Friedrich Nietzsche Quotes

• 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.
• There are no facts, only interpretations.
• In Germany there is much complaining about my 'eccentricities.' But since it is not known where my center is, it won't be easy to find out where or when I have thus far been 'eccentric.' That I was a philologist, for example, meant that I was outside my center (which fortunately does not mean that I was a poor philologist). Likewise, I now regard my having been a Wagnerian as eccentric. It was a highly dangerous experiment; now that I know it did not ruin me, I also know what significance it had for me - it was the most severe test of my character.
• So far no one had had enough courage and intelligence to reveal me to my dear Germans. My problems are new, my psychological horizon frighteningly comprehensive, my language bold and clear; there may well be no books written in German which are richer in ideas and more independent than mine.
• I've seen proof, black on white, that Herr Dr. Forster has not yet severed his connection with the anti-Semitic movement. ... Since then I've had difficulty coming up with any of the tenderness and protectiveness I've so long felt toward you. The separation between us is thereby decided in really the most absurd way. Have you grasped nothing of the reason why I am in the world? ... Now it has gone so far that I have to defend myself hand and foot against people who confuse me with these anti-Semitic canaille; after my own sister, my former sister, and after Widemann more recently have given the impetus to this most dire of all confusions. After I read the name Zarathustra in the anti-Semitic Correspondence my forbearance came to an end. I am now in a position of emergency defense against your spouse's Party. These accursed anti-Semite deformities shall not sully my ideal!!
• You have committed one of the greatest stupidities - for yourself and for me! Your association with an anti-Semitic chief expresses a foreignness to my whole way of life which fills me again and again with ire or melancholy. ... It is a matter of honor with me to be absolutely clean and unequivocal in relation to anti-Semitism, namely, opposed to it, as I am in my writings. I have recently been persecuted with letters and Anti-Semitic Correspondence Sheets. My disgust with this party (which would like the benefit of my name only too well!) is as pronounced as possible, but the relation to Forster, as well as the aftereffects of my former publisher, the anti-Semitic Schmeitzner, always brings the adherents of this disagreeable party back to the idea that I must belong to them after all. ... It arouses mistrust against my character, as if publicly I condemned something which I have favored secretly - and that I am unable to do anything against it, that the name of Zarathustra is used in every Anti-Semitic Correspondence Sheet, has almost made me sick several times.
• I have somehow something like 'influence' ... In the Anti-Semitic Correspondence ... my name is mentioned in almost every issue. Zarathustra ... has charmed the anti-Semites; there is a special anti-Semitic interpretation of it that made me laugh very much.
• Once upon a time, in some out of the way corner of that universe which is dispersed into numberless twinkling solar systems, there was a star upon which clever beasts invented knowing. That was the most arrogant and mendacious minute of 'world history,' but nevertheless, it was only a minute. After nature had drawn a few breaths, the star cooled and congealed, and the clever beasts had to die. One might invent such a fable, and yet he still would not have adequately illustrated how miserable, how shadowy and transient, how aimless and arbitrary the human intellect looks within nature. There were eternities during which it did not exist. And when it is all over with the human intellect, nothing will have happened.
• The pride connected with knowing and sensing lies like a blinding fog over the eyes and senses of men, thus deceiving them concerning the value of existence. For this pride contains within itself the most flattering estimation of the value of knowing. Deception is the most general effect of such pride, but even its most particular effects contain within themselves something of the same deceitful character.
• Deception, flattering, lying, deluding, talking behind the back, putting up a false front, living in borrowed splendor, wearing a mask, hiding behind convention, playing a role for others and for oneself - in short, a continuous fluttering around the solitary flame of vanity - is so much the rule and the law among men that there is almost nothing which is less comprehensible than how an honest and pure drive for truth could have arisen among them. They are deeply immersed in illusions and in dream images; their eyes merely glide over the surface of things and see 'forms.'
• What does man actually know about himself? Is he, indeed, ever able to perceive himself completely, as if laid out in a lighted display case? Does nature not conceal most things from him - even concerning his own body - in order to confine and lock him within a proud, deceptive consciousness, aloof from the coils of the bowels, the rapid flow of the blood stream, and the intricate quivering of the fibers! She threw away the key.
• The liar is a person who uses the valid designations, the words, in order to make something which is unreal appear to be real. He says, for example, 'I am rich,' when the proper designation for his condition would be 'poor.' He misuses fixed conventions by means of arbitrary substitutions or even reversals of names. If he does this in a selfish and moreover harmful manner, society will cease to trust him and will thereby exclude him. What men avoid by excluding the liar is not so much being defrauded as it is being harmed by means of fraud. Thus, even at this stage, what they hate is basically not deception itself, but rather the unpleasant, hated consequences of certain sorts of deception. It is in a similarly restricted sense that man now wants nothing but truth: he desires the pleasant, life-preserving consequences of truth. He is indifferent toward pure knowledge which has no consequences; toward those truths which are possibly harmful and destructive he is even hostilely inclined.
• Are designations congruent with things? Is language the adequate expression of all realities? It is only by means of forgetfulness that man can ever reach the point of fancying himself to possess a 'truth' of the grade just indicated. If he will not be satisfied with truth in the form of tautology, that is to say, if he will not be content with empty husks, then he will always exchange truths for illusions.
• The various languages placed side by side show that with words it is never a question of truth, never a question of adequate expression; otherwise, there would not be so many languages. The 'thing in itself' (which is precisely what the pure truth, apart from any of its consequences, would be) is likewise something quite incomprehensible to the creator of language and something not in the least worth striving for. This creator only designates the relations of things to men, and for expressing these relations he lays hold of the boldest metaphors.' To begin with, a nerve stimulus is transferred into an image: first metaphor. The image, in turn, is imitated in a sound: second metaphor. And each time there is a complete overleaping of one sphere, right into the middle of an entirely new and different one.
• We believe that we know something about the things themselves when we speak of trees, colors, snow, and flowers; and yet we possess nothing but metaphors for things - metaphors which correspond in no way to the original entities.
