Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche Quotes

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

We should consider every day lost on which we have not danced at least once.

There are two different types of people in the world, those who want to know, and those who want to believe.

Silence is worse; all truths that are kept silent become poisonous.

I know of no better life purpose than to perish in attempting the great and the impossible.

A thought, even a possibility, can shatter and transform us.

Is it better to out-monster the monster or to be quietly devoured?

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.

There is an innocence in admiration: it occurs in one who has not yet realized that they might one day be admired.

A thought comes when it will, not when I will.

The life of the enemy . Whoever lives for the sake of combating an enemy has an interest in the enemy's staying alive.

It is nobler to declare oneself wrong than to insist on being right --especially when one is right.

Family love is messy, clinging, and of an annoying and repetitive pattern, like bad wallpaper.

Cynicism is the only form in which base souls approach honesty.

In music the passions enjoy themselves.

I tell you: one must still have chaos in one, to give birth to a dancing star. I tell you: you have still chaos in you.

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!

Success has always been a great liar

To live alone one must be either a beast or a god, says Aristotle. Leaving out the third case: one must be both - a philosopher.

no one talks more passionately about his rights than he who in the depths of his soul doubts whether he has any

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.

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

My formula for happiness: a Yes, a No, a straight line, a goal.

We would not let ourselves be burned to death for our opinions: we are not sure enough of them for that.

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.

I go into solitude so as not to drink out of everybody's cistern. When I am among the many I live as the many do, and I do not think I really think. After a time it always seems as if they want to banish my self from myself and rob me of my soul.

It is a terrible thought, to contemplate that an immense number of mediocre thinkers are occupied with really influential matters.

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. [...] A human being may well ask an animal: 'Why do you not speak to me of your happiness but only stand and gaze at me?' The animal would like to answer, and say, 'The reason is I always forget what I was going to say' - but then he forgot this answer too, and stayed silent.

Dead are all gods: now we want the overman to live.

Where one can no longer love, there one should pass by.

Man is no longer an artist, he has become a work of art.

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.

There's no defense against stupidity.

Foolish is my happiness, and foolish things will it speak: it is still too young—so have patience with it!

Wir haben die Kunst, damit wir nicht an der Wahrheit zugrunde gehen.

ridendo dicere severum. (tr. Through what is laughable say what is somber.)

Man is a rope stretched between the animal and the Superman—a rope over an abyss. A dangerous crossing, a dangerous wayfaring, a dangerous looking-back, a dangerous trembling and halting.

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”?

