Friedrich Nietzsche Quotes
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Without music, life would be an error. The German imagines even God singing songs.
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Even the most honest writer lets slip a word too many when he wants to round off a period.
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Whoever has overthrown an existing law of custom has hitherto 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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Compulsion precedes morality, indeed morality itself is compulsion for a time, to which one submits for the avoidance of pain.
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Insects sting, not from malice, but because they want to live. It is the same with critics; they desire our blood not our pain.
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One has to pay dearly for immortality; one has to die several times while one is still alive.
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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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Animals know nothing of themselves, and they also know nothing of the world.
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A lack of the historical sense is the hereditary fault of all philosophers.
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With deep men, as with deep wells, it takes a long time for anything that falls into them to hit bottom. Onlookers, who almost never wait long enough, readily suppose that such men are callous and unresponsive--or even boring.
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Whenever the truth is uncovered, the artist will always cling with rapt gaze to what still remains covering even after such uncovering; but the theoretical man enjoys and finds satisfaction in the discarded covering and finds the highest object of his pleasure in the process of an ever happy uncovering that succeeds through his own efforts.
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Everything good is instinct--and, as a result, easy, necessary, free.
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As is well known, the priests are the most evil enemies—but why? Because they are the most impotent. It is because of their impotence that in them hatred grows to monstrous and uncanny proportions, to the most spiritual and poisonous kind of hatred. The truly great haters in world history have always been priests; likewise the most ingenious haters: other kinds of spirit hardly come into consideration when compared with the spirit of priestly vengefulness.
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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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You say, it's dark. And in truth, I did place a cloud before your sun. But do you not see how the edges of the cloud are already glowing and turning light.
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What, if some day or night a demon were to steal after you into your loneliest loneliness and say to you: 'This life as you now live it and have lived it, you will have to live once more and innumerable times more' ... Would you not throw yourself down and gnash your teeth and curse the demon who spoke thus? Or have you once experienced a tremendous moment when you would have answered him: 'You are a god and never have I heard anything more divine.
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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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State is the name of the coldest of all cold monsters. Coldly it lies; and this lie slips from its mouth: 'I, the state, am the people’.
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For the longest time, marriage has had a guilty conscience about itself. Should we believe it?--Yes, we should believe it.
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Madness is rare in individuals - but in groups, parties, nations, and ages it is the rule.
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One who has given up any hope of winning a fight or has clearly lost it wants his style in fighting to be admired all the more.
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One should never know too precisely whom one has married.
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Man is more ape than many of the apes.
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Courage is the best slayer - courage which attacketh, for in every attack there is the sound of triumph.