• Every word instantly becomes a concept precisely insofar as it is not supposed to serve as a reminder of the unique and entirely individual original experience to which it owes its origin; but rather, a word becomes a concept insofar as it simultaneously has to fit countless more or less similar cases - which means, purely and simply, cases which are never equal and thus altogether unequal. Every concept arises from the equation of unequal things. Just as it is certain that one leaf is never totally the same as another, so it is certain that the concept 'leaf' is formed by arbitrarily discarding these individual differences and by forgetting the distinguishing aspects.
• We obtain the concept, as we do the form, by overlooking what is individual and actual; whereas nature is acquainted with no forms and no concepts, and likewise with no species, but only with an X which remains inaccessible and undefinable for us.
• What then is truth? A movable host of metaphors, metonymies, and anthropomorphisms: in short, a sum of human relations which have been poetically and rhetorically intensified, transferred, and embellished, and which, after long usage, seem to a people to be fixed, canonical, and binding. Truths are illusions which we have forgotten are illusions - they are metaphors that have become worn out and have been drained of sensuous force, coins which have lost their embossing and are now considered as metal and no longer as coins.
• We still do not yet know where the drive for truth comes from. For so far we have heard only of the duty which society imposes in order to exist: to be truthful means to employ the usual metaphors. Thus, to express it morally, this is the duty to lie according to a fixed convention, to lie with the herd and in a manner binding upon everyone. Now man of course forgets that this is the way things stand for him. Thus he lies in the manner indicated, unconsciously and in accordance with habits which are centuries' old; and precisely by means of this unconsciousness and forgetfulness he arrives at his sense of truth.
• The venerability, reliability, and utility of truth is something which a person demonstrates for himself from the contrast with the liar, whom no one trusts and everyone excludes. As a 'rational' being, he now places his behavior under the control of abstractions. He will no longer tolerate being carried away by sudden impressions, by intuitions.
• Everything which distinguishes man from the animals depends upon this ability to volatilize perceptual metaphors in a schema, and thus to dissolve an image into a concept. For something is possible in the realm of these schemata which could never be achieved with the vivid first impressions: the construction of a pyramidal order according to castes and degrees, the creation of a new world of laws, privileges, subordinations, and clearly marked boundaries - a new world, one which now confronts that other vivid world of first impressions as more solid, more universal, better known, and more human than the immediately perceived world, and thus as the regulative and imperative world.
• One may certainly admire man as a mighty genius of construction, who succeeds in piling an infinitely complicated dome of concepts upon an unstable foundation, and, as it were, on running water. Of course, in order to be supported by such a foundation, his construction must be like one constructed of spiders' webs: delicate enough to be carried along by the waves, strong enough not to be blown apart by every wind.
• As a genius of construction man raises himself far above the bee in the following way: whereas the bee builds with wax that he gathers from nature, man builds with the far more delicate conceptual material which he first has to manufacture from himself.
• When someone hides something behind a bush and looks for it again in the same place and finds it there as well, there is not much to praise in such seeking and finding. Yet this is how matters stand regarding seeking and finding 'truth' within the realm of reason. If I make up the definition of a mammal, and then, after inspecting a camel, declare 'look, a mammal' I have indeed brought a truth to light in this way, but it is a truth of limited value. That is to say, it is a thoroughly anthropomorphic truth which contains not a single point which would be 'true in itself' or really and universally valid apart from man. At bottom, what the investigator of such truths is seeking is only the metamorphosis of the world into man.
• Only by forgetting this primitive world of metaphor can one live with any repose, security, and consistency: only by means of the petrification and coagulation of a mass of images which originally streamed from the primal faculty of human imagination like a fiery liquid, only in the invincible faith that this sun, this window, this table is a truth in itself, in short, only by forgetting that he himself is an artistically creating subject, does man live with any repose, security, and consistency. If but for an instant he could escape from the prison walls of this faith, his 'self consciousness' would be immediately destroyed. It is even a difficult thing for him to admit to himself that the insect or the bird perceives an entirely different world from the one that man does, and that the question of which of these perceptions of the world is the more correct one is quite meaningless, for this would have to have been decided previously in accordance with the criterion of the correct perception, which means, in accordance with a criterion which is not available.
• Between two absolutely different spheres, as between subject and object, there is no causality, no correctness, and no expression; there is, at most, an aesthetic relation: I mean, a suggestive transference, a stammering translation into a completely foreign tongue - for which I there is required, in any case, a freely inventive intermediate sphere and mediating force. 'Appearance' is a word that contains many temptations, which is why I avoid it as much as possible. For it is not true that the essence of things 'appears' in the empirical world. A painter without hands who wished to express in song the picture before his mind would, by means of this substitution of spheres, still reveal more about the essence of things than does the empirical world. Even the relationship of a nerve stimulus to the generated image is not a necessary one. But when the same image has been generated millions of times and has been handed down for many generations and finally appears on the same occasion every time for all mankind, then it acquires at last the same meaning for men it would have if it were the sole necessary image and if the relationship of the original nerve stimulus to the generated image were a strictly causal one. In the same manner, an eternally repeated dream would certainly be felt and judged to be reality. But the hardening and congealing of a metaphor guarantees absolutely nothing concerning its necessity and exclusive justification.
• If each us had a different kind of sense perception - if we could only perceive things now as a bird, now as a worm, now as a plant, or if one of us saw a stimulus as red, another as blue, while a third even heard the same stimulus as a sound - then no one would speak of such a regularity of nature, rather, nature would be grasped only as a creation which is subjective in the highest degree. After all, what is a law of nature as such for us? We are not acquainted with it in itself, but only with its effects, which means in its relation to other laws of nature - which, in turn, are known to us only as sums of relations. Therefore all these relations always refer again to others and are thoroughly incomprehensible to us in their essence.
• We produce these representations in and from ourselves with the same necessity with which the spider spins. If we are forced to comprehend all things only under these forms, then it ceases to be amazing that in all things we actually comprehend nothing but these forms. For they must all bear within themselves the laws of number, and it is precisely number which is most astonishing in things. All that conformity to law, which impresses us so much in the movement of the stars and in chemical processes, coincides at bottom with those properties which we bring to things. Thus it is we who impress ourselves in this way
• We have seen how it is originally language which works on the construction of concepts, a labor taken over in later ages by science. Just as the bee simultaneously constructs cells and fills them with honey, so science works unceasingly on this great columbarium of concepts, the graveyard of perceptions.
