Friedrich Nietzsche Quotes
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Words are but symbols for the relations of things to one another and to us; nowhere do they touch upon absolute truth.
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Not their love of humanity, but the impotence of their love, prevents the Christians of today - burning us.
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If we have our own why of life, we shall get along with almost any how. Man does not strive for pleasure; only the Englishman does.
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As a result, nature is something entirely different from what comes to mind when we invoke its name.
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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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Woman is essentially unpeaceful, like the cat, however well she may have trained herself to present an appearance of peace.
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He who has attained the freedom of reason to any extent cannot, for a long time, regard himself otherwise than as a wanderer on the face of the earth - and not even as a traveler towards a final goal, for there is no such thing. But he certainly wants to observe and keep his eyes open to whatever actually happens in the world; therefore he cannot attach his heart too firmly to anything individual; he must have in himself something wandering that takes pleasure in change and transitoriness.
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Good deeds shun the light as anxiously as evil deeds: the latter fear that disclosure will bring on pain (as punishment), while the former fear that disclosure will take away pleasure (that pure pleasure, that pleasure per se, which immediately ceases once the vanity's satisfaction is added).
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[Heraclitus' language] dispenses with lightness and artificial decoration, foremost out of disgust for humanity and out of [his own] defiant feeling.
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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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How poisonous, how crafty, how bad, does every long war make one, which cannot be waged openly by means of force!
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Learn to see - accustoming the eye to calm, to patience, to letting-things-come-to-it; learning to defer judgment, to encircle and encompass the question on all sides.
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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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Undeserved praise causes more pangs of conscience later than undeserved blame, but probably only for this reason, that our power of judgment are more completely exposed by being over praised than by being unjustly underestimated.
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What is the task of higher education? To make a man into a machine. What are the means employed? He is taught how to suffer being bored.
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We praise or blame as one or the other affords more opportunity for exhibiting our power of judgement.
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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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Could one count such dilettantes and old spinsters as that mawkish apostle of virginity, Mainländer, as a genuine German? In the last analysis he probably was a Jew (all Jews become mawkish when they moralize).
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You may lie with your mouth, but with the mouth you make as you do so you none the less tell the truth.
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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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Yet tell me, my brothers: if a goal for humanity is still lacking, is there not still lacking--humanity itself?
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Whoever has overthrown an existing law of custom has always first been accounted a bad man: but when, as did happen, the law could not afterwards be reinstated and this fact was accepted, the predicate gradually changed; - history treats almost exclusively of these bad men who subsequently became good men!
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The enjoyment that all morality has given us to now and that it continues to give us--and so, what has kept it going up to now--lies in everyone's right, without lengthy investigation, to praise and blame. And who could endure life without praising and blaming!
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Socrates ... is the first philosopher of life [Lebensphilosoph], ... Thinking serves life, while among all previous philosophers life had served thought and knowledge. ... Thus Socratic philosophy is absolutely practical: it is hostile to all knowledge unconnected to ethical implications.