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Friedrich Nietzsche Quotes



Quotes by Friedrich Nietzsche - (117 quotes)

Friedrich Nietzsche - From the Activity category:

Do whatever you will, but first be such as are able to will. (Friedrich Nietzsche)

Friedrich Nietzsche - From the Ambition category:

Admiration for a quality or an art can be so strong that it deters us from striving to possess it. (Friedrich Nietzsche)

Friedrich Nietzsche - From the Art category:

We have art so that we may not perish by the truth. (Friedrich Nietzsche)

Friedrich Nietzsche - From the Art category:

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. (Friedrich Nietzsche)

Friedrich Nietzsche - From the Attitude category:

There is one thing one has to have: either a soul that is cheerful by nature, or a soul made cheerful by work, love, art, and knowledge. (Friedrich Nietzsche)

Friedrich Nietzsche - From the Books category:

A great value of antiquity lies in the fact that its writings are the only ones that modern men still read with exactness. (Friedrich Nietzsche)

Friedrich Nietzsche - From the Boredom category:

Against boredom even the gods contend in vain. (Friedrich Nietzsche)

Friedrich Nietzsche - From the Boredom category:

Is not life a thousand times too short for us to bore ourselves? (Friedrich Nietzsche)

Friedrich Nietzsche - From the Brother/Sisterhood category:

When a hundred men stand together, each of them loses his mind and gets another one. (Friedrich Nietzsche)

Friedrich Nietzsche - From the Chaos category:

One must still have chaos in oneself to be able to give birth to a dancing star. (Friedrich Nietzsche)

Friedrich Nietzsche - From the Character category:

A person is far more likely to appear to have sound character because he persistently follows his temperament than because he persistently follows his principles. (Friedrich Nietzsche)

Friedrich Nietzsche - From the Character category:

Character is determined more by the lack of certain experiences than by those one has had. (Friedrich Nietzsche)

Friedrich Nietzsche - From the Choices category:

An artist chooses his subjects: that is the way he praises. (Friedrich Nietzsche)

Friedrich Nietzsche - From the Communication category:

There is nothing we like to communicate to others as much as the seal of secrecy together with what lies under it. (Friedrich Nietzsche)

Friedrich Nietzsche - From the Complaining category:

It is impossible to suffer without making someone pay for it; every complaint already contains revenge. (Friedrich Nietzsche)

Friedrich Nietzsche - From the Confession category:

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. (Friedrich Nietzsche)

Friedrich Nietzsche - From the Construction category:

When one has finished building one's house, one suddenly realizes that in the process one has learned something that one really needed to know in the worst way - before one began. (Friedrich Nietzsche)

Friedrich Nietzsche - From the Contemplation category:

Never trust a thought that didn't come by walking. (Friedrich Nietzsche)

Friedrich Nietzsche - From the Creativity category:

I desire that your conjectures should not reach beyond your creative will. Could you create a god? Then do not speak to me of any gods. (Friedrich Nietzsche)

Friedrich Nietzsche - From the Critics category:

Insects sting, not from malice, but because they want to live. It is the same with critics – they desire our blood, not our pain. (Friedrich Nietzsche)

Friedrich Nietzsche - From the Danger category:

Believe me! The secret of reaping the greatest fruitfulness and the greatest enjoyment from life is to live dangerously. (Friedrich Nietzsche)

Friedrich Nietzsche - From the Dreams category:

While dreams are the individual man's play with reality, the sculptor's art is – in a broader sense – the play with dreams. (Friedrich Nietzsche)

Friedrich Nietzsche - From the Drunkenness category:

For art to exist, for any sort of aesthetic activity or perception to exist, a certain physiological precondition is indispensable: intoxication. (Friedrich Nietzsche)

Friedrich Nietzsche - From the Editing category:

It is my ambition to say in ten sentences what others say in a whole book. (Friedrich Nietzsche)

Friedrich Nietzsche - From the Education category:

In large states public education will always be mediocre, for the same reason that in large kitchens the cooking is usually bad. (Friedrich Nietzsche)

Friedrich Nietzsche - From the Education category:

The doer alone learneth. (Friedrich Nietzsche)

Friedrich Nietzsche - From the Ego category:

Whenever I climb I am followed by a dog called 'Ego.' (Friedrich Nietzsche)

Friedrich Nietzsche - From the Ego category:

The higher we soar, the smaller we seem to those who cannot fly. (Friedrich Nietzsche)

Friedrich Nietzsche - From the Ego category:

Egoism is the very essence of a noble soul. (Friedrich Nietzsche)

