Friedrich Nietzsche Quotes - Page 2

Today as always, men fall into two groups: slaves and free men. Whoever does not have two-thirds of his day for himself, is a slave, whatever he may be: a statesman, a businessman, an official, or a scholar.

One should hold fast one's heart; for when one letteth it go, how quickly doth one's head run away!

It is true, there could be a metaphysical world; the absolute possibility of it is hardly to be disputed. We behold all things through the human head and cannot cut off this head; while the question nonetheless remains what of the world would still be there if one had cut it off.

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!

I am a wanderer and mountain-climber, said he to his heart, I love not the plains, and it seemeth I cannot long sit still.And whatever may still overtake me as fate and experience—a wandering will be therein, and a mountain-climbing: in the end one experienceth only oneself.

Alas, where in the world have there been greater follies than with the compassionate?And what in the world has caused more suffering than the follies of the compassionate?Woe to all lovers who cannot surmount pity!Thus spoke the Devil to me once: Even God has his Hell: it is his love for man.And I lately heard him say these words: God is dead; God has died of his pity for man.

The individual has always had to struggle to keep from being overwhelmed by the tribe. If you try it, you will be lonely often, and sometimes frightened. But no price is too high to pay for the privilege of owning yourself.

Freedom is the will to be responsible for ourselves.

Women can form a friendship with a man very well but to preserve it a slight physical antipathy most probably helps.

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.

At times one remains faithful to a cause only because its opponents do not cease to be insipid.

In large States public education will always be extremely mediocre, for the same reason that in large kitchens the cooking is at best only mediocre.

The man who fights too long against dragons becomes a dragon himself.

Water is sufficient...the spirit moves over water.

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.

In some remote corner of the universe, poured out and glittering among innumerable solar systems, there once was a star on which clever animals invented knowledge.

Be careful when you cast out your demons that you don’t throw away the best of yourself.

Better know nothing than half-know many things.

Two great European narcotics, alcohol and Christianity.

The final reward of the dead - to die no more

A good writer possesses not only his own spirit but also the spirit of his friends.

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: I have no pity for them, because I wish them the only thing that can prove today whether one is worth anything or not—that one endures.

The child is innocence and forgetting, a new beginning, a game, a self-rolling wheel, a first movement, a sacred Yes.

The higher we soar the smaller we appear to those who cannot fly.

We ought to face our destiny with courage.

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

He who writes in blood and aphorisms does not want to be read, he wants to be learned by heart.

Without forgetting it is quite impossible to live at all.

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.

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.

Weariness, which seeketh to get to the ultimate with one leap, with a death-leap; a poor ignorant weariness, unwilling even to will any longer: that created all Gods and backworlds.

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!

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.

Words are but symbols for the relations of things to one another and to us; nowhere do they touch upon absolute truth.... Through words and concepts we shall never reach beyond the wall off relations, to some sort of fabulous primal ground of things.

Madness is something rare in individuals — but in groups, parties, peoples, and ages, it is the rule.

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

It breaks my heart. Better than your words, your eye tells me all your peril.You are not yet free, you still search for freedom. Your search has fatigued you and made you too wakeful.You long for the open heights, your soul thirsts for the stars. But your bad instincts too thirst for freedom. Your fierce dogs long for freedom; they bark for joy in their cellar when your spirit aspires to break open all prisons.To me you are still a prisoner who imagines freedom: ah, such prisoners of the soul become clever, but also deceitful and base.

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.

The discerning one walketh amongst men as amongst animals.

One must not let oneself be misled: they say 'Judge not!' but they send to Hell everything that stands in their way.

Let us face ourselves. We are Hyperboreans!

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.

Everything the State says is a lie, and everything it has it has stolen.

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.

It is not the strength but the duration of great sentiments that makes great men.

We have to be careful that in throwing out the devil, we don't throw out the best part of ourselves.

Should not the giver be thankful that the receiver received? Is not giving a need? Is not receiving mercy?

We no longer have a sufficiently high estimate of ourselves when we communicate. Our true experiences are not garrulous. They could not communicate themselves if they wanted to: they lack words. We have already grown beyond whatever we have words for. In all talking there lies a grain of contempt. Speech, it seems, was devised only for the average medium, communicable. The speaker has already vulgarized himself by speaking.

The images of myth must be the daemonic guardians, omnipresent and unnoticed, which protect the growth of the young mind, and guide man's interpretation of his life and struggles.

A politician divides mankind into two classes: tools and enemies.

None of the people have any real interest in a science, who only begin to be enthusiastic about it when they themselves have made discoveries in it.

In the true man there is a child concealed - who wants to play.

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

State is the name of the coldest of all cold monsters. Coldly it lies; and this lie slips from its mouth: 'I, the state, am the people.

Truth is a mobile army of metaphors, metonyms, anthropomorphisms, in short a sum of human relations which have been subjected to poetic and rhetorical intensification, translation and decoration […]; truths are illusions of which we have forgotten that they are illusions, metaphors which have become worn by frequent use and have lost all sensuous vigour […]. Yet we still do not know where the drive to truth comes from, for so far we have only heard about the obligation to be truthful which society imposes in order to exist"from, "On Truth and Lying in a Non-Moral Sense".

Whoever extolleth him as a God of love, doth not think highly enough of love itself. Did not that God want also to be judge? But the loving one loveth irrespective of reward and requital.

For every man there exists a bait which he cannot resist swallowing.

Some men are born posthumously.

Genius too does nothing but learn first how to lay bricks then how to build, and continually seek for material and continually form itself around it.Every activity of man is amazingly complicated, not only that of the genius: but none is a ‘miracle.

Our crime against criminals lies in the fact that we treat them like rascals.