• Whereas the man of action binds his life to reason and its concepts so that he will not be swept away and lost, the scientific investigator builds his hut right next to the tower of science so that he will be able to work on it and to find shelter for himself beneath those bulwarks which presently exist. And he requires shelter, for there are frightful powers which continuously break in upon him, powers which oppose scientific 'truth' with completely different kinds of 'truths' which bear on their shields the most varied sorts of emblems.
• The drive toward the formation of metaphors is the fundamental human drive, which one cannot for a single instant dispense with in thought, for one would thereby dispense with man himself. This drive is not truly vanquished and scarcely subdued by the fact that a regular and rigid new world is constructed as its prison from its own ephemeral products, the concepts. It seeks a new realm and another channel for its activity, and it finds this in myth and in art generally. This drive continually confuses the conceptual categories and cells by bringing forward new transferences, metaphors, and metonymies. It continually manifests an ardent desire to refashion the world which presents itself to waking man, so that it will be as colorful, irregular, lacking in results and coherence, charming, and eternally new as the world of dreams. Indeed, it is only by means of the rigid and regular web of concepts that the waking man clearly sees that he is awake; and it is precisely because of this that he sometimes thinks that he must be dreaming when this web of concepts is torn by art.
• Because of the way that myth takes it for granted that miracles are always happening, the waking life of a mythically inspired people - the ancient Greeks, for instance - more closely resembles a dream than it does the waking world of a scientifically disenchanted thinker.
• Man has an invincible inclination to allow himself to be deceived and is, as it were, enchanted with happiness when the rhapsodist tells him epic fables as if they were true, or when the actor in the theater acts more royally than any real king. So long as it is able to deceive without injuring, that master of deception, the intellect, is free; it is released from its former slavery and celebrates its Saturnalia. It is never more luxuriant, richer, prouder, more clever and more daring.
• That immense framework and planking of concepts to which the needy man clings his whole life long in order to preserve himself is nothing but a scaffolding and toy for the most audacious feats of the liberated intellect. And when it smashes this framework to pieces, throws it into confusion, and puts it back together in an ironic fashion, pairing the most alien things and separating the closest, it is demonstrating that it has no need of these makeshifts of indigence and that it will now be guided by intuitions rather than by concepts. There is no regular path which leads from these intuitions into the land of ghostly schemata, the land of abstractions. There exists no word for these intuitions; when man sees them he grows dumb, or else he speaks only in forbidden metaphors and in unheard - of combinations of concepts. He does this so that by shattering and mocking the old conceptual barriers he may at least correspond creatively to the impression of the powerful present intuition.
• There are ages in which the rational man and the intuitive man stand side by side, the one in fear of intuition, the other with scorn for abstraction. The latter is just as irrational as the former is inartistic. They both desire to rule over life: the former, by knowing how to meet his principle needs by means of foresight, prudence, and regularity; the latter, by disregarding these needs and, as an 'overjoyed hero,' counting as real only that life which has been disguised as illusion and beauty.
• The man who is guided by concepts and abstractions only succeeds by such means in warding off misfortune, without ever gaining any happiness for himself from these abstractions. And while he aims for the greatest possible freedom from pain, the intuitive man, standing in the midst of a culture, already reaps from his intuition a harvest of continually inflowing illumination, cheer, and redemption - in addition to obtaining a defense against misfortune. To be sure, he suffers more intensely, when he suffers; he even suffers more frequently, since he does not understand how to learn from experience and keeps falling over and over again into the same ditch.
• Our destiny exercises its influence over us even when, as yet, we have not learned its nature: it is our future that lays down the law of our today.
• One must have a good memory to be able to keep the promises one makes.
• One will rarely err if extreme actions be ascribed to vanity, ordinary actions to habit, and mean actions to fear.
• Every tradition grows ever more venerable - the more remote its origin, the more confused that origin is. The reverence due to it increases from generation to generation. The tradition finally becomes holy and inspires awe.
• Unpleasant, even dangerous, qualities can be found in every nation and every individual: it is cruel to demand that the Jew be an exception. In him, these qualities may even be dangerous and revolting to an unusual degree; and perhaps the young stock-exchange Jew is altogether the most disgusting invention of mankind.
• He who thinks a great deal is not suited to be a party man: he thinks his way through the party and out the other side too soon.
• The advantage of a bad memory is that one can enjoy the same good things for the first time several times.
• No one talks more passionately about his rights than he who in the depths of his soul doubts whether he has any. By enlisting passion on his side he wants to stifle his reason and its doubts: thus he will acquire a good conscience and with it success among his fellow men.
• If you have hitherto believed that life was one of the highest value and now see yourselves disappointed, do you at once have to reduce it to the lowest possible price?
• The mother of excess is not joy but joylessness.
• Many a man fails to become a thinker only because his memory is too good.
• 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.
• A witticism is an epigram on the death of a feeling.
• 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.
• In the mountains of truth you will never climb in vain: either you will get up higher today or you will exercise your strength so as to be able to get up higher tomorrow.
• It is mere illusion and pretty sentiment to expect much from mankind if he forgets how to make war. And yet no means are known which call so much into action as a great war, that rough energy born of the camp, that deep impersonality born of hatred, that conscience born of murder and cold-bloodedness, that fervor born of effort of the annihilation of the enemy, that proud indifference to loss, to one's own existence, to that of one's fellows, to that earthquake-like soul-shaking that a people needs when it is losing its vitality.
• He who is punished is never he who performed the deed. He is always the scapegoat.
• He who lives as children live - who does not struggle for his bread and does not believe that his actions possess any ultimate significance - remains childlike.
• It is not enough to prove something, one has also to seduce or elevate people to it. That is why the man of knowledge should learn how to speak his wisdom: and often in such a way that it sounds like folly!
• For those who need consolation no means of consolation is so effective as the assertion that in their case no consolation is possible: it implies so great a degree of distinction that they at once hold up their heads again.
• One has attained to mastery when one neither goes wrong nor hesitates in the performance.
• Die Leugner des Zufalls. - 'Kein Sieger glaubt an den Zufall.'
