Friedrich Nietzsche may have had some problematic views. Emphasis on the “may” because how many of the things he said were meant to be taken literally is debated by scholars.
But, whoever Nietzsche truly was as a person, there is no denying he was infinitely quotable, providing some of the most oft-repeated quotations of all time.
To demonstrate just how well the man’s word have lived on in the public mind, we’ve compiled a master list of Friedrich Nietzsche quotes, broken down by category, and presented without commentary.
Nietzsche Quotes About Life
1. “Was that life? Well then, once more!”
2. “One should die proudly when it is no longer possible to live proudly.”
3. “The secret of realizing the greatest fruitfulness and the greatest enjoyment of existence is: to live dangerously! Build your cities on the slopes of Vesuvius! Send your ships out into uncharted seas! Live in conflict with your equals and with yourselves! Be robbers and ravagers as soon as you ca not be rulers and owners, you men of knowledge! The time will soon past when you could be content to live concealed int he woods like timid deer!”
4. “Amor Fati – “Love Your Fate”, which is in fact your life.”
5. “He who has a why to live for can bear almost any how.”
6. “I know of no better life purpose than to perish in attempting the great and the impossible.”
7. “Is life not a thousand times too short for us to bore ourselves?”
8. “One must give value to their existence by behaving as if ones very existence were a work of art.”
9. “One must pay dearly for immortality; one has to die several times while still alive.”
10. “Life is that which must overcome itself again and again.”
11. “Well-meaning, helpful, good-natured attitudes of mind have not come to be honored on account of their usefulness, but because they are states of richer souls that are capable of bestowing and have their value in the feeling of the plenitude of life.”
12. “No one can build you the bridge on which you, and only you, must cross the river of life. There may be countless trails and bridges and demigods who would gladly carry you across; but only at the price of pawning and forgoing yourself. There is one path in the world that none can walk but you. Where does it lead? Don’t ask, walk!”
13. “When man does not have firm, calm lines on the horizon of his life- mountain and forest lines, as it were- then a man’s innermost will becomes agitated, preoccupied, and wistful.”
14. “Either one does not dream, or one does so interestingly. One should learn to spend one’s waking life in the same way: not at all, or interestingly.”
15. “Let us beware of saying that death is the opposite of life. The living being is only a species of the dead, and a very rare species.”
16. “You desire to LIVE “according to Nature”? Oh, you noble Stoics, what fraud of words! Imagine to yourselves a being like Nature, boundlessly extravagant, boundlessly indifferent, without purpose or consideration, without pity or justice, at once fruitful and barren and uncertain: imagine to yourselves INDIFFERENCE as a power—how COULD you live in accordance with such indifference?”
17. “Life consists of rare, isolated moments of the greatest significance, and of innumerably many intervals, during which at best the silhouettes of those moments hover about us. Love, springtime, every beautiful melody, mountains, the moon, the sea – all these speak completely to the heart but once, if in fact they ever do get a chance to speak completely. For many men do not have those moments at all, and are themselves intervals and intermissions in the symphony of real life.”
18. “Human life is inexplicable, and still without meaning: a fool may decide its fate.”
19. “Not every end is the goal. The end of a melody is not its goal, and yet if a melody has not reached its end, it has not reached its goal.”
20. “We ought to face our destiny with courage.”
21. “Some men are born posthumously.”
22. “And to me also, who appreciate life, the butterflies, and soap-bubbles, and whatever is like them amongst us, seem most to enjoy happiness.”
Nietzsche Quotes on the Nature of Existence and Suffering
23. “Existence really is an imperfect tense that never becomes a present.”
24. “To live is to suffer, to survive is to find some meaning in the suffering.”
25. “Hope, in reality, is the worst of all evils because it prolongs the torments of man.”
26. “And once you are awake, you shall remain awake eternally. ”
27. “As long as you still experience the stars as something “above you”, you lack the eye of knowledge.”
28. “It is invisible hands that torment and bend us the worst”
29. “The tree that would grow to heaven must send its roots to hell.”
30. “The mother of excess is not joy but joylessness.”
31. “Have you ever said Yes to a single joy? O my friends, then you have said Yes too to all woe. All things are entangled, ensnared, enamored; if ever you wanted one thing twice, if ever you said, “You please me, happiness! Abide, moment!” then you wanted all back. All anew, all eternally, all entangled, ensnared, enamored–oh then you loved the world. Eternal ones, love it eternally and evermore; and to woe too, you say: go, but return! For all joy wants–eternity.”
32. “Ages of happiness. – An age of happiness is quite impossible, because men want only to desire it but not to have it, and every individual who experiences good times learns to downright pray for misery and disquietude. The destiny of man is designed for happy moments – every life has them – but not for happy ages.
33. “Read from a distant star, the majuscule script of our earthly existence would perhaps lead to the conclusion that the earth was the distinctively ascetic planet, a nook of disgruntled, arrogant creatures filled with a profound disgust with themselves, at the earth, at all life, who inflict as much pain on themselves as they possibly can out of pleasure in inflicting pain which is probably their only pleasure.”
34. “The voice of beauty speaks softly; it creeps only into the most fully awakened souls.”
35. “And when he invented his hell, that was his heaven on earth.”
