Friedrich Nietzsche Quotes
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We are praised or blamed, as the one or the other may be expedient, for displaying to advantage our power of discernment.
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Art is the proper task of life.
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The machine is impersonal, it takes the pride away from a piece of work, the individual merits and defects that go along with allwork that is not done by a machine--which is to say, its little bit of humanity.
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You say a good cause justifies any war; but I say a good war justifies any cause.
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Whatever a theologian regards as true must be false: there you have almost a criterion of truth.
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There are men who desire power simply for the sake of the happiness it will bring; these belong chiefly to political parties.
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All in all, punishment hardens and renders people more insensible; it concentrates; it increases the feeling of estrangement; it strengthens the power of resistance.
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What do we have in common with the rosebud, which trembles because a drop of dew lies on its body?
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Marriage: that I call the will of two to create the one who is more than those who created it.
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If you buy the why, the how is infinitely bearable.
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Those moralists, on the other hand, who, following in the footsteps of Socrates, offer the individual a morality of self-control and temperance as a means to his own advantage, as his personal key to happiness, are the exceptions.
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It is with artworks as it is with wine: it is much better when we do not need either one, when we stick with water, and when out of our own inner fire, the inner sweetness of our own soul, we turn the water over and over again into wine ourselves.
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The strongest and most evil spirits have to date advanced mankind the most: they always rekindled the sleeping passions - all orderly arranged society lulls the passions to sleep; they always reawakened the sense of comparison, of contradiction, of delight in the new, the adventurous, the untried; they compelled men to set opinion against opinion, ideal plan against ideal plan.
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My formula for greatness in a human being is amor fati: that one wants nothing to be different, not forward, not backward, not in all eternity. Not merely bear what is necessary, still less conceal it—all idealism is mendaciousness in the face of what is necessary—but love it.
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But every soil becomes finally exhausted, and the ploughshare of evil must always come once more.
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One cannot read the New Testament without acquired admiration for whatever it abuses not to speak of the "wisdom of this world," which an impudent wind bag tries to dispose of "by the foolishness of preaching."
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Our sense of the tragic waxes and wanes with our sensuality.
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I know no other way to associate with great tasks than as play: as a sign of greatness, this is an essential presupposition.
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What is evil?-Whatever springs from weakness.
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When, however, you have an enemy, then do not requite him good for evil: for that would shame him. Instead, prove that he did some good for you. And rather be angry than put to shame! And when you are cursed, I do not like it that you want to bless. Rather curse a little also! And if you are done a great injustice, then quickly add five small ones. Hideous to behold is he who is obsessed with an injustice.
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Antithesis is the narrow gateway through which error most prefers to worm its way towards truth.
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One must learn to love oneself with a wholesome and healthy love, so that one can bear to be with oneself and need not roam.
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As a genius of construction man raises himself far above the bee in the following way: whereas the bee builds with wax that he gathers from nature, man builds with the far more delicate conceptual material which he first has to manufacture from himself.
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One hears but one does not seek; one takes -- one does not ask who gives; a thought flashes up like lightning, it comes of necessity and unfalteringly formed.