• Was sagt dein Gewissen? - 'Du sollst der werden, der du bist.'
• We are, all of us, growing volcanoes that approach the hour of their eruption; but how near or distant that is, nobody knows - not even God.
• It is true that there are men who, on the approach of severe pain, hear the very opposite call of command, and never appear more proud, more martial, or more happy than when the storm is brewing; indeed, pain itself provides them with their supreme moments! These are the heroic men, the great pain-bringers of mankind: those few and rare ones who need just the same apology as pain generally - and verily, it should not be denied them. They are forces of the greatest importance for preserving and advancing the species, be it only because they are opposed to smug ease, and do not conceal their disgust at this kind of happiness.
• Who can attain to anything great if he does not feel in himself the force and will to inflict great pain? The ability to suffer is a small matter: in that line, weak women and even slaves often attain masterliness. But not to perish from internal distress and doubt when one inflicts great suffering and hears the cry of it - that is great, that belongs to greatness.
• Benefiting and hurting others are ways of exercising one's power upon others; that is all one desires in such cases. One hurts those whom one wants to feel one's power, for pain is a much more efficient means to that end than pleasure; pain always raises the question about its origin while pleasure is inclined to stop with itself without looking back. We benefit and show benevolence to those who are already dependent on us in some way (which means that they are used to thinking of us as causes); we want to increase their power because in that way we increase ours, or we want to show them how advantageous it is to be in our power; that way they will become more satisfied with their condition and more hostile to and willing to fight against the enemies of our power.
• At this point the conservatives of all ages are thoroughly dishonest: they added lies.
• 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:
• 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.
• Pardon me, my friends, I have ventured to paint my happiness on the wall.
• But let us not forget this either: it is enough to create new names and estimations and probabilities in order to create in the long run new 'things.'
• Without art we would be nothing but foreground and live entirely in the spell of that perspective which makes what is closest at hand and most vulgar appear as if it were vast, and reality itself.
• Thoughts are the shadows of our feelings - always darker, emptier, simpler.
• Good prose is written only face to face with poetry.
• Art furnishes us with eyes and hands and above all the good conscience to be able to turn ourselves into such a phenomenon.
• To what extent can truth endure incorporation? That is the question; that is the experiment.
• Gott ist tot! Gott bleibt tot! Und wir haben ihn getotet. Aph. 125
• Morality is herd instinct in the individual.
• The Christian resolution to find the world ugly and bad has made the world ugly and bad.
• What is now decisive against Christianity is our taste, no longer our reasons.
• To find everything profound - that is an inconvenient trait. It makes one strain one's eyes all the time, and in the end one finds more than one might have wished.
• We are always in our own company.
• The most perfidious way of harming a cause consists of defending it deliberately with faulty arguments.
• We have no dreams at all or interesting ones. We should learn to be awake the same way - not at all or in an interesting manner.
• New Domestic Animals. I want to have my lion and my eagle about me, that I may always have hints and premonitions concerning the amount of my strength or weakness. Must I look down on them today, and be afraid of them? And will the hour come once more when they will look up to me, and tremble?
• What is the seal of liberation? - No longer being ashamed in front of oneself.
• There is something laughable about the sight of authors who enjoy the rustling folds of long and involved sentences: they are trying to cover up their feet.
• For believe me! - the secret for harvesting from existence the greatest fruitfulness and the greatest enjoyment is: to live dangerously! Build your cities on the slopes of Vesuvius! Send your ships into uncharted seas! Live at war with your peers and yourselves! Be robbers and conquerors as long as you cannot be rulers and possessors, you seekers of knowledge! Soon the age will be past when you could be content to live hidden in forests like shy deer! At long last the search for knowledge will reach out for its due: - it will want to rule and possess, and you with it!
• Everything good, fine or great they do is first of all an argument against the skeptic inside them.
• Perhaps man will rise ever higher as soon as he ceases to flow out into a god.
• We want to be poets of our life - first of all in the smallest most everyday matters.
• Whatever has value in our world now does not have value in itself, according to its nature - nature is always value-less, but has been given value at some time, as a present - and it was we who gave and bestowed it.
• Could one count such dilettantes and old spinsters as that mawkish apostle of virginity, Mainlander, as a genuine German? In the last analysis he probably was a Jew (all Jews become mawkish when they moralize).
• I would not know what the spirit of a philosopher might wish more to be than a good dancer.
• We 'conserve' nothing; neither do we want to return to any past periods; we are not by any means 'liberal'; we do not work for 'progress'; we do not need to plug up our ears against the sirens who in the market place sing of the future: their song about 'equal rights,' 'a free society,' 'no more masters and no servants' has no allure for us.
• We simply do not consider it desirable that a realm of justice and concord should be established on earth (because it would certainly be the realm of the deepest leveling and chinoiserie); we are delighted with all who love, as we do, danger, war, and adventures, who refuse to compromise, to be captured, reconciled, and castrated; we count ourselves among conquerors; we think about the necessity for new orders, also for a new slavery - for every strengthening and enhancement of the human type also involves a new kind of enslavement.
• Is it not clear that with all this we are bound to feel ill at ease in an age that likes to claim the distinction of being the most humane, the mildest, and the most righteous age that the sun has ever seen? It is bad enough that precisely when we hear these beautiful words we have the ugliest suspicions. What we find in them is merely an expression - and a masquerade - of a profound weakening, of weariness, of old age, of declining energies. What can it matter to us what tinsel the sick may use to cover up their weakness? Let them parade it as their virtue; after all, there is no doubt that weakness makes one mild, oh so mild, so righteous, so inoffensive, so 'humane'!
• Preparatory human beings. - I welcome all signs that a more virile, warlike age is about to begin, which will restore honor to courage above all! For this age shall prepare the way for one yet higher, and it shall gather the strength that this higher age will require some day - the age that will carry heroism into the search for knowledge and that will wage wars for the sake of ideas and their consequences.
