Friedrich Nietzsche Quotes

He who has a why to live can bear almost any how.

There is always some madness in love. But there is also always some reason in madness.

We love life, not because we are used to living but because we are used to loving.

That which does not kill us makes us stronger.

Without music, life would be a mistake.

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.

When you look into an abyss, the abyss also looks into you.

Art is the proper task of life.

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

There are no facts, only interpretations.

Thoughts are the shadows of our feelings - always darker, emptier and simpler.

Go up close to your friend, but do not go over to him! We should also respect the enemy in our friend.

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.

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

All truly great thoughts are conceived by walking.

We have art in order not to die of the truth.

We have art in order not to die of the truth.

An artist has no home in Europe except in Paris.

He that humbleth himself wishes to be exalted.

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

A good writer possesses not only his own spirit but also the spirit of his friends.

Nothing has been purchased more dearly than the little bit of reason and sense of freedom which now constitutes our pride.

It is not a lack of love, but a lack of friendship that makes unhappy marriages.

What is great in man is that he is a bridge and not a goal.

He who cannot give anything away cannot feel anything either.

In the consciousness of the truth he has perceived, man now sees everywhere only the awfulness or the absurdity of existence and loathing seizes him.

Whoever does not have a good father should procure one.

The demand to be loved is the greatest of all arrogant presumptions.

To forget one's purpose is the commonest form of stupidity.

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.

There are various eyes. Even the Sphinx has eyes: and as a result there are various truths, and as a result there is no truth.

Whoever feels predestined to see and not to believe will find all believers too noisy and pushy: he guards against them.

Love matches, so called, have illusion for their father and need for their mother.

Rejoicing in our joy, not suffering over our suffering, makes someone a friend.

Blessed are the forgetful: for they get the better even of their blunders.

The true man wants two things: danger and play. For that reason he wants woman, as the most dangerous plaything.

Wit is the epitaph of an emotion.

At times one remains faithful to a cause only because its opponents do not cease to be insipid.

Talking much about oneself can also be a means to conceal oneself.

The word 'Christianity' is already a misunderstanding - in reality there has been only one Christian, and he died on the Cross.

The future influences the present just as much as the past.

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

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?

Egoism is the very essence of a noble soul.

The world itself is the will to power - and nothing else! And you yourself are the will to power - and nothing else!

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.

The most common lie is that which one lies to himself; lying to others is relatively an exception.

Whatever is done for love always occurs beyond good and evil.

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

The essence of all beautiful art, all great art, is gratitude.

The essence of all beautiful art, all great art, is gratitude.

The best weapon against an enemy is another enemy.

I cannot believe in a God who wants to be praised all the time.

There is not enough love and goodness in the world to permit giving any of it away to imaginary beings.

There is more wisdom in your body than in your deepest philosophy.

Idleness is the parent of psychology.

What can everyone do? Praise and blame. This is human virtue, this is human madness.

The best author will be the one who is ashamed to become a writer.

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.

No one lies so boldly as the man who is indignant.

The man of knowledge must be able not only to love his enemies but also to hate his friends.

Mystical explanations are thought to be deep; the truth is that they are not even shallow.

Faith: not wanting to know what is true.

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

Whenever I climb I am followed by a dog called 'Ego'.

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

One should die proudly when it is no longer possible to live proudly.

Many are stubborn in pursuit of the path they have chosen, few in pursuit of the goal.

Fear is the mother of morality.

There are slavish souls who carry their appreciation for favors done them so far that they strangle themselves with the rope of gratitude. 

Morality is the herd-instinct in the individual.

In Christianity neither morality nor religion come into contact with reality at any point.

Words are but symbols for the relations of things to one another and to us; nowhere do they touch upon absolute truth.

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.

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.

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.

God is dead. God remains dead. And we have killed him. Yet his shadow still looms. 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?

Not necessity, not desire - no, the love of power is the demon of men. Let them have everything - health, food, a place to live, entertainment - they are and remain unhappy and low-spirited: for the demon waits and waits and will be satisfied.

Whoever fights monsters should see to it that in the process he does not become a monster. And if you gaze long enough into an abyss, the abyss will gaze back into you.

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.

There are horrible people who, instead of solving a problem, tangle it up and make it harder to solve for anyone who wants to deal with it. Whoever does not know how to hit the nail on the head should be asked not to hit it at all.

Undeserved praise causes more pangs of conscience later than undeserved blame, but probably only for this reason, that our power of judgment are more completely exposed by being over praised than by being unjustly underestimated.

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.

When marrying, ask yourself this question: Do you believe that you will be able to converse well with this person into your old age? Everything else in marriage is transitory.

Nothing is beautiful, only man: on this piece of naivete rests all aesthetics, it is the first truth of aesthetics. Let us immediately add its second: nothing is ugly but degenerate man - the domain of aesthetic judgment is therewith defined.