Friedrich Nietzsche Quotes
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The destiny of the human race is to widen the gap separating it from the lower races of animals. Any code of morality which retains its permanence and authority after the conditions of existence which gave rise to it have changed, works against this upward progress of man.
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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.
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With all great deceivers there is a noteworthy occurrence to which they owe their power. In the actual act of deception... they are overcome by belief in themselves. It is this which then speaks so miraculously and compellingly to those who surround them.
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Sometimes it just takes stronger eyeglasses to cure those who are in love--and someone with the ability to imagine a face or a figure twenty years older might perhaps pass through life quite undisturbed.
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The command 'become hard! ', the deep conviction that all creators are hard, is the really distinctive sign of a Dionysian nature.
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In large states public education will always be mediocre, for the same reason that in large kitchens the cooking is usually bad.
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Again and again I am brought up against it, and again and again I resist it: I don't want to believe it, even though it is almost palpable: the vast majority lack an intellectual conscience; indeed, it often seems to me that to demand such a thing is to be in the most populous cities as solitary as in the desert.
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Many people wait throughout their whole lives for the chance to be good in their own fashion.
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Suspicious.- To admit a belief merely because it is a custom - but that means to be dishonest, cowardly, lazy! - And so could dishonesty, cowardice and laziness be the preconditions for morality?
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How did reason come into the world? As is fitting, in an irrational manner, by accident. One will have to guess at it as at a riddle.
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I love the valiant; but it is not enough to wield a broadsword, one must also know against whom.
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I am afraid that old women are more skeptical in their most secret heart of hearts than any man: they believe in the superficiality of existence as in its essence, and all virtue and profundity is to them merely a veil over this "truth," a most welcome veil over a pudendum--and so a matter of decency and modesty, and nothing else.
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Yet where is your inner value when you no longer know what it is to breathe freely; when you no longer have freedom over your own selves.
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There is no better soporific and sedative than skepticism.
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In the end we love our desire and not what it is that we desire.
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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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All preachers of morality, as also all theologians have a bad habit in common: all of them try to persuade man that he is very ill, and that a severe, final, radical cure is necessary.
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The venerability, reliability, and utility of truth is something which a person demonstrates for himself from the contrast with the liar, whom no one trusts and everyone excludes. As a 'rational' being, he now places his behavior under the control of abstractions. He will no longer tolerate being carried away by sudden impressions, by intuitions.
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I love him whose soul is deep even in the wounding, and may succumb through a small matter: thus goeth he willingly over the bridge.
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Freedom is the will to be responsible for ourselves.
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The really royal calling of the philosopher (as expressed by Alcuin the Anglo-Saxon): To correct what is wrong, and strengthen the right, and raise what is holy.
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In pain there is as much wisdom as in pleasure: like the latter it is one of the best self preservatives of a species.
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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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If you have hitherto believed that life was one of the highest value and now see yourselves disappointed, do you at once have to reduce it to the lowest possible price?