Friedrich Nietzsche Quotes
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The shortest route is not the most direct one, but rather the one where the most favorable winds swell our sails:Mthat is the lesson that seafarers teach. Not to abide by this lesson is to be obstinate: here, firmness of character is tainted with stupidity.
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Triumph depends on a roll of Fate's dice; the ultimate prize is a place in Heaven.
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The aphorism in which I am the first master among Germans, are the forms of 'eternity'; my ambition is to say in ten sentences what everyone else says in a book - what everyone else does not say in a book.
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Those who cannot forgive others break the bridge over which they themselves must pass.
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What is good? All that heightens the feeling of power, the will to power, power itself. What is bad? All that is born of weakness. What is happiness? The feeling that power is growing, that resistance is overcome.
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Why couldn't the world that concerns us- be a fiction? And if somebody asked, 'but to be a fiction there surely belongs an author?'- couldn't one answer simply: 'Why? Doesn't this "belongs" perhaps belong to the fiction, too?'
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What is the greatest thing ye can experience? It is the hour of great contempt. The hour in which even your happiness becometh loathsome unto you, and so also your reason and virtue.
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That faith makes blessed under certain circumstances, that blessedness does not make of a fixed idea a true idea, that faith moves no mountains but puts mountains where there are none: a quick walk through a madhouse enlightens one sufficiently about this.
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Logic, too, also rests on assumptions that do not correspond to anything in the real world, e.g., on the assumption that there areequal things, that the same thing is identical at different points in time: but this science arose as a result of the opposite belief (that such things actually exist in the real world). And it is the same with mathematics, which would certainly never have arisen if it had been understood from the beginning that there is no such thing in nature as a perfectly straight line, a true circle, and absolute measure.
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Either one does not dream, or one does so interestingly. One should learn to spend one's waking life in the same way: not at all, or interestingly.
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Every power draws its ultimate consequences at every moment.
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Tragedy is dead! Poetry itself died with it! Away, away with you, puny, stunted imitators! Away with you to Hades, and eat your fill of the old masters' crumbs!
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Desire is happiness: satisfaction as happiness is merely the ultimate moment of desire. To be wish and wish alone is happiness, and a new wish over and over again.
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To call a thing good not a day longer than it appears to us good, and above all not a day earlier - that is the only way to keep joy pure.
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The most common sort of lie is the one uttered to one's self.
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The beating of drums, which delights young writers who serve a party, sounds to him who does not belong to the party line like a rattling of chains, and excites sympathy rather than admiration.
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The concepts "beyond" and "real world" were invented in order to depreciate the only world that exists-in order that no goal, no aim or task might be left for our earthly reality.
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He who has always spared himself much will in the end become sickly of so much consideration. Praised be what hardens!
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The spirit of the poet craves spectators... even if only buffaloes.
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Moderation sees itself as beautiful; it is unaware that in the eye of the immoderate it appears black and sober and consequently ugly-looking.
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Extreme positions are not succeeded by moderate ones but by extreme positions of the opposite kind.
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The sick woman especially: no one surpasses her in refinements for ruling, oppressing, tyrannising.
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You lovers of knowledge! So what have you done out of your love of knowledge up to now? Have you already stolen and murdered so as to know how a thief and a murderer feels?
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It is difficult to live among people because silence is so difficult.