36. “It is intoxicating joy for the sufferer to look away from his suffering and to forget himself.”
37. “Everything in the world displeases me: but, above all, my displeasure in everything displeases me.”
38. “Swallow your poison, for you need it badly.”
39. “To see others suffer does one good, to make others suffer even more: this is a hard saying but an ancient, mighty, human, all-too-human principle… Without cruelty there is no festival.”
40. “Only great pain, the long, slow pain that takes its time… compels us to descend to our ultimate depths… I doubt that such pain makes us “better”; but I know it makes us more profound.”
41. “Your only problem, perhaps, is that you scream without letting yourself cry.”
42. “Whoever, at any time, has undertaken to build a new heaven has found the strength for it in his own hell…”
43. “We labour at our daily work more ardently and thoughtlessly than is necessary to sustain our life because it is even more necessary not to have leisure to stop and think. Haste is universal because everyone is in flight from himself.”
44. “Pity is the most agreeable feeling among those who have little pride and no prospects of great conquests.”
45. “I overcame myself, the sufferer; I carried my own ashes to the mountains; I invented a brighter flame for myself.”
46. “Perhaps I know best why it is man alone who laughs; he alone suffers so deeply that he had to invent laughter.”
Nietzsche Quotes About Love
47. “Love is a state in which a man sees things most decidedly as they are not.”
48. “True, we love life, not because we are used to living, but because we are used to loving. There is always some madness in love, but there is also always some reason in madness.”
49. “That which is done out of love is always beyond good and evil.”
50. “Ultimately, it is the desire, not the desired, that we love.”
51. “One ought to hold on to one’s heart; for if one lets it go, one soon loses control of the head too.”
52. “Love is blind. Friendship closes its eyes.”
53. “Love brings to light a lover’s noble and hidden qualities-his rare and exceptional traits: it is thus liable to be deceptive of his normal qualities.”
54. “Family love is messy, clinging, and of an annoying and repetitive pattern, like bad wallpaper.”
55. “Sensuality often hastens the “Growth of Love” so much that the roots remain weak and are easily torn up.”
56. “This is the hardest of all: to close the open hand out of love, and keep modest as a giver.”
57. “When marrying you should ask yourself this question: do you believe you are going to enjoy talking with this woman into your old age? Everything else in a marriage is transitory, but most of the time that you’re together will be devoted to conversation.”
58. “I fear you close by; I love you far away.”
59. “Where one can no longer love, there one should pass by.”
60. “The greatest cure for love is still that time honoured medicine – love returned.”
61. “The spiritualization of sensuality is called love: it is a great triumph over Christianity.”
62. “Even the most beautiful scenery is no longer assured of our love after we have lived in it for three months, and some distant coast attracts our avarice: possessions are generally diminished by possession.”
63. “What else is love but understanding and rejoicing in the fact that another person lives acts and experiences otherwise than we do?”
64. “Love of one is a piece of barbarism: for it is practiced at the expense of all others. Love of God likewise.”
65. “I hate you most because you attract, but are not strong enough to pull me to you.”
66. “They call you heartless; but you have a heart and I love you for being ashamed to show it.”
67. “One must learn to love.— This is what happens to us in music: first one has to learn to hear a figure and melody at all, to detect and distinguish it, to isolate it and delimit it as a separate life; then it requires some exertion and good will to tolerate it in spite of its strangeness, to be patient with its appearance and expression, and kindhearted about its oddity:—finally there comes a moment when we are used to it, when we wait for it, when we sense that we should miss it if it were missing: and now it continues to compel and enchant us relentlessly until we have become its humble and enraptured lovers who desire nothing better from the world than it and only it.— But that is what happens to us not only in music: that is how we have learned to love all things that we now love. In the end we are always rewarded for our good will, our patience, fair-mindedness, and gentleness with what is strange; gradually, it sheds its veil and turns out to be a new and indescribable beauty:—that is its thanks for our hospitality. Even those who love themselves will have learned it in this way: for there is no other way. Love, too, has to be learned.”
Nietzsche Quotes on Oneself/Man
68. “Man is the cruelest animal.”
69. “What does your conscience say? — ‘You should become the person you are’.”
70. “What is the seal of liberation? Not to be ashamed in front of oneself.”
71. “To predict the behavior of ordinary people in advance, you only have to assume that they will always try to escape a disagreeable situation with the smallest possible expenditure of intelligence.”
72. “Talking much about oneself can also be a means to conceal oneself. ”
73. “Madness is something rare in individuals — but in groups, parties, peoples, and ages, it is the rule.”
74. “I assess the power of a will by how much resistance, pain, torture it endures and knows how to turn to its advantage.”
75. “Whenever I climb I am followed by a dog called ‘Ego’.”
76. “But it is the same with man as with the tree. The more he seeks to rise into the height and light, the more vigorously do his roots struggle earthward, downward, into the dark, the deep – into evil.”
77. “One must be a sea, to receive a polluted stream without becoming impure.”
78. “Man is something that shall be overcome. Man is a rope, tied between beast and overman — a rope over an abyss. What is great in man is that he is a bridge and not an end.”
79. “The earth has a skin and that skin has diseases; one of its diseases is called man.”