• To this end we now need many preparatory courageous human beings who cannot very well leap out of nothing - any more than out of the sand and slime of present-day civilization and metropolitanism: human beings who know how to be silent, lonely, resolute, and content and constant in invisible activities; human beings who are bent on seeking in all things for what in them must be overcome; human beings distinguished as much by cheerfulness, patience, unpretentiousness, and contempt for all great vanities as by magnanimity in victory and forbearance regarding the small vanities of the vanquished; human beings whose judgment concerning all victors and the share of chance in every victory and fame is sharp and free; human beings with their own festivals, their own working days, and their own periods of mourning, accustomed to command with assurance but instantly ready to obey when that is called for, equally proud, equally serving their own cause in both cases; more endangered human beings, more fruitful human beings, happier beings!
• Du grosses Gestirn! Was ware dein Gluck, wenn du nicht Die hattest, welchen du leuchtest!
• Ihr habt den Weg vom Wurme zum Menschen gemacht, und Vieles ist in euch noch Wurm. Einst wart ihr Affen, und auch jetzt ist der Mensch mehr Affe, als irgend ein Affe.
• Wahrlich, ein schmutziger Strom ist der Mensch. Man mu? schon ein Meer sein, um einen schmutzigen Strom aufnehmen zu konnen, ohne unrein zu werden.
• Ich sage euch: man mu? noch Chaos in sich haben, um einen tanzenden Stern gebaren zu konnen.
• Kein Hirt und Eine Heerde! Jeder will das Gleiche, Jeder ist gleich: wer anders fuhlt, geht freiwillig in's Irrenhaus.
• Welches ist der gro?e Drache, den der Geist nicht mehr Herr und Gott hei?en mag? 'Du-sollst' hei?t der gro?e Drache. Aber der Geist des Lowen sagt 'ich will'. 'Du-sollst' liegt ihm am Wege, goldfunkelnd, ein Schuppentier, und auf jeder Schuppe glanzt golden 'Du sollst!' Tausendjahrige Werte glanzen an diesen Schuppen, und also spricht der machtigste aller Drachen: 'aller Wert der Dinge - der glanzt an mir.' 'Aller Wert ward schon geschaffen, und aller geschaffene Wert - das bin ich. Wahrlich, es soll kein 'Ich will' mehr geben!' Also spricht der Drache.
• Keine geringe Kunst ist schlafen: es thut schon Noth, den ganzen Tag darauf hin zu wachen.
• 'Leib bin ich und Seele'-so redet das Kind. Und warum sollte man nicht wie die Kinder reden?
• Es ist mehr Vernunft in deinem Leibe, als in deiner besten Weisheit.
• Und nichts Boses wachst mehr furderhin aus dir, es sei denn das Bose, das aus dem Kampfe deiner Tugenden wachst. Mein Bruder, wenn du Gluck hast, so hast du Eine Tugend und nicht mehr: so gehst du leichter uber die Brucke.
• Von allem Geschriebenen liebe ich nur Das, was Einer mit seinem Blute schreibt.
• Es ist immer etwas Wahnsinn in der Liebe. Es ist aber immer auch etwas Vernunft im Wahnsinn.
• There is always some madness in love. But there is also always some reason in madness.
• Muthig, unbekummert, spottisch, gewaltthatig - so will uns die Weisheit: sie ist ein Weib und liebt immer nur einen Kriegsmann.
• Es ist wahr: wir lieben das Leben, nicht, weil wir an's Leben, sondern weil wir an's Lieben gewohnt sind.
• Ich wurde nur an einen Gott glauben, der zu tanzen verstunde.
• Nicht durch Zorn, sondern durch Lachen todtet ma
• Ihr seht nach oben, wenn ihr nach Erhebung verlangt. Und ich sehe hinab, weil ich erhoben bin.
• Im Gebirge ist der nachste Weg von Gipfel zu Gipfel: aber dazu musst du lange Beine haben. Spruche sollen Gipfel sein: und Die, zu denen gesprochen wird, Grosse und Hochwuchsige.
• 'Je mehr er hinauf in die Hohe und Helle will, um so starker streben seine Wurzeln erdwarts, abwarts, in's Dunkle, Tiefe, - in's Bose.'
• Ihre (Predigern des Todes) Weisheit lautet: 'ein Thor, der leben bleibt, aber so sehr sind wir Thoren! Und das eben ist das Thorichtste am Leben!' -
• Ich weiss um den Hass und Neid eures Herzens. Ihr seid nicht gross genug, um Hass und Neid nicht zu kennen. So seid denn gross genug, euch ihrer nicht zu schamen!
• Seht sie klettern, diese geschwinden Affen! Sie klettern uber einander hinweg und zerren sich also in den Schlamm und die Tiefe. Hin zum Throne wollen sie Alle: ihr Wahnsinn ist es, - als ob das Gluck auf dem Throne sasse! Oft sitzt der Schlamm auf dem Thron - und oft auch der Thron auf dem Schlamme. Wahnsinnige sind sie mir Alle und kletternde Affen und Uberheisse. Ubel riecht mir ihr Gotze, das kalte Unthier: ubel riechen sie mir alle zusammen, diese Gotzendiener.
• Wenn die Macht gnadig wird und herabkommt ins Sichtbare: Schonheit hei?e ich solches Herabkommen. Und von niemandem will ich so als von dir gerade Schonheit, du Gewaltiger: deine Gute sei deine letzte Selbst-Uberwaltigung.
• Zweierlei will der echte Mann: Gefahr und Spiel. Deshalb will er das Weib als das gefahrlichste Spielzeug.
• Also aber rathe ich euch, meine Freunde: misstraut Allen, in welchen der Trieb, zu strafen, machtig ist! Das ist Volk schlechter Art und Abkunft; aus ihren Gesichtern blickt der Henker und der Spurhund. Misstraut allen Denen, die viel von ihrer Gerechtigkeit reden! Wahrlich, ihren Seelen fehlt es nicht nur an Honig. Und wenn sie sich selber 'die Guten und Gerechten' nennen, so vergesst nicht, dass ihnen zum Pharisaer Nichts fehlt als - Macht!
• Und wer von uns Dichtern hatte nicht seinen Wein verfalscht? Manch giftiger Mischmasch geschah in unsern Kellern, manches Unbeschreibliche ward da getan.