The more you let yourself go, the less others let you go

76. David Hume – Treatise on Human Nature; Essays Moral and Political; An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding 77. Jean-Jacques Rousseau – On the Origin of Inequality; On the Political Economy; Emile – or, On Education, The Social Contract 78. Laurence Sterne – Tristram Shandy; A Sentimental Journey through France and Italy 79. Adam Smith – The Theory of Moral Sentiments; The Wealth of Nations 80. Immanuel Kant – Critique of Pure Reason; Fundamental Principles of the Metaphysics of Morals; Critique of Practical Reason; The Science of Right; Critique of Judgment; Perpetual Peace 81. Edward Gibbon – The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire; Autobiography 82. James Boswell – Journal; Life of Samuel Johnson, Ll.D. 83. Antoine Laurent Lavoisier – Traité Élémentaire de Chimie (Elements of Chemistry) 84. Alexander Hamilton, John Jay, and James Madison – Federalist Papers 85. Jeremy Bentham – Introduction to the Principles of Morals and Legislation; Theory of Fictions 86. Johann Wolfgang von Goethe – Faust; Poetry and Truth 87. Jean Baptiste Joseph Fourier – Analytical Theory of Heat 88. Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel – Phenomenology of Spirit; Philosophy of Right; Lectures on the Philosophy of History 89. William Wordsworth – Poems 90. Samuel Taylor Coleridge – Poems; Biographia Literaria 91. Jane Austen – Pride and Prejudice; Emma 92. Carl von Clausewitz – On War 93. Stendhal – The Red and the Black; The Charterhouse of Parma; On Love 94. Lord Byron – Don Juan 95. Arthur Schopenhauer – Studies in Pessimism 96. Michael Faraday – Chemical History of a Candle; Experimental Researches in Electricity 97. Charles Lyell – Principles of Geology 98. Auguste Comte – The Positive Philosophy 99. Honoré de Balzac – Père Goriot; Eugenie Grandet 100. Ralph Waldo Emerson – Representative Men; Essays; Journal 101. Nathaniel Hawthorne – The Scarlet Letter 102. Alexis de Tocqueville – Democracy in America 103. John Stuart Mill – A System of Logic; On Liberty; Representative Government; Utilitarianism; The Subjection of Women; Autobiography 104. Charles Darwin – The Origin of Species; The Descent of Man; Autobiography 105. Charles Dickens – Pickwick Papers; David Copperfield; Hard Times 106. Claude Bernard – Introduction to the Study of Experimental Medicine 107. Henry David Thoreau – Civil Disobedience; Walden 108. Karl Marx – Capital; Communist Manifesto 109. George Eliot – Adam Bede; Middlemarch 110. Herman Melville – Moby-Dick; Billy Budd 111. Fyodor Dostoevsky – Crime and Punishment; The Idiot; The Brothers Karamazov 112. Gustave Flaubert – Madame Bovary; Three Stories 113. Henrik Ibsen – Plays 114. Leo Tolstoy – War and Peace; Anna Karenina; What is Art?; Twenty-Three Tales 115. Mark Twain – The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn; The Mysterious Stranger 116. William James – The Principles of Psychology; The Varieties of Religious Experience; Pragmatism; Essays in Radical Empiricism 117. Henry James – The American; The Ambassadors 118. Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche – Thus Spoke Zarathustra; Beyond Good and Evil; The Genealogy of Morals;The Will to Power 119. Jules Henri Poincaré – Science and Hypothesis; Science and Method 120. Sigmund Freud – The Interpretation of Dreams; Introductory Lectures on Psychoanalysis; Civilization and Its Discontents; New Introductory Lectures on Psychoanalysis 121. George Bernard Shaw – Plays and Prefaces

everything that is deep loves the mask

One will rarely err if extreme actions be ascribed to vanity, ordinary actions to habit, and mean actions to fear.

The German philosopher Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche, who had syphilis, said that only a person of deep faith could afford the luxury of religious skepticism. Humanists, by and large educated, comfortably middle-class persons with rewarding lives like mine, find rapture enough in secular knowledge and hope. Most people can't.

Aphorisms should be peaks – and those who are addressed, tall and lofty. The air thin and pure, danger near, and the spirit full of gay sarcasm: these go well together.

Suppose a human being has thus put his ear, as it were, to the heart chamber of the world will and felt the roaring desire for existence pouring from there into all the veins of the world, as a thundering current or as the gentlest brook, dissolving into a mist—how could he fail to break suddenly? How could he endure to perceive the echo of innumerable shouts of pleasure and woe in the "wide space of the world night," enclosed in the wretched glass capsule of the human individual, without inexorably fleeing toward his primordial home, as he hears this shepherd's dance of metaphysics? But if such a work could nevertheless be perceived as a whole, without denial of individual existence; if such a creation could be created without smashing its creator—whence do we take the solution of such a contradiction?

What is love but understanding and rejoicing that another lives, works, and feels in a different and opposite way to ourselves? That love may be able to bridge over the contrasts by joys, we must not remove or deny those contrasts.

Why?" said Zarathustra. "Thou askest why? I do not belong to those who may be asked after their Why.

One knows a little too much about everybody. And we can even see through some men, and yet we can by no means pass through them.

When your heart overfloweth broad and full like the river, a blessing and a danger to the lowlanders: there is the origin of your virtue.

Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche (October 15, 1844 – August 25, 1900) was a German philosopher. His writing included critiques of religion, morality, contemporary culture, philosophy, and science, using a distinctive style and displaying a fondness for aphorism. Nietzsche's influence remains substantial within and beyond philosophy, notably in existentialism and postmodernism. Nietzsche began his career as a philologist before turning to philosophy. At the age of 24 he became Professor of Classical Philology at the University of Basel, but resigned in 1879 due to health problems, which would plague him for most of his life. In 1889 he exhibited symptoms of a serious mental illness, living out his remaining years in the care of his mother and sister until his death in 1900.