80. “And so, onwards… along a path of wisdom, with a hearty tread, a hearty confidence.. however you may be, be your own source of experience. Throw off your discontent about your nature. Forgive yourself your own self. You have it in your power to merge everything you have lived through- false starts, errors, delusions, passions, your loves and your hopes- into your goal, with nothing left over.”
81. “I obviously do everything to be “hard to understand” myself.”
82. “If a man has character, he has also his typical experience, which always recurs.”
83. “Most people are far too occupied with themselves to be malicious.”
84. “You say ‘I’ and you are proud of this word. But greater than this- although you will not believe in it – is your body and its great intelligence, which does not say ‘I’ but performs ‘I’.”
85. “Giving style” to one’s character – a great and rare art! It is exercised by those who see all the strengths and weaknesses of their own natures and then comprehend them in an artistic plan until everything appears as art and reason and even weakness delights the eye.”
86. “The vanity of others runs counter to our taste only when it runs counter to our vanity.”
87. “Consider the cattle, grazing as they pass you by. They do not know what is meant by yesterday or today, they leap about, eat, rest, digest, leap about again, and so from morn till night and from day to day, fettered to the moment and its pleasure or displeasure, and thus neither melancholy nor bored.”
88. “My humanity is a constant self-overcoming.”
89. “Man’s maturity: to have regained the seriousness that he had as a child at play.”
90. “The Great Man… is colder, harder, less hesitating, and without fear of ‘opinion’; he lacks the virtues that accompany respect and ‘respectability,’ and altogether everything that is the ‘virtue of the herd.’ If he cannot lead, he goes alone… He knows he is incommunicable: he finds it tasteless to be familiar… When not speaking to himself, he wears a mask. There is a solitude within him that is inaccessible to praise or blame.”
91. “I am no man, I am dynamite.”
92. “What destroys a man more quickly than to work, think and feel without inner necessity, without any deep personal desire, without pleasure – as a mere automaton of duty?”
93. “The complete irresponsibility of man for his actions and his nature is the bitterest drop which he who understands must swallow.”
94. “It is not the strength, but the duration, of great sentiments that makes great men.”
Nietzsche Quotes on Human Foibles
95. “If we train our conscience, it kisses us while it hurts.”
96. “He who despises himself esteems himself as a self-despiser.”
97. “Many are stubborn in pursuit of the path they have chosen. Few in pursuit of the goal.”
98. “A bad conscience is easier to cope with than a bad reputation.”
99. “A strong and well-constituted man digests his experiences (deeds and misdeeds all included) just as he digests his meats, even when he has some tough morsels to swallow. ”
100. “Character is determined more by the lack of certain experiences than by those one has had.”
101. “Something unappeased, unappeasable, is within me.”
102. “The higher man is distinguished from the lower by his fearlessness and his readiness to challenge misfortune.”
103. “In nooks all over the earth sit men who are waiting, scarcely knowing in what way they are waiting, much less that they are waiting in vain. Occasionally the call that awakens, that accident which gives the permission to act, comes too late, when the best youth and strength for action has already been used up by sitting still; and many have found to their horror when they ‘leaped up’ that their limbs had gone to sleep and their spirit had become too heavy. ‘It is too late,’ they said to themselves, having lost their faith in themselves and henceforth forever useless.”
104. “Man is the most bungled of all the animals, the sickliest, and not one has strayed more dangerously from its instincts. But for all that, of course, he is the most interesting.”
105.
106. “The pure soul is a pure lie.”
107. “Whoever thought that he had understood something of me had merely construed something out of me, after his own image.”
108. “The consequences of our actions take hold of us, quite indifferent to our claim that meanwhile we have ‘improved’.”
109. “There they laugh: they do not understand me; I am not the mouth for these ears.”
110. “No one talks more passionately about his rights than he who in the depths of his soul doubts whether he has any.”
111. “Every profound spirit needs a mask.”
112. “We laugh at a man who, stepping out of his room at the very minute when the sun is rising, says, “It is my will that the sun shall rise”; or at him who, unable to stop a wheel, says, “I wish it to roll”; or, again, at him who, thrown in a wrestling match, says, “Here I lie, but here I wish to lie.” But, joking apart, do we not act like one of these three persons whenever we use the expression “I wish”.
Nietzsche Quotes on Friendships and Relationships
113. “Invisible threads are the strongest ties.”
114. “It is not a lack of love, but a lack of friendship that makes unhappy marriages.”
115. “Our faith in others betrays that we would rather have faith in ourselves. Our longing for a friend is our betrayer. And often with our love we want merely to overcome envy. And often we attack and make ourselves enemies, to conceal that we are vulnerable.”
116. “My solitude doesn’t depend on the presence or absence of people; on the contrary, I hate who steals my solitude without, in exchange, offering me true company.”
117. “Are you a slave? Then you cannot be a friend. Are you a tyrant? Then you cannot have friends.”
118. “Go up close to your friend but do not go over to him! We should respect the enemy that is in our friend.”
119. “The lonely one offers his hand too quickly to whomever he encounters.”
120. “Though I may seem at times somewhat distant from you, through the gray mist of philology, I am never far, my thoughts always circle around you.”
121. “There is a false saying: “How can someone who can’t save himself save others?” Supposing I have the key to your chains, why should your lock and my lock be the same?”
