Friedrich Nietzsche Quotes
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Egoism is the law of perspective applied to feelings: what is closest appears large and weighty, and as one moves farther away size and weight decrease.
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We do not hate as long as we still attach a lesser value, but only when we attach an equal or a greater value.
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No artist tolerates reality.
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Some men are born posthumously.
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To predict the behavior of ordinary people in advance, you only have to assume that they will always try to escape a disagreeable situation with the smallest possible expenditure of intelligence.
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The Hour-Hand of Life --- Life consists of rare, isolated moments of the greatest significance, and of innumerably many intervals, during which at best the silhouettes of those moments hover about us. Love, springtime, every beautiful melody, mountains, the moon, the sea - all these speak completely to the heart but once, if in fact they ever do get a chance to speak completely. For many men do not have those moments at all, and are themselves intervals and intermissions in the symphony of real life.
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The true man wants two things: danger and play. For that reason he wants woman, as the most dangerous plaything.
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Those who know that they are profound strive for clarity. Those who would like to seem profound to the crowd strive for obscurity. For the crowd believes that if it cannot see to the bottom of something it must be profound. It is so timid and dislikes going into the water.
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Success has always been the greatest liar - and the "work" itself is a success; the great statesman, the conqueror, the discoverer is disguised by his creations, often beyond recognition; the "work," whether of the artist or the philosopher, invents the man who has created it, who is supposed to have create it; "great men," as they are venerated, are subsequent pieces of wretched minor fiction.
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Perhaps man will rise ever higher as soon as he ceases to flow out into a god.
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The visionary lies to himself, the liar only to others.
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Truths are illusions of which one has forgotten that they are illusions, metaphors that have become worn-out and deprived of their sensuous force, coins that have lost their imprint and are now no longer seen as coins but as metal.
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In the stream.- Mighty waters draw much stone and rubble along with them; mighty spirits many stupid and bewildered heads.
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Everything good is the transmutation of something evil: every god has a devil for a father.
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Our vanity desires that what we do best should be considered what is hardest for us.
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Noble and wise men once believed in the music of the spheres: noble and wise men still continue to believe in the "moral significance of existence." But one day even this sphere-music will no longer be audible to them! They will wake up and take note that their ears were dreaming.
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The degree and kind of a man's sexuality reach up into the ultimate pinnacle of his spirit.
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I love him who chasteneth his God, because he loveth his God: for he must succumb through the wrath of his God.
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What is not intelligible to me is not necessarily unintelligent.
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You must be born for your physician, otherwise you are bound to perish because of your physician.
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We take a fancy to something: and scarcely have we thoroughly taken a fancy to it when that tyrant in us calls out: "Give me thatin sacrifice"--and we give it.
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Only individuals have a sense of responsibility.
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Sensuality often hastens the "Growth of Love" so much that the roots remain weak and are easily torn up.
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Truth is a mobile army of metaphors, metonyms, anthropomorphisms, in short a sum of human relations which have been subjected to poetic and rhetorical intensification, translation and decoration […]; truths are illusions of which we have forgotten that they are illusions, metaphors which have become worn by frequent use and have lost all sensuous vigour […]. Yet we still do not know where the drive to truth comes from, for so far we have only heard about the obligation to be truthful which society imposes in order to exist" from, "On Truth and Lying in a Non-Moral Sense".