Friedrich Nietzsche Quotes
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There are more idols than realities in the world: that is my "evil eye" for this world, which is also my "evil ear".
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Art is essentially the affirmation, the blessing, and the deification of existence.
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Every power draws its ultimate consequences at every moment.
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Even today many educated people think that the victory of Christianity over Greek philosophy is a proof of the superior truth of the former - although in this case it was only the coarser and more violent that conquered the more spiritual and delicate. So far as superior truth is concerned, it is enough to observe that the awakening sciences have allied themselves point by point with the philosophy of Epicurus, but point by point rejected Christianity.
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However unchristian it may seem, I do not even bear any ill feeling towards myself.
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What if God were not exactly truth, and if this could be proved? And if he were instead the vanity, the desire for power, the ambitions, the fear, and the enraptured and terrified folly of mankind?
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Thus strength is afforded by good and thorough customs, thus is learnt the subjection of the individual, and strenuousness of character becomes a birth gift and afterwards is fostered as a habit.
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In certain pious people I have found a hatred of reason, and have been favourably disposed to them for it: their bad intellectual conscience was at least exposed by that!
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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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A good aphorism is too hard for the tooth of time, and is not worn away by all the centuries, although it serves as food for every epoch. Hence it is the greatest paradox in literature, the imperishable in the midst of change, the nourishment which always remains highly valued, as salt does, and never becomes stupid like salt.
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Every virtue inclines to stupidity, every stupidity to virtue; "stupid to the point of sanctity," they say in Russia, - let us be careful lest out of pure honesty we eventually become saints and bores.
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No more fiction, for now we calculate; but that we may calculate, we had to make fiction first.
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Whoever despises himself nonetheless respects himself as one who despises.
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The advent of the Christian God, as the maximum god attained so far, was therefore accompanied by the maximum feeling of guilty indebtedness on earth.
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Alas, where is there still a sea in which one could drown: thus our lament resounds – across shallow swamps.
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In the 'in-itself' there is nothing of 'causal connections', of 'necessity', or of 'psychological non-freedom'; there the effect does not follow the cause, there is no rule or 'law'. It is we alone who have devised cause, sequence, for-each-other, relativity, constraint, number, law, freedom, motive, and purpose; and when we project and mix this symbol world into things as if it existed 'in itself', we act once more as we have always acted- mythologically.
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A thought comes when it will, not when I will.
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I have never come across someone who could inspire more respect than the Greek philosophers.
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The good displeases us when we are not up to it.
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For what purpose humanity is there should not even concern us: why you are here, that you should ask yourself: and if you have no ready answer, then set for yourself goals, high and noble goals, and perish in pursuit of them!
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Christianity has done its utmost to close the circle and declared even doubt to be sin. One is supposed to be cast into belief without reason, by a miracle, and from then on to swim in it as in the brightest and least ambiguous of elements: even a glance towards land, even the thought that one perhaps exists for something else as well as swimming, even the slightest impulse of our amphibious nature.
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I would only believe in a god who could dance. And when I saw my devil I found him serious, thorough, profound, and solemn: it was the spirit of gravity—through him all things fall. Not by wrath does one kill but by laughter. Come, let us kill the spirit of gravity!
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At the beginning of a marriage ask yourself whether this woman will be interesting to talk to from now until old age. Everything else in marriage is transitory: most of the time is spent in conversation.
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One does not know - cannot know - the best that is in one.