Friedrich Nietzsche Quotes
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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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What a person is begins to betray itself when his talent weakens--when he stops showing what he can do. Talent, too, is ornamentation, and ornamentation, too, is a hiding place.
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With regard to philosophical metaphysics, I always see increasing numbers who have attained to the negative goal, but as yet few who climb a few rungs backwards; one ought to look out, perhaps, over the last steps of the ladder, but not try to stand upon them.
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The great man fights the elements in his time that hinder his own greatness, in other words his own freedom and sincerity.
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There are expressions and bulls-eyes of the spirit, there are epigrams, a little handful of words, in which a whole culture, a whole society is suddenly crystallized.
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Virtues are dangerous as vices insofar as they are allowed to rule over one as authorities and not as qualities one develops oneself.
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It is the stillest words that bring the storm.
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Most thinkers write badly, because they communicate not only their thoughts, but also the thinking of them.
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To those human beings who are of any concern to me, I wish suffering, desolation, sickness, ill treatment, indignities, profound self-contempt, the torture of self-mistrust, and the wretchedness of the vanquished.
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What else is love but understanding and rejoicing in the fact that another person lives acts and experiences otherwise than we do?
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The Greeks, with their truly healthy culture, have once and for all justified philosophy simply by having engaged in it, and having engaged in it more fully than any other people.
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We talk about taking "pleasure in a thing": but in truth it is pleasure in ourselves, mediated by a thing.
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The irrationality of a thing is no argument against its existence, rather a condition of it.
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[Heraclitus] concluded that coming-to-be itself could not be anything evil or unjust.
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He who attains his ideal, precisely thereby surpasses it.
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What was silent in the father speaks in the son, and often I found in the son the unveiled secret of the father.
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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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Our shortcomings are the eyes with which we see the ideal.
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Mathematics would certainly have not come into existence if one had known from the beginning that there was in nature no exactly straight line, no actual circle, no absolute magnitude.
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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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Heroism--that is the disposition of a man who aspires to a goal compared to which he himself is wholly insignificant. Heroism is the good will to self-destruction.
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We 'conserve' nothing; neither do we want to return to any past periods; we are not by any means 'liberal'; we do not work for 'progress'; we do not need to plug up our ears against the sirens who in the market place sing of the future: their song about 'equal rights,' 'a free society,' 'no more masters and no servants' has no allure for us.
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And if a friend does you wrong, then say: "I forgive you what you have done to me; that you have done it to YOURSELF, however--how could I forgive that!
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Love as a passion – it is our European specialty – must absolutely be of noble origin; as is well known, its invention is due to the Provencal poet-cavaliers, those brilliant, ingenious men of the "gai saber," to whom Europe owes so much, and almost owes itself.