Nietzsche Quotes on Solitude
122. “But in the loneliest desert happens the second metamorphosis: here the spirit becomes a lion; he will seize his freedom and be master in his own wilderness.”
123. “But I need solitude–which is to say, recovery, return to myself, the breath of a free, light, playful air.”
124. “He who delights in solitude is either a wild beast or a god.”
125. “I go into solitude so as not to drink out of everybody’s cistern.”
126. “In loneliness, the lonely one eats himself; in a crowd, the many eat him. Now choose.”
Nietzsche Quotes on Enemies
127. “A politician divides mankind into two classes: tools and enemies.”
128. “When we have to change our mind about a person, we hold the inconvenience he causes us very much against him.”
129. “Under peaceful conditions a warlike man sets upon himself.”
130. “At times one remains faithful to a cause only because its opponents do not cease to be insipid.”
131. “Anyone who has declared someone else to be an idiot, a bad apple, is annoyed when it turns out in the end that he isn’t. ”
132. “But thus do I counsel you, my friends: distrust all in whom the impulse to punish is powerful!”
133. “We do not place especial value on the possession of a virtue until we notice its total absence in our opponent.”
134. “Whoever lives for the sake of combating an enemy has an interest in the enemy’s staying alive.”
135. “It is impossible to suffer without making someone pay for it; every complaint already contains revenge.”
136. “The desire to annoy no one, to harm no one, can equally well be the sign of a just as of an anxious disposition.”
137. “But the worst enemy you can meet will always be yourself; you lie in wait for yourself in caverns and forests. Lonely one, you are going the way to yourself! And your way goes past yourself, and past your seven devils! You will be a heretic to yourself and witch and soothsayer and fool and doubter and unholy one and villain. You must be ready to burn yourself in your own flame: how could you become new, if you had not first become ashes?”
Nietzsche Quotes on Women
138. “Woman was God’s second mistake.”
139. “In revenge and in love woman is more barbaric than man is.”
140. “The true man wants two things: danger and play. For that reason he wants woman, as the most dangerous plaything.”
141. “Ah, women. They make the highs higher and the lows more frequent.”
142. “Stupidity in a woman is unfeminine.”
Nietzsche Quotes About Individuality vs Herd Mentality
143. “And those who were seen dancing were thought to be insane by those who could not hear the music.”
144. “The higher we soar the smaller we appear to those who cannot fly.”
145. “At bottom every man knows well enough that he is a unique being, only once on this earth; and by no extraordinary chance will such a marvelously picturesque piece of diversity in unity as he is, ever be put together a second time.”
146. “Injustice and filth they throw after the lonely one: but, my brother, if you would be a star, you must not shine less for them because of that. And beware of the good and the just! They like to crucify those who invent their own virtue for themselves—they hate the lonely one.”
147. “Alas, I have begun my loneliest walk. But whoever is of my kind, cannot escape such an hour, the hour which says to him, ‘Only now are you going your way to greatness. Peak and abyss, they are now joined together, for all things are baptized in a well of eternity, and lie beyond good and evil.”
148. “So long as men praise you, you can only be sure that you are not yet on your own true path but on someone else’s.”
149. “Freedom is the will to be responsible for ourselves.”
150. “He who obeys, does not listen to himself!”
151. “Whoever knows he is deep, strives for clarity; whoever would like to appear deep to the crowd, strives for obscurity. For the crowd considers anything deep if only it cannot see to the bottom: the crowd is so timid and afraid of going into the water.”
152. “The individual has always had to struggle to keep from being overwhelmed by the tribe. If you try it, you will be lonely often, and sometimes frightened. But no price is too high to pay for the privilege of owning yourself.”
153. “In the end things must be as they are and have always been–the great things remain for the great, the abysses for the profound, the delicacies and thrills for the refined, and, to sum up shortly, everything rare for the rare.”
154. “I mistrust all systematizers and avoid them. The will to a system is a lack of integrity.”
155. “He who cannot obey himself will be commanded. That is the nature of living creatures.”
156. “No shepherd and one herd! Everybody wants the same, everybody is the same: whoever feels different goes voluntarily into a madhouse.”
157. “Today as always, men fall into two groups: slaves and free men. Whoever does not have two-thirds of his day for himself, is a slave, whatever he may be: a statesman, a businessman, an official, or a scholar.”
158. “Disobedience- that is the nobility of slaves.”
Nietzsche Quotes On Wisdom/Thought
159. “A thought, even a possibility, can shatter and transform us.”
160. “It is hard enough to remember my opinions, without also remembering my reasons for them!”
161. “Every deep thinker is more afraid of being understood than of being misunderstood.”
162. “All truly great thoughts are conceived while walking.”
163. “Great intellects are skeptical.”
164. “There is more wisdom in your body than in your deepest philosophy.”
165. “Every achievement, every step forward in knowledge, is the consequence of courage, of toughness towards oneself, of sincerity to oneself.”
166. “Wisdom—seems to the rabble a kind of escape, a means and a trick for getting well out of a wicked game. But the genuine philosopher—as it seems to us, my friends?—lives ‘unphilosophically’ and ‘unwisely,’ above all imprudently, and feels the burden and the duty of a hundred attempts and temptations of life—he risks himself constantly, he plays the wicked game.”
