man: that does not preclude their being the most cheerful and the kindliest.
– Friedrich Nietzsche
Not that you lied to me but that I no longer believe you - that is what has distressed me.
– Friedrich Nietzsche
I am interested only in the relations of a people to the rearing of the individual man, and among the Greeks the conditions were unusually favourable for the development of the individual; not by any means owing to the goodness of the people, but because of the struggles of their evil instincts.With the help of favourable measures great individuals might be reared who would be both different from and higher than those who heretofore have owed their existence to mere chance. Here we may still be hopeful: in the rearing of exceptional men.
– Friedrich Nietzsche
And as for our future, one will hardly find us again on the paths of those Egyptian youths who endanger temples by night, embrace statues, and want by all means to unveil, uncover, and put into a bright light whatever is kept concealed for good reasons. No, this bad taste, this will to truth, to truth at any price, this youthful madness in the love of truth, have lost their charm for us: for that we are too experienced, too serious, too gay, too burned, too deep. We no longer believe that truth remains truth when the veils are withdrawn; we have lived enough not to believe this. Today we consider it a matter of decency not to wish to see everything naked, or to be present at everything, or to understand and know everything. Tout comprendre—est tout mépriser. [To understand all is to despise all.]
– Friedrich Nietzsche
One must have a good memory to be able to keep the promises one makes.
– Friedrich Nietzsche
The advantage of a bad memory is that one enjoys several times the same good things for the first time.
– Friedrich Nietzsche
The visionary lies to himself, the liar only to others.
– Friedrich Nietzsche
What else is love but understanding and rejoicing in the fact that another person lives, acts, and experiences otherwise than we do…?
– Friedrich Nietzsche
Digressions, objections, delight in mockery, carefree mistrust are signs of health; everything unconditional belongs in pathology.
– Friedrich Nietzsche
What is good? All that heightens the feeling of power in man, the will to power, power itself. What is bad? All that is born of weakness. What is happiness? The feeling that power is growing, that resistance is overcome.
– Friedrich Nietzsche
God is dead.
– Friedrich Nietzsche
Morality is herd instinct in the individual.
– Friedrich Nietzsche
To find everything profound - that is an inconvenient trait. It makes one strain one's eyes all the time, and in the end one finds more than one might have wished.
– Friedrich Nietzsche
We are always in our own company.
– Friedrich Nietzsche
The most perfidious way of harming a cause consists of defending it deliberately with faulty arguments.
– Friedrich Nietzsche
For believe me: the secret for harvesting from existence the greatest fruitfulness and greatest enjoyment is - to live dangerously.
– Friedrich Nietzsche
I would not know what the spirit of a philosopher might wish more to be than a good dancer.
– Friedrich Nietzsche
A thinker sees his own actions as experiments and questions--as attempts to find out something. Success and failure are for him answers above all.
– Friedrich Nietzsche
It is nobler to declare oneself wrong than to insist on being right - especially when one is right.
– Friedrich Nietzsche
Is man merely a mistake of God's? Or God merely a mistake of man's?
– Friedrich Nietzsche
Plato is boring.
– Friedrich Nietzsche
The thought of suicide is a great consolation: by means of it, one gets successfully through many a bad night.
– Friedrich Nietzsche
You say it is the good cause that hallows even war? I say unto you: it is the good war that hallows any cause.
– Friedrich Nietzsche
Words are but symbols for the relations of things to one another and to us nowhere do they touch upon absolute truth.
– Friedrich Nietzsche
Whoever does not have a good father should procure one.
– Friedrich Nietzsche
Whoever has provoked men to rage against him has always gained a party in his favor, too.
– Friedrich Nietzsche
When art dresses in worn-out material it is most easily recognized as art.
– Friedrich Nietzsche
Whatever is done for love always occurs beyond good and evil.
– Friedrich Nietzsche
What do I care about the purring of one who cannot love, like the cat?
– Friedrich Nietzsche
Today I love myself as I love my god: who could charge me with a sin today? I know only sins against my god but who knows my god?
– Friedrich Nietzsche
There is not enough religion in the world even to destroy religion.
– Friedrich Nietzsche
There is not enough love and goodness in the world to permit giving any of it away to imaginary beings.
– Friedrich Nietzsche
There is always some madness in love. But there is also always some reason in madness.
– Friedrich Nietzsche
There cannot be a God because if there were one, I could not believe that I was not He.
– Friedrich Nietzsche
There are various eyes. Even the Sphinx has eyes: and as a result there are various truths, and as a result there is no truth.
– Friedrich Nietzsche
There are people who want to make men's lives more difficult for no other reason than the chance it provides them afterwards to offer their prescription for alleviating life their Christianity, for instance.
– Friedrich Nietzsche
The world itself is the will to power - and nothing else! And you yourself are the will to power - and nothing else!
– Friedrich Nietzsche
The man of knowledge must be able not only to love his enemies but also to hate his friends.
– Friedrich Nietzsche
The essence of all beautiful art, all great art, is gratitude.
– Friedrich Nietzsche
The best author will be the one who is ashamed to become a writer.
– Friedrich Nietzsche
The bad gains respect through imitation, the good loses it especially in art.
– Friedrich Nietzsche
The abdomen is the reason why man does not readily take himself to be a god.
– Friedrich Nietzsche
That which does not kill us makes us stronger.
– Friedrich Nietzsche
Stupid as a man, say the women: cowardly as a woman, say the men. Stupidity in a woman is unwomanly.
– Friedrich Nietzsche
Some are made modest by great praise, others insolent.
– Friedrich Nietzsche
Rejoicing in our joy, not suffering over our suffering, makes someone a friend.
– Friedrich Nietzsche
Regarding life, the wisest men of all ages have judged alike: it is worthless.
– Friedrich Nietzsche
Mystical explanations are thought to be deep the truth is that they are not even shallow.
– Friedrich Nietzsche
Love is not consolation. It is light.
– Friedrich Nietzsche
It is the most sensual men who need to flee women and torment their bodies.
– Friedrich Nietzsche
It is not when truth is dirty, but when it is shallow, that the lover of knowledge is reluctant to step into its waters.
– Friedrich Nietzsche
It is good to express a thing twice right at the outset and so to give it a right foot and also a left one. Truth can surely stand on one leg, but with two it will be able to walk and get around.
– Friedrich Nietzsche