Friedrich Nietzsche Quotes
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I call a lie: wanting not to see something one does see, wanting not to see something as one sees it... The most common lie is the lie one tells to oneself; lying to others is relatively the exception.
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He that prefers the beautiful to the useful in life will, undoubtedly, like children who prefer sweetmeats to bread, destroy his digestion and acquire a very fretful outlook on the world.
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Without music, life would be a mistake... I would only believe in a God who knew how to dance.
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Every tradition grows ever more venerable - the more remote its origin, the more confused that origin is. The reverence due to it increases from generation to generation. The tradition finally becomes holy and inspires awe.
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There are no eternal facts, as there are no absolute truths.
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If you know the why, you can live any how.
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In a man devoted to knowledge, pity seems almost ridiculous, like delicate hands on a cyclops.
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Whoever has overthrown an existing law of custom has hitherto always first been accounted a bad man: but when, as did happen, the law could not afterwards be reinstated and this fact was accepted, the predicate gradually changed: - history treats almost exclusively of these bad men who subsequently became good men!
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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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It is certainly not the least charm of a theory that it is refutable; it is precisely thereby that it attracts the more subtle minds. It seems that the hundred-times-refuted theory of the "free will" owes its persistence to this charm alone; some one is always appearing who feels himself strong enough to refute it.
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Mastery has been achieved when one neither makes a mistake nor hesitates in the performance.
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How do you expect to learn to dance when you have not even learned to walk! And above the dancer is still the flyer and his bliss.
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That which an age considers evil is usually an unseasonable echo of what was formerly considered good - the atavism of an old ideal.
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I do not give alms; I am not poor enough for that.
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How good music and bad reasons sound when one marches against an enemy.
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I awoke you from your sleep because I saw that you were having a nightmare. And now you are cross and say to me: "What are we supposed to do now? Everything is still night!" You ingrates! You should go to sleep again and dream better.
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Our greatest experiences are our quietest moments.
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To what extent can truth endure incorporation? That is the question; that is the experiment.
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In the end we are always rewarded for our good will, our patience, fair-mindedness, and gentleness with what is strange.
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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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The greatest events-they are not our loudest but our stillest hours.
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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 call yourself free? I want to hear your ruling thought and not that you have escaped a yoke. Are you such a one as was permitted to escape a yoke? There are some who threw away their ultimate worth when they threw away their servitude. Free from what? What is that to Zarathustra! But your eyes should announce to me brightly: free for what?
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For one thing is needful: that a human being should attain satisfaction with himself, whether it be by means of this or that poetry or art; only then is a human being at all tolerable to behold. Whoever is dissatisfied with himself is constantly ready for revenge, and we others will be his victims, if only by having to endure his ugly sight.