Friedrich Nietszche Quotes

“He who fights with monsters should be careful lest he thereby become a monster. And if thou gaze long into an abyss, the abyss will also gaze into thee.”

“Courage, however, and adventure, and delight in the uncertain, in the unattempted—COURAGE seemeth to me the entire primitive history of man.”

“I have departed from the house of the scholars, and the door have I also slammed behind me. Too long did my soul sit hungry at their table: not like them have I got the knack of investigating, as the knack of nut-cracking. Freedom do I love, and the air over fresh soil; rather would I sleep on ox-skins than on their honours and dignities.”

“It is true we love life; not because we are wont to live, but because we are wont to love. There is always some madness in love. But there is always, also, some method in madness.”

“Hearken rather, my brethren, to the voice of the healthy body; it is a more upright and pure voice. More uprightly and purely speaketh the healthy body, perfect and square-built; and it speaketh of the meaning of the earth.”

“Lift up your hearts, my brethren, high, higher! And do not forget your legs! Lift up also your legs, ye good dancers, and better still if ye stand upon your heads!”

“‘Zarathustra’ is my brother’s most personal work; it is the history of his most individual experiences, of his friendships, ideals, raptures, bitterest disappointments and sorrows. Above it all, however, there soars, transfiguring it, the image of his greatest hopes and remotest aims.”

“For fear—that is man’s original and fundamental feeling; through fear everything is explained, original sin and original virtue.”

“My shadow calleth me? What matter about my shadow! Let it run after me! I—run away from it.”

“Call me however what thou wilt—I am who I must be. I call myself Zarathustra.”

“In my domain shall no one come to grief; my cave is a good haven. And best of all would I like to put every sorrowful one again on firm land and firm legs.”

“Mine eagle is awake, and like me honoureth the sun. With eagle-talons doth it grasp at the new light. Ye are my proper animals; I love you. But still do I lack my proper men!”

“He whom the flame of jealousy encompasseth, turneth at last, like the scorpion, the poisoned sting against himself.”

“Is not wounded vanity the mother of all tragedies? Where, however, pride is wounded, there there groweth up something better than pride.”

“For nothing is more precious to me, and rarer, than honesty.”

“I became weary of the poets, of the old and of the new: superficial are they all unto me, and shallow seas. They did not think sufficiently into the depth; therefore their feeling did not reach to the bottom.”

“Ah, my friends! I should have something more to say unto you! I should have something more to give unto you! Why do I not give it? Am I then a niggard?”

“Of all that is written, I love only what a person hath written with his blood. Write with blood, and thou wilt find that blood is spirit.”

“Ye are only bridges: may higher ones pass over upon you! Ye signify steps: so do not upbraid him who ascendeth beyond you into HIS height!”

“Let thy virtue be too high for the familiarity of names, and if thou must speak of it, be not ashamed to stammer about it.”

“Of all that is written, I love only what a person hath written with his blood. Write with blood, and thou wilt find that blood is spirit.”

“Be not virtuous beyond your powers! And seek nothing from yourselves opposed to probability! Walk in the footsteps in which your fathers’ virtue hath already walked! How would ye rise high, if your fathers’ will should not rise with you?”

“The greater part of the conscious thinking of a philosopher is secretly influenced by his instincts, and forced into definite channels.”

“To talk much about oneself may also be a means of concealing oneself.”

“Objection, evasion, joyous distrust, and love of irony are signs of health; everything absolute belongs to pathology.”

“Love brings to light the noble and hidden qualities of a lover—his rare and exceptional traits: it is thus liable to be deceptive as to his normal character.”

“It seems that in order to inscribe themselves upon the heart of humanity with everlasting claims, all great things have first to wander about the earth as enormous and awe-inspiring caricatures.”

“HOW COULD anything originate out of its opposite? For example, truth out of error?

“The fundamental belief of metaphysicians is THE BELIEF IN ANTITHESES OF VALUES.”

“In spite of all the value which may belong to the true, the positive, and the unselfish, it might be possible that a higher and more fundamental value for life generally should be assigned to pretence, to the will to delusion, to selfishness, and cupidity. It might even be possible that WHAT constitutes the value of those good and respected things, consists precisely in their being insidiously related, knotted, and crocheted to these evil and apparently opposed things—perhaps even in being essentially identical with them.”

“The sense of the tragic increases and declines with sensuousness.”

“The belly is the reason why man does not so readily take himself for a God.”

“TO RECOGNISE UNTRUTH AS A CONDITION OF LIFE; that is certainly to impugn the traditional ideas of value in a dangerous manner, and a philosophy which ventures to do so, has thereby alone placed itself beyond good and evil.”

