Friedrich Nietzsche Quotes
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What makes us heroic?--Confronting simultaneously our supreme suffering and our supreme hope.
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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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Without music, life would be a mistake... I would only believe in a God who knew how to dance.
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He who climbeth on the highest mountains, laugheth at all tragic plays and tragic realities.
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A few hours of mountain climbing make a blackguard and a saint two rather similar creatures.
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The thirst for equality can express itself either as a desire to draw everyone down to one's level, or to raise oneself and everyone else up.
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The golden fleece of self-sufficiency guards against cudgel- blows but not against pin-pricks.
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When we have to change our mind about a person, we hold the inconvenience he causes us very much against him.
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Mastery has been achieved when one neither makes a mistake nor hesitates in the performance.
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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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Whoever has provoked men to rage against him has always gained a party in his favor, too.
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It is the music in our conscience, the dance in our spirit, to which Puritan litanies, moral sermons, and goody goodness won’t chime.
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One has to take a somewhat bold and dangerous line with this existence: especially as, whatever happens, we are bound to lose it.
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One has to pay dearly for immortality; one has to die several times while one is still alive.
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When a man is ill his very goodness is sickly.
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Life is at an end where the kingdom of God begins.
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In order to acquire intellect one must need it. One loses it when it is no longer necessary.
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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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To die proudly when it is no longer possible to live proudly. Death freely chosen, death at the right time, brightly and cheerfully accomplished amid children and witnesses: then a real farewell is still possible, as the one who is taking leave is still there; also a real estimate of what one has wished, drawing the sum of one's life--all in opposition to the wretched and revolting comedy that Christianity has made of the hour of death.
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In a man devoted to knowledge, pity seems almost ridiculous, like delicate hands on a cyclops.
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Morality makes stupid.- Custom represents the experiences of men of earlier times as to what they supposed useful and harmful - but the sense for custom (morality) applies, not to these experiences as such, but to the age, the sanctity, the indiscussability of the custom. And so this feeling is a hindrance to the acquisition of new experiences and the correction of customs: that is to say, morality is a hindrance to the development of new and better customs: it makes stupid.
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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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Merchant and pirate were for a long period one and the same person. Even today mercantile morality is really nothing but a refinement of piratical morality.
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Even the most beautiful scenery is no longer assured of our love after we have lived in it for three months, and some distant coast attracts our avarice: possessions are generally diminished by possession…