Friedrich Nietzsche - From the Exhaustion category:

Living in a constant chase after gain compels people to expend their spirit to the point of exhaustion. (Friedrich Nietzsche)

Friedrich Nietzsche - From the Experience category:

No one can draw more out of things, books included, than he already knows. A man has no ears for that to which experience has given him no access. (Friedrich Nietzsche)

Friedrich Nietzsche - From the Experience category:

Experience, as a desire for experience, does not come off. We must not study ourselves while having an experience. (Friedrich Nietzsche)

Friedrich Nietzsche - From the Friendship category:

A friend should be a master at guessing and keeping still: you must not want to see everything. (Friedrich Nietzsche)

Friedrich Nietzsche - From the Friendship category:

Rejoicing in our joy, not suffering over our suffering, makes someone a friend. (Friedrich Nietzsche)

Friedrich Nietzsche - From the Future category:

The future influences the present just as much as the past. (Friedrich Nietzsche)

Friedrich Nietzsche - From the Gender category:

Ah, women. They make the highs higher and the lows more frequent. (Friedrich Nietzsche)

Friedrich Nietzsche - From the Generosity category:

He who cannot give anything away cannot feel anything either. (Friedrich Nietzsche)

Friedrich Nietzsche - From the Goals category:

Many are stubborn in pursuit of the path they have chosen, few in pursuit of the goal. (Friedrich Nietzsche)

Friedrich Nietzsche - From the Goodness category:

What is good? All that heightens the feeling of power, the will to power, power itself in man. (Friedrich Nietzsche)

Friedrich Nietzsche - From the Gratitude category:

The essence of all beautiful art, all great art, is gratitude. (Friedrich Nietzsche)

Friedrich Nietzsche - From the Growth category:

Become who you are. (Friedrich Nietzsche)

Friedrich Nietzsche - From the Guilt category:

Although the most acute judges of the witches and even the witches themselves, were convinced of the guilt of witchery, the guilt nevertheless was non-existent. It is thus with all guilt. (Friedrich Nietzsche)

Friedrich Nietzsche - From the Habit category:

Enduring habits I hate... Yes, at the very bottom of my soul I feel grateful to all my misery and bouts of sickness and everything about me that is imperfect, because this sort of thing leaves me with a hundred backdoors through which I can escape from enduring habits. (Friedrich Nietzsche)

Friedrich Nietzsche - From the Humour category:

And we should consider every day lost on which we have not danced at least once. And we should call every truth false which was not accompanied by at least one laugh. (Friedrich Nietzsche)

Friedrich Nietzsche - From the Imitation category:

The 'bad' gains respect through imitation; the 'good' loses it, especially in art. (Friedrich Nietzsche)

Friedrich Nietzsche - From the Immortality category:

One has to pay dearly for immortality; one has to die several times while one is still alive. (Friedrich Nietzsche)

Friedrich Nietzsche - From the Immortality category:

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. (Friedrich Nietzsche)

Friedrich Nietzsche - From the Impossibilities category:

In everything one thing is impossible: rationality. (Friedrich Nietzsche)

Friedrich Nietzsche - From the Individuality category:

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. (Friedrich Nietzsche)

Friedrich Nietzsche - From the Individuality category:

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. (Friedrich Nietzsche)

Friedrich Nietzsche - From the Indolence category:

Idleness is the parent of psychology. (Friedrich Nietzsche)

Friedrich Nietzsche - From the Innocence category:

There is an innocence in admiration; it is found in those to whom it has never yet occurred that they, too, might be admired some day. (Friedrich Nietzsche)

Friedrich Nietzsche - From the Interpretation category:

There are no facts, only interpretations. (Friedrich Nietzsche)

Friedrich Nietzsche - From the Jealousy category:

The desire to create continually is vulgar and betrays jealousy, envy, ambition. If one is something, one really does not need to make anything - and one nonetheless does very much. There exists above the 'productive' man a yet higher species. (Friedrich Nietzsche)

Friedrich Nietzsche - From the Joy category:

Not joy is the mother of dissipation, but joylessness. (Friedrich Nietzsche)

Friedrich Nietzsche - From the Knowledge category:

Our treasure lies in the beehive of our knowledge. We are perpetually on the way thither, being by nature winged insects and honey gatherers of the mind. (Friedrich Nietzsche)

Friedrich Nietzsche - From the Life category:

Art is the proper task of life. (Friedrich Nietzsche)

Friedrich Nietzsche - From the Life category:

I still live, I still think: I still have to live, for I still have to think. (Friedrich Nietzsche)