167. “A thought comes when it will, not when I will.”
168. “Close beside my knowledge lies my black ignorance.”
169. “For nothing is more democratic than logic; it is no respecter of persons and makes no distinction between crooked and straight noses.”
170. “Thus I spoke, more and more softly; for I was afraid of my own thoughts and the thoughts behind my thoughts.”
171. “Do not talk about giftedness, inborn talents! One can name great men of all kinds who were very little gifted. They acquired greatness, became ‘geniuses’ (as we put it), through qualities the lack of which no one who knew what they were would boast of: they all possessed that seriousness of the efficient workman which first learns to construct the parts properly before it ventures to fashion a great whole; they allowed themselves time for it, because they took more pleasure in making the little, secondary things well than in the effect of a dazzling whole.”
172. The doer alone learneth.
173. “Your educators can only be your liberators.”
174. “A thinker sees his own actions as experiments and questions–as attempts to find out something. Success and failure are for him answers above all.”
175. “One repays a teacher badly if one always remains nothing but a pupil.”
176. “He who cannot put his thoughts on ice should not enter into the heat of dispute.”
177. “He who speaks a bit of a foreign language has more delight in it than he who speaks it well; pleasure goes along with superficial knowledge.”
178. “He who would learn to fly one day must first learn to walk and run and climb and dance; one cannot fly into flying.”
179. “I have learned to walk: since then I have run. I have learned to fly: since then I do not have to be pushed in order to move.”
180. “Behold! I am weary of my wisdom, like the bee that has gathered too much honey; I need hands outstretched to take it from me. I wish to spread it and bestow it, until the wise have once more become joyous in their folly, and the poor happy in their riches.”
Nietzsche Quotes On Truth vs Belief/Conviction
181. “What is the truth, but a lie agreed upon.”
182. “The surest way to corrupt a youth is to instruct him to hold in higher esteem those who think alike than those who think differently.”
183. “One sticks to an opinion because he prides himself on having come to it on his own, and another because he has taken great pains to learn it and is proud to have grasped it: and so both do so out of vanity.”
184. “You should seek your enemy, you should wage your war – a war for your opinions. And when your opinion is defeated your honesty should still cry triumph over that!”
185. “It is not conflict of opinions that has made history so violent but conflict of belief in opinions, that is to say conflict of convictions.”
186. “Sometimes people don’t want to hear the truth because they don’t want their illusions destroyed.”
187. “The man of knowledge must be able not only to love his enemies but also to hate his friends.”
188. “The snake which cannot cast its skin has to die. As well the minds which are prevented from changing their opinions; they cease to be mind.”
189. “There are two different types of people in the world, those who want to know, and those who want to believe.”
190. “There are no facts, only interpretations.”
191. “What, then, is truth? A mobile army of metaphors, metonyms, and anthropomorphisms – in short, a sum of human relations, which have been enhanced, transposed, and embellished poetically and rhetorically, and which after long use seem firm, canonical, and obligatory to a people: truths are illusions about which one has forgotten that this is what they are; metaphors which are worn out and without sensuous power; coins which have lost their pictures and now matter only as metal, no longer as coins.”
192. “A casual stroll through the lunatic asylum shows that faith does not prove anything.”
193.“I have never pondered over questions that are not questions.”
194. “Convictions are more dangerous foes of truth than lies.”
195. “There are no eternal facts, as there are no absolute truths. ”
196. “The irrationality of a thing is no argument against its existence, rather a condition of it.”
197. “Knowledge kills action; action requires the veils of illusion.”
198. “There is a point in every philosophy at which the “conviction” of the philosopher appears on the scene; or, to put it in the words of an ancient mystery: adventavit asinus, pulcher et fortissimus. (Translation: The ass arrives, beautiful and most brave.)”
199. “The strength of a person’s spirit would then be measured by how much ‘truth’ he could tolerate, or more precisely, to what extent he needs to have it diluted, disguised, sweetened, muted, falsified.”
200. “Truths are illlusions which we have forgotten are illusions.”
201. “All truth is simple … is that not doubly a lie?”
202. “No one dies of fatal truths nowadays: there are too many antidotes.”
203. “Convictions are prisons.”
204. “The text has disappeared under the interpretation.”
205. “It is not when truth is dirty, but when it is shallow, that the lover of knowledge is reluctant to step into its waters.”
206. “How much truth can a spirit bear, how much truth can a spirit dare?”
207. “And we should call every truth false which was not accompanied by at least one laugh.”
208. “Silence is worse; all truths that are kept silent become poisonous.”
209. “I am not upset that you lied to me, I am upset that from now on I cannot believe you.”
210. “All credibility, all good conscience, all evidence of truth come only from the senses.”
211. “Ten truths must you find during the day; otherwise will you seek truth during the night, and your soul will have been hungry.”
212. “Here the ways of men divide. If you wish to strive for peace of soul and happiness, then believe; if you wish to be a disciple of truth, then inquire.”
213. “The more abstract the truth you wish to teach, the more you need to seduce the senses to it.”
214.
215. “To recognize untruth as a condition of life–that certainly means resisting accustomed value feelings in a dangerous way; and a philosophy that risks this would by that token alone place itself beyond good and evil.”
