Friedrich Nietzsche Quotes
-
Pain makes hens and poets cackle.
-
Anything which is a living and not a dying body... will have to be an incarnate will to power, it will strive to grow, spread, seize, become predominant - not from any morality or immorality but because it is living and because life simply is will to power... 'Exploitation'... belongs to the essence of what lives, as a basic organic function; it is a consequence of the will to power, which is after all the will to life.
-
If one considers how much reason every person has for anxiety and timid self-concealment, and how three-quarters of his energy and goodwill can be paralyzed and made unfruitful by it, one has to be very grateful to fashion.
-
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.
-
I am driven out of fatherlands and motherlands. Thus I now love only my children's land, yet undiscovered, in the farthest sea; for this I bid my sails search and search.
-
No one talks more passionately about his rights than he who in the depths of his soul doubts whether he has any. By enlisting passion on his side he wants to stifle his reason and its doubts: thus he will acquire a good conscience and with it success among his fellow men.
-
Our body is simply a social structure made of many souls.
-
Schatten in der Flamme. - Die Flamme ist sich selber nicht so hell, als den Anderen, denen sie leuchtet: so auch der Weise.
-
Our sense of the tragic waxes and wanes with our sensuality.
-
What good is a book that does not even transport us beyond all books?
-
The question of place and climate is most closely related to the question of nutrition. Nobody is free to live everywhere; and whoever has to solve great problems that challenge all his strength actually has a very restricted choice in this matter. The influence of climate on our metabolism, its retardation, its acceleration, goes so far that a mistaken choice of place and climate can not only estrange a man from his task but can actually keep it from him: he never gets to see it.
-
A refined nature is vexed by knowing that some one owes it thanks, a coarse nature by knowing that it owes thanks to some one.
-
Sometimes we owe a friend to the lucky circumstance that we give him no cause for envy.
-
Pity is the most agreeable feeling among those who have little pride and no prospects of great conquests.
-
One should not be deceived: great spirits are skeptics ... Strength, FREEDOM which is born of the strength and overstrength of the spirit, proves itself by skepticism. Men of conviction are not worthy of the least consideration in fundamental questions of value and disvalue. Convictions are prisons.
-
Give me today, for once, the worst throw of your dice, destiny. Today I transmute everything into gold.
-
It was a subtle refinement of God to learn Greek when he wished to write a book – and that he did not learn it better.
-
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.
-
When an idea is just rising on the horizon, the soul's temperature with respect to it is usually very cold. Only gradually does the idea develop its warmth, and it is hottest (which is to say, exerting its greatest influence) when belief in the idea is already once again in decline.
-
Whoever knows he is deep tries to be clear, but whoever wants to seem deep to the crowd tries to be obscure. For the crowd supposes that anything it cannot see to the bottom must be deep: it is so timid and goes so unwillingly into the water.
-
I understand by 'freedom of spirit' something quite definite - the unconditional will to say No, where it is dangerous to say No.
-
An attack on the roots of passion means an attack on the roots of life.
-
Towards gnats and fleas we should show no pity. We would do right to hang petty thieves, petty calumniators, and slanderers.
-
Thus the will to power strives towards oppositions, towards displeasure. There is a will to suffering at the foundation of all organic life (contrary to "happiness" as "goal").