دوست مي دارم آناني را كه براي فرو شدن و فرا شدن نخست فراپشت ستارگان از پي دليل نميگردند، بل خويش را فداي زمين ميكنند تا زمين روزي از آن ابر انسان شود

We are so fond of being out among Nature, because it has no opinions about us.

A traveler who had seen many countries, peoples and several of the earth’s continents was asked what attribute he had found in men everywhere. He said: “They have a propensity for laziness.” To others, it seems that he should have said: “They are all fearful. They hide themselves behind customs and opinions.” In his heart every man knows quite well that, being unique, he will be in the world only once and that there will be no second chance for his oneness to coalesce from the strangely variegated assortment that he is: he knows it but hides it like a bad conscience – why? From fear of his neighbor, who demands conformity and cloaks himself with it. But what is it that forces the individual to fear his neighbor, to think and act like a member of a herd, and to have no joy in himself? Modesty, perhaps, in a few rare cases. For the majority it is idleness, inertia, in short that propensity for laziness of which the traveler spoke. He is right: men are even lazier than they are fearful.

Said ye ever Yea to one joy? O my friends, then said ye Yea also unto ALL woe. All things are enlinked, enlaced and enamoured.

Of all the evil I deem you capable. Therefore I want the good from you. Verily I have often laughed at weaklings who thought themselves good because they had no claws.

Many die too late, and some die too early. Yet strange soundeth the precept: "Die at the right time!

Our ancestors pay the price for who we are

The daring venture, the prolonged distrust, the cruel Nay, the tedium, the cutting-into-the-quick—how seldom do THESE come together! Out of such seed, however—is truth produced!

Only a person of deep faith can afford the luxury of skepticism.

Could it be possible! This old saint in the forest hath not yet heard of it, that GOD IS DEAD!

This world, the eternally imperfect, an eternal contradiction's image and imperfect image—an intoxicating joy to its imperfect creator:—thus did the world once seem to me.

Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche said, “Only those thoughts that come by walking have any value.

Whoever fights monsters should see to it that in the process he does not become a monster.   FRIEDRICH WILHELM NIETZSCHE

When you gaze into the Abyss, the Abyss gazes into you. (~ Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche)

there they laugh: they understand me not; I am not the mouth for these ears.

«El cinismo es la única fuerza bajo la cual las almas vulgares rozan lo que se llama sinceridad»

[...] let us go with all our "devils" to the help of our "god"!

Is he a poet? Or a genuine one? An emancipator? Or a subjugator? A good one? Or an evil one?

God is Dead; but given the way of men, there may still be caves for thousands of years in which his shadow will be shown. And we - we still have to vanquish his shadow, too.

It was all very puzzling—both that Jill could smell still more like Jill… and that Dorcas should wish to smell like Jill when she already smelled like herself… and that Jubal would say that Dorcas smelled like a cat when she did not. There was a cat who lived on the place (not as a pet, but as co-owner); on rare occasions it came to the house and deigned to accept a handout. The cat and Mike had grokked each other at once, and Mike had found its carniverous thoughts most pleasing and quite Martian. He had discovered, too, that the cat's name (Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche) was not the cat's name at all, but he had not told anyone this because he could not pronounce the cat's real name; he could only hear it in its head. The cat did not smell like Dorcas.

Zarathustra, however, answered thus unto him who so spake: When one taketh his hump from the hunchback, then doth one take from him his spirit—so do the people teach. And when one giveth the blind man eyes, then doth he see too many bad things on the earth: so that he curseth him who healed him. He, however, who maketh the lame man run, inflicteth upon him the greatest in him — so do the people teach concerning cripples

Cada dia en que no bailemos, al menos una vez, debemos considerarlo perdido. Y cada verdad que no venga acompañada de al menos una risa, debera considerarse mentira.

Of all that is written I love only what a man has written with his blood. Write with blood, and you will experience that blood is spirit.