216. “Sometimes it is harder to accede to a thing than it is to see its truth.”
217. “You may lie with your mouth, but with the mouth you make as you do so you none the less tell the truth.”
218. “We would not let ourselves be burned to death for our opinions: we are not sure enough of them for that.”
219. “You have your way. I have my way. As for the right way, the correct way, and the only way, it does not exist.”
220. “It is nobler to declare oneself wrong than to insist on being right –especially when one is right.”
Nietzsche Quotes on Truth and Lying
221. “The lie is a condition of life.”
222. “The visionary lies to himself, the liar only to others.”
223. “The most perfidious way of harming a cause consists of defending it deliberately with faulty arguments.”
224. “Everything the State says is a lie, and everything it has it has stolen.”
225. “The most common sort of lie is that by which a man deceives himself: the deception of others is a relatively rare offense.”
Nietzsche Quotes on the Powerful
226. “Human history would be nothing but a record of stupidity save for the cunning contributions of the weak.”
227. “They muddy the water, to make it seem deep.”
228. “Distrust all in whom the impulse to punish is powerful.”
229. “All things are subject to interpretation. Whichever interpretation prevails at a given time is a function of power and not truth.”
230. “It is a terrible thought, to contemplate that an immense number of mediocre thinkers are occupied with really influential matters.”
231. “What is good? All that heightens the feeling of power, the will to power, power itself. What is bad? All that is born of weakness. What is happiness? The feeling that power is growing, that resistance is overcome.”
232. “Watch them clamber, these swift monkeys! They clamber over one another and thus drag one another into the mud and the depth. They all want to get to the throne: that is their madness — as if happiness sat on the throne. Often, mud sits on the throne — and often the throne also on mud. Mad they all appear to me, clambering monkeys and over-ardent. Foul smells their idol, the cold monster: foul, they smell to me altogether, these idolators. ”
233. “All great things must first wear terrifying and monstrous masks in order to inscribe themselves on the hearts of humanity.”
234. “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.”
Nietzsche Quotes on Art
235. “We have art in order not to die of the truth.”
236. “Behind a remarkable scholar we not infrequently find an average human being, and behind an average artist we often find a very remarkable human being.”
237. “Art is the proper task of life.”
238. “For art to exist, for any sort of aesthetic activity or perception to exist, a certain physiological precondition is indispensable: intoxication.”
239. “One thing a man must have: either a naturally light disposition or a disposition lightened by art and knowledge.”
240. “As an artist, a man has no home in Europe save in Paris.”
241. “The man who is responsive to artistic stimuli reacts to the reality of dreams as does the philosopher to the reality of existence; he observes closely, and he enjoys his observation: for it is out of these images that he interprets life, out of these processes that he trains himself for life.”
242. “Art is essentially the affirmation, the blessing, and the deification of existence.”
243. “The essence of all beautiful art, all great art, is gratitude.”
244. “Companions the creator seeks, not corpses, not herds and believers. Fellow creators the creator seeks — those who write new values on new tablets. Companions the creator seeks, and fellow harvesters; for everything about him is ripe for the harvest.”
245. “Admiration for a quality or an art can be so strong that it deters us from striving to possess it.”
246. “The real world is much smaller than the imaginary.”
247. “I love him who seeks to create over and beyond himself and thus perishes.”
248. “I want to learn more and more to see as beautiful what is necessary in things:—then I shall be one of those who make things beautiful.”
249. “Success has always been the greatest liar – and the “work” itself is a success; the great statesman, the conqueror, the discoverer is disguised by his creations, often beyond recognition; the “work,” whether of the artist or the philosopher, invents the man who has created it, who is supposed to have created it; “great men,” as they are venerated, are subsequent pieces of wretched minor fiction.”
250. “Art is not merely an imitation of the reality of nature, but in truth a metaphysical supplement to the reality of nature, placed alongside thereof for its conquest. ”
251. “Creating—that is the great salvation from suffering, and life’s alleviation. But for the creator to appear, suffering itself is needed, and much transformation.”
252. “No artist tolerates reality.”
Nietzsche Quotes on Writing
253. “All I need is a sheet of paper, and something to write with, and then I can turn the world upside down.”
254. “Ultimately no one can hear in things―books included―more than he already knows. If you have no access to something from experience, you will have no ear for it.”
255. “One does not only wish to be understood when one writes; one wishes just as surely not to be understood.”
256. “Books and drafts mean something quite different for different thinkers. One collects in a book the lights he was able to steal and carry home swiftly out of the rays of some insight that suddenly dawned on him, while another thinker offers us nothing but shadows – images in black and grey of what had built up in his soul the day before.”
257. “We talk so abstractly about poetry because all of us are usually bad poets.”
258. “A good writer possesses not only his own spirit but also the spirit of his friends.”
259. “Dancing in all its forms cannot be excluded from the curriculum of all noble education; dancing with the feet, with ideas, with words, and, need I add that one must also be able to dance with the pen?”
260. “It is my ambition to say in ten sentences what others say in a whole book.”
262. “The worst readers are those who behave like plundering troops: they take away a few things they can use, dirty and confound the remainder, and revile the whole.”