• Ach, es gibt so viel Dinge zwischen Himmel und Erde, von denen sich nur die Dichter etwas haben traumen lassen. Und zumal u b e r dem Himmel: denn alle Gotter sind Dichter-Gleichnis, Dichter-Erschleichnis! Wahrlich, immer zieht es uns hinan - namlich zum Reich der Wolken: auf diese setzen wir unsre bunten Balge und hei?en sie dann Gotter und Ubermenschen: - Sind sie doch gerade leicht genug fur diese Stuhle! - alle diese Gotter und Ubermenschen. Ach, wie bin ich all des Unzulanglichen mude, das durchaus Ereignis sein soll! Ach, wie bin ich der Dichter mude!
• Hoheres als alle Versohnung muss der Wille wollen, welcher der Wille zur Macht ist.
• Und wer unter Menschen nicht verschmachten will, mu? lernen, aus allen Glasern zu trinken; und wer unter Menschen rein bleiben will, mu? verstehn, sich auch mit schmutzigem Wasser zu waschen. Und also sprach ich oft mir zum Troste: 'Wohlan! Wohlauf! Altes Herz! Ein Ungluck mi?riet dir: genie?e dies als dein - Gluck!'
• Die stillsten Worte sind es, welche den Sturm bringen. Gedanken, die mit Taubenfu?en kommen, lenken die Welt.
• Woher kommen die hochsten Berge? so fragte ich einst. Da lernte ich, da? sie aus dem Meere kommen. Dies Zeugnis ist in ihr Gestein geschrieben und in die Wande ihrer Gipfel. Aus dem Tiefsten mu? das Hochste zu seiner Hohe kommen.
• O meine Bruder, ich weihe und weise euch zu einem neuen Adel: ihr sollt mir Zeuger und Zuchter werden und Saemanner der Zukunft, - wahrlich, nicht zu einem Adel, den ihr kaufen konntet gleich den Kramern und mit Kramer-Golde: denn wenig Wert hat alles, was seinen Preis hat. Nicht, woher ihr kommt, mache euch furderhin eure Ehre, sondern wohin ihr geht! Euer Wille und euer Fu?, der uber euch selber hinaus will, - das mache eure neue Ehre!
• O meine Bruder, nicht zuruck soll euer Adel schauen, sondern h i n a u s ! Vertriebene sollt ihr sein aus allen Vater- und Urvaterlandern! Eurer Kinder Land sollt ihr lieben: diese Liebe sei euer neuer Adel, - das unentdeckte, im fernsten Meere! Nach ihm hei?e ich eure Segel suchen und suchen! An euren Kindern sollt ihr gut machen, da? ihr eurer Vater Kinder seid: alles Vergangene sollt ihr so erlosen! Diese neue Tafel stelle ich uber euch!
• Free from what? As if that mattered to Zarathustra! But your eyes should tell me brightly: free for what?
• Then will he who goes under bless himself for being one who goes over and beyond; and the sun of his knowledge will stand at high noon for him.
• 
• It is some basic certainty which the noble soul has about itself, something which does not allow itself to be sought out or found or perhaps even to be lost. The noble soul has reverence for itself.
• So you want to live 'according to nature?' Oh, you noble Stoics, what a fraud is in this phrase! Imagine something like nature, profligate without measure, indifferent without measure, without purpose and regard, without mercy and justice, fertile and barren and uncertain at the same time, think of indifference itself as power - how could you live according to this indifference? Living - isn't that wanting specifically to be something other than this nature? Isn't living assessing, preferring, being unfair, being limited, wanting to be different? And assuming your imperative to 'live according to nature' basically amounts to 'living according to life' - well how could you not? Why make a principle out of what you yourselves are and must be?
• Physiologists should think twice before positioning the drive for self-preservation as the cardinal drive of an organic being. Above all, a living thing wants to discharge its strength - life itself is will to power -: self-preservation is only one of the indirect and most frequent consequences of this.
• Independence is an issue that concerns very few people: - it is a prerogative of the strong. And even when somebody has every right to be independent, if he attempts such a thing without having to do so, he proves that he is probably not only strong, but brave to the point of madness. He enters a labyrinth, he multiplies by a thousand the dangers already inherent in the very act of living, not the least of which is the fact that no one with eyes will see how and where he gets lost and lonely and is torn limb from limb by some cave-Minotaur of conscience. And assuming a man like this is destroyed, it is an event so far from human comprehension that people do not feel it or feel for him: - and he cannot go back again! He cannot go back to their pity again!
• People used to believe in 'the soul' as they believed in grammar and the grammatical subject: people said that 'I' was a condition and 'think' was a predicate and conditioned - thinking is an activity and a subject must be thought of as its cause. Now, with admirable tenacity and cunning, people are wondering whether they can get out of this net - wondering whether the reverse might be true: that 'think' is the condition and 'I' is conditioned, in which case 'I' would be a synthesis that only gets produced through thought itself.
• 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; the joy of this particular festival shines in the cruel eyes of the ascetic, that enthusiastic piece of 'anti-nature.' Finally: what was left to be sacrificed? In the end, didn't people have to sacrifice all comfort and hope, everything holy or healing, any faith in hidden harmony or a future filled with justice and bliss? Didn't people have to sacrifice God himself and worship rocks, stupidity, gravity, fate, or nothingness out of sheer cruelty to themselves? To sacrifice God for nothingness - that paradoxical mystery of the final cruelty has been reserved for the race that is now approaching: by now we all know something about this.
• I did that,' says my memory. 'I could not have done that,' says my pride, and remains inexorable. Eventually - the memory yields.
• One has only seen little of life, if one hasn't also seen the hand that mercifully - kills.
• The sage as astronomer. - If you still experience the stars as something 'over you,' you still don't have the eyes of a knower.
• Anyone who despises himself will still respect himself as a despiser.
• One seeks a midwife for his thoughts, another someone to whom he can be a midwife: thus originates a good conversation.
• Wer mit Ungeheuern kampft, mag zusehn, dass er nicht dabei zum Ungeheuer wird. Und wenn du lange in einen Abgrund blickst, blickt der Abgrund auch in dich hinein.
• Was aus Liebe getan wird, geschieht immer jenseits von Gut und Bose.
• Madness is the exception in individuals but the rule in groups.
