Friedrich Nietzsche Quotes
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Spirit is the life that itself cuts into life: with its own torment it increases its own knowledge. Did you already know that?
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We labour at our daily work more ardently and thoughtlessly than is necessary to sustain our life because it is even more necessary not to have leisure to stop and think. Haste is universal because everyone is in flight from himself.
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When I seek another word for 'music', I never find any other word than 'Venice'.
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My idea of paradise is a straight line to goal.
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There are preachers of death: and the earth is full of those to whom desistance from life must be preached.
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Man is very well defended against himself... The actual fortress is inaccessible, even invisible to him, unless his friends and enemies play the traitor and conduct him in by a secret path.
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Danger alone acquaints us with our own resources, our virtues, our armor and weapons, our spirit, and forces us to be strong.
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Watch them clamber, these swift monkeys! They clamber over one another and thus drag one another into the mud and the depth. They all want to get to the throne: that is their madness — as if happiness sat on the throne. Often, mud sits on the throne — and often the throne also on mud. Mad they all appear to me, clambering monkeys and overardent. Foul smells their idol, the cold monster: foul, they smell to me altogether, these idolators.
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I absolutely cannot see how one can later make up for having failed to go to a good school at the proper time. For this is what distinguishes the hard school as a good school from all others: that much is demanded; and sternly demanded; that the good, even the exceptional, is demanded as the norm; that praise is rare, that indulgence is nonexistent; that blame is apportioned sharply, objectively, without regard for talent or antecedents. What does one learn in a hard school? Obeying and commanding.
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Ye are ugly? Well then, my brethren, take the sublime about you, the mantle of the ugly!
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When virtue has slept it will arise more vigorous.
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It is only when we have ceased to be the followers of our followers that we comprehend how meaningless followers are.
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The vain.- We are like shop windows in which we are continually arranging, concealing or illuminating the supposed qualities other ascribe to us - in order to deceive ourselves.
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Possessions are usually diminished by possession.
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The man who sees little always sees less than there is to see; the man who hears badly always hears something more than there is to hear.
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One must have all the virtues to sleep well. Shall I bear false witness? Shall I commit adultery? Shall I covet my neighbor's maid? All that would go ill with good sleep.
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The highest type of free men should be sought where the highest resistance is constantly overcome: five steps from tyranny, close to the threshold of the danger of servitude.
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The broad effects which can be obtained by punishment in man and beast are the increase of fear, the sharpening of the sense of cunning, the mastery of the desires; so it is that punishment tames man, but does not make him 'better.'
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Nihilist and Christian. They rhyme [in German], and they do indeed do more than just rhyme.
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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.
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The God that Paul invented for himself, a God who 'reduced to absurdity' 'the wisdom of this world' (especially the two great enemies of superstition, philology and medicine), is in truth only an indication of Paul's resolute determination to accomplish that very thing himself: to give one's own will the name of God, Torah - that is essentially Jewish.
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Nobody thanks a witty man for politeness when he puts himself on a par with a society in which it would not be polite to show one's wit.
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We should turn our death into a celebration, even if only out of a malice towards life: towards the woman who wants to leave--us!
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All instincts that do not discharge themselves outwardly turn inward - this is what I call the internalization of man: thus it was that man first developed what was later called his 'soul.'