Friedrich Nietzsche Quotes
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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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What is wanted - whether this is admitted or not - is nothing less than a fundamental remolding, indeed weakening and abolition of the individual: one never tires of enumerating and indicating all that is evil and inimical, prodigal, costly, extravagant in the form individual existence has assumed hitherto, one hopes to manage more cheaply, more safely, more equitably, more uniformly if there exist only large bodies and their members.
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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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The possibility has been established for the production of...a master race, the future 'masters of the earth'...made to endure for millennia - a higher kind of men who...employ democratic Europe as their most pliant and supple instrument for getting hold of the destinies of the earth.
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Against war it may be said that it makes the victor stupid and the vanquished revengeful.
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There is a great ladder of religious cruelty, and, of its many rungs, three are the most important. People used to make human sacrifices to their god, perhaps even sacrificing those they loved the best ... Then, during the moral epoch of humanity, people sacrificed the strongest instincts they had, their 'nature,' to their god... Finally: what was left to be sacrificed? ... Didn't people have to sacrifice God himself and worship rocks, stupidity, gravity, fate, or nothingness out of sheer cruelty to themselves?
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A man far oftener appears to have a decided character from persistently following his temperament than from persistently following his principles.
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He who denies himself much in great matters will readily indulge himself in small things.
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That the world is not the embodiment of an eternal rationality can be conclusively proved by the fact that the piece of the worldthat we know--I mean our human reason--is not so very rational. And if it is not eternally and completely wise and rational, then the rest of the world will not be either; here the conclusion a minori ad majus, a parte ad totum applies, and does so with decisive force.
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All mankind is divided, as it was at all times and is still, into slaves and freemen.
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The advocates of a criminal are seldom artists enough to turn the beautiful terribleness of the deed to the advantage of the doer.
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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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Every talent must unfold itself in fighting.
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There are people who want to make men's lives more difficult for no other reason than the chance it provides them afterwards to offer their prescription for alleviating life; their Christianity, for instance.
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All isolation is wrong so say the herd. And long didst thou belong to the herd.
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And as long as you are in any way ashamed before yourself, you do not yet belong with us.
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Whether in conversation we generally agree or disagree with others is largely a matter of habit: the one tendency makes as much sense as the other.
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That is an artist as I would have an artist be, modest in his needs: he really wants only two things, his bread and his art--panemet Circen.
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My wisdom has long accumulated like a cloud, it becomes stiller and darker. So does all wisdom which shall one day bear lightnings.
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The will to overcome an emotion, is ultimately only the will of another, or of several other, emotions.
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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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However modest one may be in one's demand for intellectual cleanliness, one cannot help feeling, when coming into contact with the New Testament, a kind of inexpressible discomfiture: for the unchecked impudence with which the least qualified want to raise their voice on the greatest problems, and even claim to be judges of such things, surpasses all measure. The shameless levity with which the most intractable problems (life, world, God, purpose of life) are spoken of, as if they were not problems at all but simply things that these little bigots knew!
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Whatever we have words for, that we have already got beyond.
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Man demands truth and fulfills this demand in moral intercourse with other men; this is the basis of all social life. One anticipates the unpleasant consequences of reciprocal lying. From this there arises the duty of truth. We permit epic poets to lie because we expect no detrimental consequences in this case. Thus the lie is permitted where it is considered something pleasant. Assuming that it does no harm, the lie is beautiful and charming.