Friedrich Nietzsche Quotes
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“Evil men have no songs.” How is it, then, that the Russians have songs?
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We should conserve evil just as we should conserve the forests. It is true that by thinning and clearing the forests the earth grew warmer.
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Are you one who looks on? or lends a hand? - or who looks away, sidles off?...Third question for the conscience.
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We have to be careful that in throwing out the devil, we don't throw out the best part of ourselves.
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I want to know whether you are a person devoted to creating or to exchanging in some respect or other: as a creator you belong tothe free, as an exchanger you are their slave and instrument.
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Hope in reality is the worst of all evils because it prolongs the torments of man.
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All great things must first wear terrifying and monstrous masks, in order to inscribe themselves on the hearts of humanity.
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We come to recognize that playfulness, as a philosophical stance, can be very serious indeed; and moreover, that it possesses an unfailing capacity to arouse ridicule and hostility in those among us who crave certainty, reverence, and restraint.
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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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I presume that you are compassionate: to be without pity means to be sick in body and spirit. But one should have spirit in abundance, so as to be permitted to be compassionate! For your pity is detrimental to you and to everyone.
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To regard states of distress in general as an objection, as something which must be abolished is the greatest nonsense on earth; having the most disastrous consequences, fatally stupid- almost as stupid as a wish to abolish bad weather - out of pity for the poor.
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We are so fond of being out among nature, because it has no opinions about us.
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The less men are fettered by tradition, the greater becomes the inward activity of their motives, and greater again in proportion to their outer restlessness.
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And those who were seen dancing were thought to be insane by those who could not hear the music.
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The irrationality of a thing is no argument against its existence, rather a condition of it.
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We are most unfair to God; we do not allow Him to sin.
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Strong currents drag many stones and bushes along with them, strong intellects many dense and muddled minds.
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A degree of culture, and assuredly a very high one, is attained when man rises above superstitions and religious notions and fears, and, for instance, no longer believes in guardian angels or in original sin, and has also ceased to talk of the salvation of his soul.
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When self control is lacking in small things, the ability to apply it to matters of importance withers away. Every day in which one does not at least deny himself some trifle is badly spent and a threat to the day following.
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One who is publicly honest about himself ends up by priding himself somewhat on this honesty: for he knows only too well why he is honest-for the same reasons another person prefers illusion and dissimulation.
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Precisely the least, the softest, lightest, a lizard's rustling, a breath, a flash, a moment - a little makes the way of the best happiness.
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Could one count such dilettantes and old spinsters as that mawkish apostle of virginity, Mainlander, as a genuine German? In the last analysis he probably was a Jew (all Jews become mawkish when they moralize).
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The drive toward the formation of metaphors is the fundamental human drive, which one cannot for a single instant dispense with in thought , for one would thereby dispense with man himself.
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The concept of greatness is changeable, in the realm of morality as well as in that of esthetics. And so philosophy starts by legislating greatness.