263. “The author must keep his mouth shut when his work starts to speak.”
264. “I am one thing, my writings are another.”
265. “Poets are shameless with their experiences: they exploit them.”
266. “Of all that is written, I love only what a person hath written with his blood. Write with blood, and thou wilt find that blood is spirit.”
267. “How lovely it is that there are words and sounds. Are not words and sounds rainbows and illusive bridges between things which are eternally apart?”
Nietzsche Quotes on Music
268. “Without music, life would be a mistake.”
269. “In music the passions enjoy themselves.”
Nietzsche Quotes on Dancing
270. “I would believe only in a God that knows how to dance.”
271. “We should consider every day lost in which we have not danced at least once.”
Nietzsche Quotes on Memory
272. “Blessed are the forgetful, for they get the better even of their blunders.”
273. “The advantage of a bad memory is that one enjoys several times the same good things for the first time.”
274. “Man… cannot learn to forget, but hangs on the past: however far or fast he runs, that chain runs with him.”
275. “Memory says, ‘I did that.’ Pride replies, ‘I could not have done that.’ Eventually, memory yields.”
276. “Many a man fails as an original thinker simply because his memory is too good.”
277. “Without forgetting it is quite impossible to live at all.”
Nietzsche Quotes on Emotion
278. “Cynicism is the only form in which base souls approach honesty.”
279. “Nothing on earth consumes a man more quickly than the passion of resentment.”
280. “I notice that Autumn is more the season of the soul than of nature.”
281. “Not he is great who can alter matter, but he who can alter my state of mind.”
282. “To those human beings who are of any concern to me I wish suffering, desolation, sickness, ill-treatment, indignities—I wish that they should not remain unfamiliar with profound self-contempt, the torture of self-mistrust, the wretchedness of the vanquished: I have no pity for them, because I wish them the only thing that can prove today whether one is worth anything or not—that one endures.”
283. “He who climbs upon the highest mountains laughs at all tragedies, real or imaginary.”
284. “Remorse.– Never yield to remorse, but at once tell yourself: remorse would simply mean adding to the first act of stupidity a second.”
285. “Arrogance on the part of the meritorious is even more offensive to us than the arrogance of those without merit: for merit itself is offensive.”
286. “There is an innocence in admiration: it occurs in one who has not yet realized that they might one day be admired.”
287. “Resentment, born of weakness, harms no one more than the weak person himself.”
288. “Of all evil I deem you capable: Therefore I want good from you. Verily, I have often laughed at the weaklings who thought themselves good because they had no claws.”
289. “Against boredom even gods struggle in vain.”
Nietzsche Quotes on Change and Challenges
290. “I change too quickly: my today refutes my yesterday. When I ascend I often jump over steps, and no step forgives me that.”
291. “There will always be rocks in the road ahead of us. They will be stumbling blocks or stepping stones; it all depends on how you use them.”
292. “There are terrible people who, instead of solving a problem, bungle it and make it more difficult for all who come after. Whoever can’t hit the nail on the head should, please, not hit at all.”
293. “One has to take a somewhat bold and dangerous line with this existence: especially as, whatever happens, we are bound to lose it.”
Nietzsche Quotes on God, Christianity, and Faith
294. “Is man merely a mistake of God’s? Or God merely a mistake of man?”
295. “Weariness that wants to reach the ultimate with one leap, with one fatal leap, a poor ignorant weariness that does not want to want any more: this created all gods and afterworlds.”
296. “After coming into contact with a religious man I always feel I must wash my hands.”
297. “A subject for a great poet would be God’s boredom after the seventh day of creation.”
298. “In Christianity neither morality nor religion come into contact with reality at any point.”
299. “I cannot believe in a God who wants to be praised all the time.”
300. “Doubt as sin. — 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 — is sin! And notice that all this means that the foundation of belief and all reflection on its origin is likewise excluded as sinful. What is wanted are blindness and intoxication and an eternal song over the waves in which reason has drowned.”
301. “Faith: not wanting to know what is true.”
302. “I might believe in the Redeemer if his followers looked more redeemed.”
303. “The believer in magic and miracles reflects on how to impose a law on nature–: and, in brief, the religious cult is the outcome of this reflection.”
304. “One must not let oneself be misled: they say ‘Judge not!’ but they send to Hell everything that stands in their way.”
305. “Two great European narcotics, alcohol and Christianity.”
306. “As soon as a religion comes to dominate it has as its opponents all those who would have been its first disciples. ”
307. “There is not enough love and goodness in the world to permit giving any of it away to imaginary beings.”
308. “The most spiritual human beings, assuming they are the most courageous, also experience by far the most painful tragedies: but it is precisely for this reason that they honor life, because it brings against them its most formidable weapons.”
309. “The less one knows how to command, the more urgently one covets someone who commands, who commands severely—a god, prince, class, physician, father confessor, dogma, or party conscience… Once a human being reaches the fundamental conviction that he must be commanded, he becomes “a believer.”
310. “There is not enough religion in the world to destroy the world’s religions.”
311. “The word “Christianity” is already a misunderstanding; in reality there has been only one Christian, and he died on the cross.”
