Friedrich Nietzsche Quotes
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Whatever has value in our world now does not have value in itself, according to its nature - nature is always value-less, but has been given value at some time, as a present - and it was we who gave and bestowed it.
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The man who meets with a failure attributes this failure rather to the ill will of another than to fate.
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Above all, there is no exception to this rule: that the idea of political superiority always resolves itself into the idea of psychological superiority.
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A man who has depths in his shame meets his destiny and his delicate decisions upon paths which few ever reach . . .
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One must still have chaos in oneself to be able to give birth to a dancing star.
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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.
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The rights a man arrogates to himself are related to the duties he imposes on himself, to the tasks to which he feels equal. The great majority of men have no right to existence, but are a misfortune to higher men.
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Truth as Circe. - Error has transformed animals into men; is truth perhaps capable of changing man back into an animal?
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Man, full of emptiness and torn apart with homesickness for the desert has had to create from within himself an adventure, a torture-chamber, an unsafe and hazardous wilderness- this fool, this prisoner consumed with longing and despair, became the inventor of 'bad conscience'.
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To use the same words is not a sufficient guarantee of understanding; one must use the same words for the same genus of inward experience; ultimately one must have one's experiences in common.
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What separates two people most profoundly is a different sense and degree of cleanliness.
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And those who were seen dancing were thought to be insane by those who could not hear the music.
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The most vulnerable and yet most unconquerable of things is human vanity; nay, through being wounded its strength increases and can grow to giant proportions.
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People who have given us their complete confidence believe that they have a right to ours. The inference is false, a gift confers no rights.
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The earth is like the breasts of a woman: useful as well as pleasing.
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He who denies himself much in great matters will readily indulge himself in small things.
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I love something: and scarcely do I love it completely when the tyrant in me says: "I want that in sacrifice." This cruelty is in my entrails. Behold! I am evil.
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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.
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Every talent must unfold itself in fighting.
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It is a terrible thought, to contemplate that an immense number of mediocre thinkers are occupied with really influential matters.
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Everything good is instinct--and, as a result, easy, necessary, free.
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Many other such substitutes for war will be discovered, but perhaps precisely thereby it will become more and more obvious that such a highly cultivated and therefore necessarily enfeebled humanity as that of modern Europe not only needs wars, but the greatest and most terrible wars, consequently occasional relapses into barbarism, lest, by the means of culture, it should lose its culture and its very existence.
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All philosophers make the common mistake of taking contemporary man as their starting point and of trying, through an analysis of him, to[21] reach a conclusion. "Man" involuntarily presents himself to them as an aeterna veritas as a passive element in every hurly-burly, as a fixed standard of things. Yet everything uttered by the philosopher on the subject of man is, in the last resort, nothing more than a piece of testimony concerning man during a very limited period of time.
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A high civilization is a pyramid: it can stand only on a broad base; its primary prerequisite is a strong and soundly consolidated mediocrity.