Friedrich Nietzsche Quotes
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A casual stroll through the lunatic asylum shows that faith does not prove anything.
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Art is the highest task and the proper metaphysical activity of this life.
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Antithesis is the narrow gateway through which error most prefers to worm its way towards truth.
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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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Perhaps I know best why it is man alone who laughs; he alone suffers so deeply that he had to invent laughter.
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When we have a great goal we are superior even to justice, not merely to our deeds and our judges.
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At every step one has to wrestle for truth; one has to surrender for it almost everything to which the heart, to which our love, our trust in life, cling otherwise. That requires greatness of soul: the service of truth is the hardest service. What does it mean, after all, to have integrity in matters of the spirit? That one is severe against one's heart...that one makes of every Yes and No a matter of conscience.
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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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To die proudly when it is no longer possible to live proudly. Death of one's own free choice, death at the proper time, with a clear head and with joyfulness, consummated in the midst of children and witnesses: so that an actual leave-taking is possible while he who is leaving is still there.
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A man unconsciously imagines that where he is strong, where he feels most thoroughly alive, the element of his freedom must lie.
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Against war one might say that it makes the victor stupid and the vanquished malicious. In its favor, that in producing these two effects it barbarizes, and so makes the combatants more natural. For culture it is a sleep or a wintertime, and man emerges from it stronger for good and for evil.
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My genius is in my nostrils.
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The purpose of punishment is to improve those who do the punishing--that is the final recourse of those who support punishment.
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A few hours of mountain climbing make a blackguard and a saint two rather similar creatures.
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It is a distinction to have many virtues, but a hard lot.
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The people we have employed in an undertaking that has turned out badly should be doubly rewarded.
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I could dispense with nothing when I created the superman. His seed still carries all your evil and falsehood, your lies and yourignorance.
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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.
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Ist das Leben nicht hundert Mal zu kurz, sich in ihm- zu langweilen?
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But say, my brothers, what can the child do that even the lion could not do? Why must the preying lion still become a child? The child is innocence and forgetting, a new beginning, a sacred 'Yes.' For the game of creation, my brothers, a sacred 'Yes' is needed: the spirit now wills his own will, and he who had been lost to the world now conquers his own world.
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The golden fleece of self-sufficiency guards against cudgel- blows but not against pin-pricks.
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He who knows himself to be profound endeavors to be clear; he who would like to appear profound to the crowd endeavors to be obscure.
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When one speaks of humanity, the idea is fundamental that this is something which separates and distinguishes man from nature. In reality, however, there is no such separation: "natural" qualities and those called truly "human" are inseparably grown together. Man, in his highest and noblest capacities, is wholly nature and embodies its uncanny dual character. Those of his abilities which are terrifying and considered inhuman may even be the fertile soil out of which alone all humanity can grow in impulse, deed, and work.
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You shall not steal! You shall not kill! Such words were once called holy; before them people bowrd their knees and heads, and removed their shoes. But I ask you: where have there ever been better thieves and killers in the world than such holy words have been? Is there not in all of life itself - robbing and killing? And when such words were called holy, was not truth itself thereby - killed?