312. “God is a thought who makes crooked all that is straight. ”
313. “I am too inquisitive, too skeptical, too arrogant, to let myself be satisfied with an obvious and crass solution of things. God is such an obvious and crass solution; a solution which is a sheer indelicacy to us thinkers – at bottom He is really nothing but a coarse commandment against us: ye shall not think! ”
314. “The desire for a strong faith is not the proof of a strong faith, rather the opposite. If one has it one may permit oneself the beautiful luxury of skepticism: one is secure enough, fixed enough for it.”
315. “Remain faithful to the earth, my brothers, with the power of your virtue. Let your gift-giving love and your knowledge serve the meaning of the earth. Thus I beg and beseech you. Do not let them fly away from earthly things and beat with their wings against eternal walls. Alas, there has always been so much virtue that has flown away. Lead back to the earth the virtue that flew away, as I do—back to the body, back to life, that it may give the earth a meaning, a human meaning.”
316. “In letting God sit in judgment they judge themselves; in glorifying God they glorify themselves.”
317. “In heaven, all the interesting people are missing.”
318. “The Christian resolution to find the world ugly and bad has made the world ugly and bad.”
319. “Certainly the Christian religion is an antiquity projected into our times from remote prehistory… how ghoulishly all this touches us, as if from the tomb of a primeval past! Can one believe that such things are still believed?”
320. “Christianity was from the beginning, essentially and fundamentally, life’s nausea and disgust with life, merely concealed behind, masked by, dressed up as, faith in “another” or “better” life.”
321. “Indeed, at hearing the news that ‘the old god is dead’, we philosophers and ‘free spirits’ feel illuminated by a new dawn; our heart overflows with gratitude, amazement, forebodings, expectation – finally the horizon seems clear again, even if not bright; finally our ships may set out again, set out to face any danger; every daring of the lover of knowledge is allowed again; the sea, our sea, lies open again; maybe there has never been such an ‘open sea’.”
322. “Christianity gave Eros poison to drink; he did not die of it, certainly, but degenerated to Vice.”
323. “God is dead, but considering the state the species man is in, there will perhaps be caves, for ages yet, in which his shadow will be shown.”
324. “Christianity remains to this day the greatest misfortune of humanity.”
Nietzsche ‘God is Dead’ Quote
325. “God is dead. God remains dead. And we have killed him. How shall we comfort ourselves, the murderers of all murderers? What was holiest and mightiest of all that the world has yet owned has bled to death under our knives: who will wipe this blood off us? What water is there for us to clean ourselves? What festivals of atonement, what sacred games shall we have to invent? Is not the greatness of this deed too great for us? Must we ourselves not become gods simply to appear worthy of it?”
Nietzsche Quotes on Morality
326. “A moral system valid for all is basically immoral.”
327. “It is a self-deception of philosophers and moralists to imagine that they escape decadence by opposing it. That is beyond their will; and, however little they acknowledge it, one later discovers that they were among the most powerful promoters of decadence.”
328. “Morality is the herd-instinct in the individual.”
329. “There is no such thing as moral phenomena, but only a moral interpretation of phenomena.”
330. “Merchant and pirate were for a long period one and the same person. Even today mercantile morality is really nothing but a refinement of piratical morality.”
331. “Because we have for millenia made moral, aesthetic, religious demands on the world, looked upon it with blind desire, passion or fear, and abandoned ourselves to the bad habits of illogical thinking, this world has gradually become so marvelously variegated, frightful, meaningful, soulful, it has acquired color – but we have been the colorists: it is the human intellect that has made appearances appear and transported its erroneous basic conceptions into things.”
332. “Morality is neither rational nor absolute nor natural. The world has known many moral systems, each of which advances claims of universality; all moral systems are therefore particular, serving a specific purpose for their propagators or creators, and enforcing a certain regime that disciplines human beings for social life by narrowing our perspectives and limiting our horizons.”
Nietzsche Quotes on the Abyss and Darkness
333. “Whoever fights monsters should see to it that in the process he does not become a monster. If you gaze long enough into an abyss, the abyss also gazes into you.”
334. “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?”
335. “How can those who live in the light of the day possibly comprehend the depths of the night?”
336. “There are no beautiful surfaces without a terrible depth.”
337. “When we are tired, we are attacked by ideas we conquered long ago.”
338. “Thoughts are the shadows of our feelings — always darker, emptier and simpler.”
339. “I am a forest, and a night of dark trees: but he who is not afraid of my darkness, will find banks full of roses under my cypresses.”
340. “If you are not a bird, then beware of coming to rest above an abyss.”
341. “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.”
342. “Is it better to out-monster the monster or to be quietly devoured?”
343. “…throw roses into the abyss and say: ‘here is my thanks to the monster who didn’t succeed in swallowing me alive.”
344. “Be careful, lest in casting out your demon you exorcise the best thing in you.”
Nietzsche Quotes on Death
345. “The final reward of the dead – to die no more.”
346. “The thought of suicide is a great consolation: by means of it one gets through many a dark night.”
347. “There is a certain right by which we many deprive a man of life, but none by which we may deprive him of death; this is mere cruelty.”
348. “The best of all things is something entirely outside your grasp: not to be born, not to be, to be nothing. But the second best thing for you is to die soon.”
349. “Those you cannot teach to fly, teach to fall faster.”