“The spectacle of the Tartuffery of old Kant, equally stiff and decent, with which he entices us into the dialectic by-ways that lead (more correctly mislead) to his “categorical imperative”—makes us fastidious ones smile, we who find no small amusement in spying out the subtle tricks of old moralists and ethical preachers.”

“It has gradually become clear to me what every great philosophy up till now has consisted of—namely, the confession of its originator, and a species of involuntary and unconscious auto-biography.”

“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.”

“A living thing seeks above all to DISCHARGE its strength—life itself is WILL TO POWER; self-preservation is only one of the indirect and most frequent RESULTS thereof.”

“Insanity in individuals is something rare—but in groups, parties, nations, and epochs it is the rule.”

“Around the hero everything becomes a tragedy; around the demigod everything becomes a satyr-play; and around God everything becomes—what? perhaps a ‘world’?”

“Not only our reason, but also our conscience, truckles to our strongest impulse—the tyrant in us.”

“Poets act shamelessly towards their experiences: they exploit them.”

“As Friedrich Nietzsche said, ‘Man is the cruelest animal.’ This is a fact of life and it is not changed by all the abuse and harassment policies in all of Silicon Valley. Progressives will never understand this.

“For spirit alone does not make noble. Rather, there must be something to ennoble the spirit. What then is required? Blood.”

“There is only nobility of birth, only nobility of blood. When one speaks of “aristocrats of the spirit,” reasons are usually not lacking for concealing something.”

“The Beautiful exists just as little as the True. In every case it is a question of the conditions of preservation of a certain type of man: thus the herd-man will experience the value feeling of the True in different things than will the Overman.”

“The states in which we infuse a transfiguration and a fullness into things and poetize about them until they reflect back our fullness and joy in life...three elements principally: sexuality, intoxication and cruelty - all belonging to the oldest festal joys.”

“The stronger becomes master of the weaker, in so far as the latter cannot assert its degree of independence - here there is no mercy, no forbearance, even less a respect for ‘laws.’ ”

“If there is something to pardon in everything, there is also something to condemn.”

“The mechanistic world is imagined only as sight and touch imagine a world (as “moved”) --so as to be calculable-- thus causal unities are invented, “things” (atoms) whose effect remains constant (--transference of the false concept of subject to the concept of the atom).”

“A declaration of war on the masses by Higher Men is needed!... Everything that makes soft and effeminate, that serves the end of the People or the Feminine, works in favor of Universal Suffrage, i.e. the domination of the Inferior Men. But we should take reprisal and bring this whole affair to light and the bar of judgment.”

“The rights a man arrogates to himself are related to the duties he imposes on himself, to the tasks to which he feels equal. The great majority of men have no right to existence, but are a misfortune to higher men.”

“Of what is great one must either be silent or speak with greatness. With greatness--that means cynically and with innocence.”

“In order to sustain the theory of a mechanistic world, therefore, we always have to stipulate to what extent we are employing two fictions: the concept of motion (taken from our sense language) and the concept of the atom (=unity, deriving from our psychical “experience”): the mechanistic theory presupposes a sense prejudice and a psychological prejudice.”

“My idea is that every specific body strives to become master over all space and to extend its force (--its will to power:) and to thrust back all that resists its extension. But it continually encounters similar efforts on the part of other bodies and ends by coming to an arrangement (“union”) with those of them that are sufficiently related to it: thus they then conspire together for power. And the process goes on.”

“The possibility has been established for the production of...a Master Race, the future “masters of the earth”...made to endure for millennia - a higher kind of men who... employ democratic Europe as their most pliant and supple instrument for getting hold of the destinies of the earth.”

“To those human beings who are of any concern to me I wish suffering, desolation, sickness, ill-treatment, indignities - I wish that they should not remain unfamiliar with profound self-contempt, the torture of self-mistrust, the wretchedness of the vanquished.”

“It is a self-deception of philosophers and moralists to imagine that they escape decadence by opposing it. That is beyond their will; and, however little they acknowledge it, one later discovers that they were among the most powerful promoters of decadence.”

“The will to power is not a being, not a becoming, but a pathos --the most elemental fact from which a becoming and effecting first emerge-”

“Morality is: the mediocre are worth more than the exceptions... I abhore Christianity with a deadly hatred.”

“The homogenizing of European man... requires a justification: it lies in serving a higher sovereign species that stands upon the former which can raise itself to its task only by doing this.”

“Not merely a Master Race whose sole task is to rule, but a Race with its own sphere of life, with an excess of strength... strong enough to have no need of the tyranny of the virtue-imperative.”

“I want to have goblins about me, for I am courageous.”

“A man as he ought to be: that sounds to us as insipid as ‘a tree as it ought to be.’ ”