Friedrich Nietzsche Quotes
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Human existence basically is──a never to be completed imperfect tense.
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Good manners disappear in proportion as the influence of a Court and an exclusive aristocracy lessens; this decrease can be plainly observed from decade to decade by those who have an eye for public behavior, which grows visibly.
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The noble caste was in the beginning always the barbarian caste: their superiority lay, not in their physical strength, but primarily in their psychical - they were more complete human beings.
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Out of love, women become entirely what it is that they are in the imaginations of the men who love them.
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There is not enough love and goodness in the world to permit giving any of it away to imaginary beings.
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Your educators can only be your liberators.
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Great things demand that we either remain silent about them or speak in a great manner: in a great manner, that is-cynically and with innocence.
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My conception of freedom. — The value of a thing sometimes does not lie in that which one attains by it, but in what one pays for it — what it costs us. Liberal institutions cease to be liberal as soon as they are attained: later on, there are no worse and no more thorough injurers of freedom than liberal institutions.
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It is, indeed, a fact that, in the midst of society and sociability every evil inclination has to place itself under such great restraint, don so many masks, lay itself so often on the procrustean bed of virtue, that one could well speak of a martyrdom of the evil man. In solitude all this falls away. He who is evil is at his most evil in solitude: which is where he is at his best - and thus to the eye of him who sees everywhere only a spectacle also at his most beautiful.
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Every man who has declared that some other man is an ass or a scoundrel, gets angry when the other man conclusively shows that the assertion was erroneous.
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For the purpose of knowledge we must know how to make use of the inward current which draws us towards a thing, and also of the current which after a time draws us away from it.
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The wittiest authors evoke a barely perceptible smile.
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One who dresses in rags that have been washed clean dresses cleanly to be sure, but raggedly nonetheless.
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People to whom their daily life appears too empty and monotonous easily grow religious; this is comprehensible and excusable, only they have no right to demand religious sentiments from those whose daily life is not empty and monotonous.
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Our greatest experiences are our quietest moments.
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The problem of culture is seldom grasped correctly. The goal of a culture is not the greatest possible happiness of a people, noris it the unhindered development of all their talents; instead, culture shows itself in the correct proportion of these developments. Its aim points beyond earthly happiness: the production of great works is the aim of culture.
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God is a gross answer, an indelicacy against us thinkers- at bottom merely a gross prohibition for us: you shall not think!
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Nothing is more pathological in our pathological modernity than this disease of Christian pity.
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To live alone one must be a beast or a god, says Aristotle. Leaving out the third case: one must be both - a philosopher.
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Men have hitherto treated women like birds which have strayed down to them from the heights; as something more delicate, more fragile, more savage, stranger, sweeter, soulful--but as something which has to be caged up so that it shall not fly away.
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With sturdy shoulders, space stands opposing all its weight to nothingness. Where space is, there is being.
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Have you heard of that madman who lit a lantern in the bright morning hours, ran to the market place, and cried incessantly, I seek God! I seek God! As many of those who do not believe in God were standing around just then, he provoked much laughter... Whither is God, he cried. I shall tell you. We have killed him - you and I. All of us are murderers.... God is dead. God remains dead. And we have killed him.
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It is always consoling to think of suicide: in that way one gets through many a bad night.
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Because of the way that myth takes it for granted that miracles are always happening, the waking life of a mythically inspired people - the ancient Greeks, for instance - more closely resembles a dream than it does the waking world of a scientifically disenchanted thinker.