Friedrich Nietzsche - From the Listening category:

We hear only those questions for which we are in a position to find answers. (Friedrich Nietzsche)

Friedrich Nietzsche - From the Love category:

Love is not consolation. It is light. (Friedrich Nietzsche)

Friedrich Nietzsche - From the Love category:

We love life, not because we are used to living but because we are used to loving. (Friedrich Nietzsche)

Friedrich Nietzsche - From the Love category:

There is always some madness in love. But there is also always some reason in madness. (Friedrich Nietzsche)

Friedrich Nietzsche - From the Morality category:

-The Joyful Wisdom
Morality is the herd-instinct in the individual. (Friedrich Nietzsche)

Friedrich Nietzsche - From the Morality category:

-Beyond Good and Evil
There are no moral phenomena, only a moral interpretation of phenomena. (Friedrich Nietzsche)

Friedrich Nietzsche - From the Morality category:

Fear is the mother of morality. (Friedrich Nietzsche)

Friedrich Nietzsche - From the Music category:

-Twilight of the Idols...
Without music life would be a mistake. (Friedrich Nietzsche)

Friedrich Nietzsche - From the Opposites category:

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. (Friedrich Nietzsche)

Friedrich Nietzsche - From the Originality category:

Many a man fails as an original thinker simply because his memory is too good. (Friedrich Nietzsche)

Friedrich Nietzsche - From the Originality category:

Every man is a creative cause of what happens, a primum mobile with an original movement. (Friedrich Nietzsche)

Friedrich Nietzsche - From the Passion category:

In music the passions enjoy themselves. (Friedrich Nietzsche)

Friedrich Nietzsche - From the Perception category:

And those who were seen dancing were thought to be insane by those who could not hear the music. (Friedrich Nietzsche)

Friedrich Nietzsche - From the Philosophy category:

I do not know what the spirit of a philosopher could more wish to be than a good dancer. For the dance is his ideal, also his fine art, finally also the only kind of piety he knows, his 'divine service.' (Friedrich Nietzsche)

Friedrich Nietzsche - From the Play category:

In the true man there is a child concealed who wants to play. (Friedrich Nietzsche)

Friedrich Nietzsche - From the Poetry category:

A subject for a great poet would be God's boredom after the seventh day of Creation. (Friedrich Nietzsche)

Friedrich Nietzsche - From the Power category:

I am not a human being, I am dynamite. (Friedrich Nietzsche)

Friedrich Nietzsche - From the Practice category:

He who would learn to fly one day must first learn to stand and walk and run and climb and dance; one cannot fly into flying. (Friedrich Nietzsche)

Friedrich Nietzsche - From the Production category:

When one has a great deal to put into it, a day has a hundred pockets. (Friedrich Nietzsche)

Friedrich Nietzsche - From the Profession category:

The best author will be the one who is ashamed to become a writer. (Friedrich Nietzsche)

Friedrich Nietzsche - From the Purpose category:

He who has a why to live can bear almost any how. (Friedrich Nietzsche)

Friedrich Nietzsche - From the Questions category:

Today I love myself as I love my god: who could charge me with a sin today? I know only sins against my god; but who knows my god? (Friedrich Nietzsche)

Friedrich Nietzsche - From the Realism category:

'Completely true to nature!' – what a lie: / How could nature ever be constrained into a picture? / The smallest bit of nature is infinite! / And so he paints what he likes about it. / And what does he like? He likes what he can paint! (Friedrich Nietzsche)

Friedrich Nietzsche - From the Recognition category:

When art dresses in worn-out material it is most easily recognized as art. (Friedrich Nietzsche)

Friedrich Nietzsche - From the Relaxation category:

There is no better soporific and sedative than scepticism. (Friedrich Nietzsche)

Friedrich Nietzsche - From the Religion category:

God is a thought who makes crooked all that is straight. (Friedrich Nietzsche)

Friedrich Nietzsche - From the Religion category:

I cannot believe in a God who wants to be praised all the time. (Friedrich Nietzsche)

Friedrich Nietzsche - From the Revelation category:

Talking much about oneself can also be a means to conceal oneself. (Friedrich Nietzsche)

Friedrich Nietzsche - From the Rules category:

You have your way. I have my way. As for the right way, the correct way, and the only way, it does not exist. (Friedrich Nietzsche)

Friedrich Nietzsche - From the Senses category:

All credibility, all good conscience, all evidence of truth come only from the senses. (Friedrich Nietzsche)

Friedrich Nietzsche - From the Shock category:

Extreme positions are not succeeded by moderate ones, but by contrary extreme positions. (Friedrich Nietzsche)

Friedrich Nietzsche - From the Silence category:

The author should shut his mouth when his work begins to speak. (Friedrich Nietzsche)

Friedrich Nietzsche - From the Sleep category:

Sleeping is no mean art: for its sake one must stay awake all day. (Friedrich Nietzsche)

Friedrich Nietzsche - From the Space category:

When you look into an abyss, the abyss also looks into you. (Friedrich Nietzsche)

Friedrich Nietzsche - From the Spirituality category:

It says nothing against the ripeness of a spirit that it has a few worms. (Friedrich Nietzsche)

Friedrich Nietzsche - From the Strength category:

-b.1844 d.1900...
What does not destroy me, makes me stronger. (Friedrich Nietzsche)

Friedrich Nietzsche - From the Struggle category:

I assess the power of a will by how much resistance, pain, torture it endures and knows how to turn to its advantage. (Friedrich Nietzsche)

Friedrich Nietzsche - From the Suffering category:

Perhaps I know best why it is man alone who laughs; he alone suffers so deeply that he had to invent laughter. (Friedrich Nietzsche)

Friedrich Nietzsche - From the Suffering category:

That which does not kill us makes us stronger. (Friedrich Nietzsche)

Friedrich Nietzsche - From the Suffering category:

To live is to suffer; to survive is to find some meaning in the suffering. (Friedrich Nietzsche)

Friedrich Nietzsche - From the Technology category:

The press, the machine, the railway, the telegraph are premises whose thousand-year conclusion no one has yet dared to draw. (Friedrich Nietzsche)

Friedrich Nietzsche - From the Temperament category:

There are highly gifted spirits who are always infertile simply because, owing to a weakness in temperament, they are too impatient to wait out their pregnancy to term. (Friedrich Nietzsche)

Friedrich Nietzsche - From the Thinking category:

Many a man fails to become a thinker for the sole reason that his memory is too good. (Friedrich Nietzsche)

Friedrich Nietzsche - From the Thought category:

He who fights with monsters might take care lest he thereby become a monster. And if you gaze for long into an abyss, the abyss gazes also into you. (Friedrich Nietzsche)

Friedrich Nietzsche - From the Thought category:

Even a thought, even a possibility, can shatter us and transform us. (Friedrich Nietzsche)

Friedrich Nietzsche - From the Thought category:

All truly great thoughts are conceived by walking. (Friedrich Nietzsche)

Friedrich Nietzsche - From the Thought category:

Thoughts are the shadows of our feelings - always darker, emptier and simpler. (Friedrich Nietzsche)

Friedrich Nietzsche - From the Time category:

Glance into the world just as though time were gone: and everything crooked will become straight to you. (Friedrich Nietzsche)

Friedrich Nietzsche - From the Timeliness category:

I love those who do not know how to live for today. (Friedrich Nietzsche)

Friedrich Nietzsche - From the Truth category:

In the mountains of truth you never climb in vain: either you will reach a point higher up today, or you will be training your powers so that you will be able to climb higher tomorrow. (Friedrich Nietzsche)

Friedrich Nietzsche - From the Truth category:

It is good to express a thing twice right at the outset and so to give it a right foot and also a left one. Truth can surely stand on one leg, but with two it will be able to walk and get around. (Friedrich Nietzsche)

Friedrich Nietzsche - From the Understanding category:

The irrationality of a thing is no argument against its existence, rather a condition of it. (Friedrich Nietzsche)

Friedrich Nietzsche - From the Uniqueness category:

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. (Friedrich Nietzsche)

Friedrich Nietzsche - From the Vanity category:

Our vanity is hardest to wound precisely when our pride has just been wounded. (Friedrich Nietzsche)

Friedrich Nietzsche - From the Wisdom category:

Does wisdom perhaps appear on the earth as a raven which is inspired by the smell of carrion? (Friedrich Nietzsche)

Friedrich Nietzsche - From the Words category:

A good aphorism is too hard for the tooth of time, and is not worn away by all the centuries, although it serves as food for every epoch. (Friedrich Nietzsche)

Friedrich Nietzsche - From the Words category:

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. (Friedrich Nietzsche)

Friedrich Nietzsche - From the Writing category:

A good writer possesses not only his own spirit but also the spirit of his friends. (Friedrich Nietzsche)

Friedrich Nietzsche - From the Writing category:

Of all that is written, I love only what a person has written with his own blood. (Friedrich Nietzsche)