• The thought of suicide is a powerful solace: by means of it one gets through many a bad night.
• In a man devoted to knowledge, pity seems almost ridiculous, like delicate hands on a cyclops.
• The Jews - a people 'born for slavery' as Tacitus and the whole ancient world says, 'the chosen people' as they themselves say and believe - the Jews achieved that miracle of inversion of values thanks to which life on earth has for a couple of millennia acquired a new and dangerous fascination - their prophets fused 'rich', 'godless', 'evil', 'violent', 'sensual' into one and were the first to coin the word 'world' as a term of infamy. It is in this inversion of values ... that the significance of the Jewish people resides: with them there begins the slave revolt in morals.
• There still shines the most important nuance by virtue of which the noble felt themselves to be men of a higher rank. They designate themselves simply by their superiority in power (as 'the powerful,' 'the masters,' 'the commanders') or by the most clearly visible signs of this superiority, for example, as 'the rich,' 'the possessors' (this is the meaning of 'Arya,' and of corresponding words in Iranian and Slavic).
• While every noble morality develops from a triumphant affirmation of itself, slave morality from the outset says No to what is 'outside,' what is 'different,' what is 'not itself'; and this No is its creative deed.
• Without cruelty there is no festival: thus the longest and most ancient part of human history teaches - and in punishment there is so much that is festive!
• 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 the 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.
• That every will must consider every other will its equal - would be a principle hostile to life, an agent of the dissolution and destruction of man, an attempt to assassinate the future of man, a sign of weariness, a secret path to nothingness.
• It is possible to imagine a society flushed with such a sense of power that it could afford to let its offenders go unpunished.
• The broad effects which can be obtained by punishment in man and beast are the increase of fear, the sharpening of the sense of cunning, the mastery of the desires; so it is that punishment tames man, but does not make him 'better.'
• All instincts that do not discharge themselves outwardly turn inward - this is what I call the internalization of man: thus it was that man first developed what was later called his 'soul.'
• The advent of the Christian God, as the maximum god attained so far, was therefore accompanied by the maximum feeling of guilty indebtedness on earth.
• The sick are the greatest danger for the healthy; it is not from the strongest that harm comes to the strong, but from the weakest.
• 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.
• Plato ist langweilig
• What is it: is man only a blunder of God, or God only a blunder of man?
• Was mich nicht umbringt, macht mich starker.
• Women are considered profound. Why? Because we never fathom their depths. But women aren't even shallow.
• Ohne Musik ware das Leben ein Irrtum.
• Das Christenthum ist eine Metaphysik des Henkers...
• Two great European narcotics, alcohol and Christianity.
• My conception of freedom. - The value of a thing sometimes does not lie in that which one attains by it, but in what one pays for it - what it costs us. I give an example. Liberal institutions cease to be liberal as soon as they are attained: later on, there are no worse and no more thorough injurers of freedom than liberal institutions. One knows, indeed, what their ways bring: they undermine the will to power; they level mountain and valley, and call that morality; they make men small, cowardly, and hedonistic [genusslich] - every time it is the herd animal that triumphs with them. Liberalism: in other words, herd-animalization ...
• It is my ambition to say in ten sentences what everyone else says in a whole book - what everyone else does not say in a whole book.
• The doctrine of equality! : But there is no more venomous poison in existence: for it appears to be preached by justice itself, when it is actually the end of justice : 'Equality to the equal; inequality to the unequal' - that would be true justice speaking: and its corollary, 'never make the unequal equal'.
• When one gives up Christian belief one thereby deprives oneself of the right to Christian morality. For the latter is absolutely not self-evident: one must make this point clear again and again, in spite of English shallowpates.
• We have already gone beyond whatever we have words for. In all talk there is a grain of contempt.
• These same institutions produce quite different effects while they are still being fought for; then they really promote freedom in a powerful way. On closer inspection it is war that produces these effects, the war for liberal institutions, which, as a war, permits illiberal instincts to continue. And war educates for freedom. For what is freedom? That one has the will to self-responsibility. That one maintains the distance which separates us. That one becomes more indifferent to difficulties, hardships, privation, even to life itself. That one is prepared to sacrifice human beings for one's cause, not excluding oneself.
• Freedom means that the manly instincts which delight in war and victory dominate over other instincts, for example, over those of 'pleasure.' The human being who has become free - and how much more the spirit who has become free - spits on the contemptible type of well-being dreamed of by shopkeepers, Christians, cows, females, Englishmen, and other democrats. The free man is a warrior. -
• How is freedom measured, in individuals as in nations? By the resistance which must be overcome, by the effort [Muhe] it costs to remain on top. The highest type of free men should be sought where the highest resistance is constantly overcome: five steps from tyranny, close to the threshold of the danger of servitude. This is true psychologically if by 'tyrants' are meant inexorable and dreadful instincts that provoke the maximum of authority and discipline against themselves - most beautiful type: Julius Caesar - ; this is true politically too; one need only go through history. The nations which were worth something, became worth something, never became so under liberal institutions: it was great danger that made something of them that merits respect. Danger alone acquaints us with our own resources, our virtues, our armor and weapons, our spirit - and forces us to be strong ...
• First principle: one must need to be strong - otherwise one will never become strong. - Those large hothouses [Treibhauser] for the strong, for the strongest kind of human being that has ever been, the aristocratic commonwealths of the type of Rome or Venice, understood freedom exactly in the sense in which I understand the word freedom: as something one has and does not have, something one wants, something one conquers ...
• Einige werden posthum geboren.
• What is good? All that heightens the feeling of power in man, 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.
• In Christianity neither morality nor religion come into contact with reality at any point.
• Love is a state in which a man sees things most decidedly as they are not.
• The very word 'Christianity' is a misunderstanding - in truth, there was only one Christian, and he died on the cross.
• As an artistic triumph in psychological corruption ... the Gospels, in fact, stand alone ... Here we are among Jews: this is the first thing to be borne in mind if we are not to lose the thread of the matter. This positive genius for conjuring up a delusion of personal 'holiness' unmatched anywhere else, either in books or by men; this elevation of fraud in word and attitude to the level of an art - all this is not an accident due to the chance talents of an individual, or to any violation of nature. The thing responsible is race.
