Friedrich Nietzsche Quotes
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Every word has its fragrance: there is a harmony and a disharmony of fragrances, and hence of words.
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One can also be undignified and flattering toward a virtue.
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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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Rather perish than hate and fear, and twice rather perish than make oneself hated and feared — this must some day become the highest maxim for every single commonwealth.
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My philosophy is inverted Platonism: the further a thing is from true being, the purer, the lovelier, the better it is. Living inillusion as a goal!
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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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Whoever wants to set a good example must add a grain of foolishness to his virtue: then others can imitate and yet at the same time surpass the one they imitate-which human beings love to do.
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Diesen Ernsthaften diene zur Belehrung, dass ich von der Kunst als der höchsten Aufgabe und der eigentlich metaphysischen Thätigkeit dieses Lebens im Sinne des Mannes überzeugt bin, dem ich hier, als meinem erhabenen Vorkämpfer auf dieser Bahn, diese Schrift gewidmet haben will.
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Just as bones, tissues, intestines, and blood vessels are enclosed in a skin that makes it possible to bear the sight of a human being, so the agitations and passions of the soul are wrapped up in vanity: it is the soul's skin.
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So long as the spectator has to figure out the meaning of this or that person, or the presuppositions of this or that conflict of inclinations and purposes, he cannot become completely absorbed in the activities and sufferings of the chief characters or feel breathless pity and fear.
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Nothing is more pathological in our pathological modernity than this disease of Christian pity.
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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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The "religion of pity" to which people would like to convert us- oh, we know well enough the hysterical little men and women who need this religion at present as a veil and an adornment!
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I love those who do not first seek a reason beyond the stars for going down and being sacrifices, but sacrifice themselves to the earth, that the earth of the Superman may hereafter arrive.
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Pharisaism is not a degeneration in a good man: a large portion of it is rather the condition of all being-good.
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My time has not yet come either; some are born posthumously.
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Which is it? Is man only a blunder of God? Or is God only a blunder of man?
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Whoever commits to paper what he suffers becomes a melancholy author: but he becomes a serious author when he tells us what he suffered and why he now reposes in joy.
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We love life, not because we are used to living but because we are used to loving.
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Whoever no longer finds greatness in God no longer finds it anywhere--he must either deny it or create it.
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Science rushes headlong, without selectivity, without 'taste,' at whatever is knowable, in the blind desire to know all at any cost. Philosophical thinking, on the other hand, is ever on the scent of those things which are most worth knowing, the great and the important insights.
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The object of convalescence ought to be to turn our attention to life: at other times, simply to our tasks!
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A man as he ought to be: that sounds to us as insipid as 'a tree as it ought to be.'
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If we make sacrifices in doing good or in doing ill, it does not alter the ultimate value of our actions; even if we stake our life in the cause, as martyrs do for the sake of our church : it is a sacrifice to our longing for power, or for the purpose of conserving our sense of power.