Friedrich Nietzsche Quotes
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Without the errors involved in the assumptions of ethics, man would have remained an animal. Thus has he taken himself as something higher and imposed rigid laws upon himself.
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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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God is Dead; but given the way of men, there may still be caves for thousands of years in which his shadow will be shown. And we - we still have to vanquish his shadow, too.
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Pardon me, my friends, I have ventured to paint my happiness on the wall.
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You say that I should be your teacher! See to it that I am your pinion and not your brake.
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Nihilism: any aim is lacking, any answer to the question "why" is lacking. What does nihilism mean?--that the supreme values devaluate themselves.
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It is possible to imagine a society flushed with such a sense of power that it could afford to let its offenders go unpunished.
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Whoever has really sacrificed anything, knows that he wanted and got something in return.
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And he who must be a creator in good and evil: verily, he must be an annihilator first and demolish values.
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Where the past is venerated the clean and those who clean things up should be kept out. Piety is never happy without a little dust, dirt, and rubbish.
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It is so little true that martyrs offer any support to the truth of a cause that I am inclined to deny that any martyr has ever had anything to do with the truth at all.
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"God", "the immortality of the soul", "salvation", "the beyond"-even as a child I had no time for such notions, I do not waste any time upon them-maybe I was never childish enough for that?
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The world itself is the will to power - and nothing else! And you yourself are the will to power - and nothing else!
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The genius-in work and in deed-is necessarily a squanderer: the fact that he spends himself constitutes his greatness.
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I love him whose soul is deep even in the wounding.
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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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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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I am afraid that old women are more skeptical in their most secret heart of hearts than any man: they believe in the superficiality of existence as in its essence, and all virtue and profundity is to them merely a veil over this "truth," a most welcome veil over a pudendum--and so a matter of decency and modesty, and nothing else.
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In art the end does not sanctify the means: but sacred means employed here can sanctify the end.
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Joy wants the eternity of all things, wants deep, wants deep eternity.
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As regards the celebrated struggle for life, it seems to me for the present to have been rather asserted than proved. It does occur, but as the exception; the general aspect of life is not hunger and distress, but rather wealth, luxury, even absurd prodigality -- where there is a struggle it is a struggle for power.
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“Evil men have no songs.” How is it, then, that the Russians have songs?
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At the bottom of all these noble races the beast of prey, the splendid blond beast, prowling about avidly in search of spoil and victory.
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A high civilization is a pyramid: it can stand only on a broad base; its primary prerequisite is a strong and soundly consolidated mediocrity.