• The whole disaster was only made possible by the fact that there already existed in the world a similar megalomania, allied to this one in race, to wit, the Jewish.
• What follows, then? That one had better put on gloves before reading the New Testament. The presence of so much filth makes it very advisable. One would as little choose early Christians for companions as Polish Jews: not that one need seek out an objection to them - neither has a pleasant smell.
• The God that Paul invented for himself, a God who 'reduced to absurdity' 'the wisdom of this world' (especially the two great enemies of superstition, philology and medicine), is in truth only an indication of Paul's resolute determination to accomplish that very thing himself: to give one's own will the name of God, Torah - that is essentially Jewish.
• God created woman. And boredom did indeed cease from that moment - but many other things ceased as well! Woman was God's second mistake.
• Against boredom even gods struggle in vain.
• That faith makes blessed under certain circumstances, that blessedness does not make of a fixed idea a true idea, that faith moves no mountains but puts mountains where there are none: a quick walk through a madhouse enlightens one sufficiently about this.
• 'Faith' means not wanting to know what is true.
• Nihilist und Christ: das reimt sich, das reimt sich nicht bloss.
• Christianity destroyed for us the whole harvest of ancient civilization, and later it also destroyed for us the whole harvest of Mohammedan civilization. The wonderful culture of the Moors in Spain, which was fundamentally nearer to us and appealed more to our senses and tastes than that of Rome and Greece, was trampled down (-I do not say by what sort of feet-) Why? Because it had to thank noble and manly instincts for its origin-because it said yes to life, even to the rare and refined luxuriousness of Moorish life![...] Intrinsically there should be no more choice between Islam and Christianity than there is between an Arab and a Jew. The decision is already reached; nobody remains at liberty to choose here. Either a man is a Chandala or he is not.... 'War to the knife with Rome! Peace and friendship with Islam!': this was the feeling, this was the act, of that great free spirit, that genius among German emperors, Frederick II.
• I call Christianity the one great curse, the one great intrinsic depravity, the one great instinct for revenge for which no expedient is sufficiently poisonous, secret, subterranean, petty - I call it the one immortal blemish of mankind.
• Der Mensch der Erkenntniss muss nicht nur seine Feinde lieben, er muss auch seine Freunde hassen konnen.
• Nothing on earth consumes a man more quickly than the passion of resentment.
• One must pay dearly for immortality; one has to die several times while still alive.
• I know my fate. One day my name will be associated with the memory of something tremendous - a crisis without equal on earth, the most profound collision of conscience, a decision that was conjured up against everything that had been believed, demanded, hallowed so far. I am no man, I am dynamite.
• was ihn nicht umbringt, macht ihn starker
• All things considered, I could never have survived my youth without Wagnerian music. For I seemed condemned to the society of Germans. If a man wishes to rid himself of a feeling of unbearable oppression, he may have to take to hashish. Well, I had to take to Wagner...
• This is the antinomy: Insofar as we believe in morality we pass sentence on existence.
• Moralities and religions are the principal means by which one can make whatever one wishes out of man, provided one possesses a superfluity of creative forces and can assert one's will over long periods of time - in the form of legislation, religions, and customs.
• A man as he ought to be: that sounds to us as insipid as 'a tree as it ought to be.'
• The stronger becomes master of the weaker, in so far as the latter cannot assert its degree of independence - here there is no mercy, no forbearance, even less a respect for 'laws.'
• Morality is: the mediocre are worth more than the exceptions ... I abhor Christianity with a deadly hatred.
• The states in which we infuse a transfiguration and a fullness into things and poetize about them until they reflect back our fullness and joy in life...three elements principally: sexuality, intoxication and cruelty - all belonging to the oldest festal joys.
• The Beautiful exists just as little as the True. In every case it is a question of the conditions of preservation of a certain type of man: thus the herd-man will experience the value feeling of the True in different things than will the Overman.
• A declaration of war on the masses by Higher Men is needed! ... Everything that makes soft and effeminate, that serves the end of the People or the Feminine, works in favor of Universal Suffrage, i.e. the domination of the Inferior Men. But we should take reprisal and bring this whole affair to light and the bar of judgment.
• The rights a man arrogates to himself are related to the duties he imposes on himself, to the tasks to which he feels equal. The great majority of men have no right to existence, but are a misfortune to higher men.
• The homogenizing of European man ... requires a justification: it lies in serving a higher sovereign species that stands upon the former which can raise itself to its task only by doing this. Not merely a Master Race whose sole task is to rule, but a Race with its own sphere of life, with an excess of strength ... strong enough to have no need of the tyranny of the virtue-imperative.
• There is only nobility of birth, only nobility of blood. When one speaks of 'aristocrats of the spirit,' reasons are usually not lacking for concealing something. As is well known, it is a favorite term among ambitious Jews. For spirit alone does not make noble. Rather, there must be something to ennoble the spirit. What then is required? Blood.
• 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.
• Underneath the reality in which we live and have our being, another and altogether different reality lies concealed.
• Here the ways of men part: if you wish to strive for peace of soul and pleasure, then believe; if you wish to be a devotee of truth, then inquire.
• The future influences the present just as much as the past.
• Every word is a prejudice. (The Wanderer and his Shadow, sec. 55)
• The greatest events are not our loudest hours, but rather our most quiet.
• Ah, women. They make the highs higher and the lows more frequent. (Beyond Good and Evil)
• A woman may very well form a friendship with a man, but for this to endure, it must be assisted by a little physical antipathy.
• At times one remains faithful to a cause only because its opponents do not cease to be insipid. (Thus Spoke Zarathustra)
• For out of fear and need each religion is born, creeping into existence on the byways of reason.
• I cannot believe in a God who wants to be praised all the time.
• In heaven all the interesting people are missing.
• After the old god has been assassinated, I am ready to rule the world.
• Swallow your poison, for you need it badly.
• What is bad? But I have said this already: all that comes of weakness, of envy, of revenge. The anarchist and the Christian have the same origin.
• Liberalism is the transformation of mankind into cattle.
• We have art in order not to die of the truth.
• Your pride can't hurt me - I have no beliefs!
• No price is too high to pay for the privilege of owning yourself.
• 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