Gustavo Solivellas dice: "Todo lo que se hace por amor, se hace más allá del bien y del mal" (Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche)

Wir haben den Begriff "Zweck" erfunden: in der Realität fehlt der Zweck... Man ist nothwendig, man ist ein Stück Verhängniss, man gehört zum Ganzen, man ist im Ganzen, - es giebt Nichts, was unser Sein richten, messen, vergleichen, verurtheilen könnte, denn das hiesse das Ganze richten, messen, vergleichen, verurtheilen... Aber es giebt Nichts ausser dem Ganzen!

William Wordsworth was said to have walked 180,000 miles in his lifetime. Charles Dickens captured the ecstasy of near-madness and insomnia in the essay “Night Walks” and once said, “The sum of the whole is this: Walk and be happy; Walk and be healthy.” Robert Louis Stevenson wrote of “the great fellowship of the Open Road” and the “brief but priceless meetings which only trampers know.” Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche said, “Only those thoughts that come by walking have any value.” More recently, writers who knew the benefits of striking out excoriated the apathetic public, over and over again, for its laziness. “Of course, people still walk,” wrote a journalist in Saturday Night magazine in 1912. “That is, they shuffle along on their own pins from the door to the street car or taxi-cab…. But real walking … is as extinct as the dodo.” “They say they haven’t time to walk—and wait fifteen minutes for a bus to carry them an eighth of a mile,” wrote Edmund Lester Pearson in 1925. “They pretend that they are rushed, very busy, very energetic; the fact is, they are lazy. A few quaint persons—boys chiefly—ride bicycles.

How can man know himself? It is a dark, mysterious business: if a hare has seven skins, a man may skin himself seventy times seven times without being able to say, “Now that is truly you; that is no longer your outside.” It is also an agonizing, hazardous undertaking thus to dig into oneself, to climb down toughly and directly into the tunnels of one’s being. How easy it is thereby to give oneself such injuries as no doctor can heal. Moreover, why should it even be necessary given that everything bears witness to our being — our friendships and animosities, our glances and handshakes, our memories and all that we forget, our books as well as our pens. For the most important inquiry, however, there is a method. Let the young soul survey its own life with a view of the following question: “What have you truly loved thus far? What has ever uplifted your soul, what has dominated and delighted it at the same time?” Assemble these revered objects in a row before you and perhaps they will reveal a law by their nature and their order: the fundamental law of your very self. Compare these objects, see how they complement, enlarge, outdo, transfigure one another; how they form a ladder on whose steps you have been climbing up to yourself so far; for your true self does not lie buried deep within you, but rather rises immeasurably high above you, or at least above what you commonly take to be your I.

Quiconque lutte contre des monstres devrait prendre garde, dans le combat, à ne pas devenir monstre lui-même. Et quant à celui qui scrute le fond de l'abysse, l'abysse le scrute à son tour.

What if, some day or night, a demon were to steal after you in 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; and there will be nothing new in it, but every pain and every joy and every thought and sigh and everything unutterably small or great in your life will have to return to you, all in the same succession and sequence—even this spider and this moonlight between the trees, and even this moment and I myself. The eternal hourglass of existence is turned upside down again and again—and you with it, speck of dust!”... 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.

Anyone who cannot manage to invest his will in things at least invests them with a meaning: i.e. he believes there is already a will in them (principle of ‘belief).Anyone who cannot manage to invest his will in things at least invests them with a meaning: i.e. he believes there is already a will in them (principle of ‘belief).

La madurez del hombre es haber vuelto a encontrar la seriedad con la que jugaba cuando era niño.

Bei einem längeren Gespräche wird auch der Weiseste einmal zum Narren Und dreimal zum Tropf.

Όταν βαρέθηκα να ψάχνω, έμαθα να βρίσκω.

Anyone who cannot manage to invest his will in things at least invests them with a meaning: i.e. he believes there is already a will in them (principle of ‘belief).

Creation, that is the redemption from suffering, and life’s growing light.

Lack of intimacy among friends is a mistake that cannot be censured without becoming irreparable.

We should not let ourselves be burned for our opinions themselves, since we can never be quite sure of them; but perhaps we might for the right to hold and alter them.

Anyone who fights with monsters should take care that he does not in the process become a monster.

Als 'ein Frevel, als ein Raub an der göttlichen Natur' erscheine hier die Aneignung des Feuers, der erste Schritt 'jeder aufsteigenden Kultur', und diesen 'arischen Mythus', der 'den heroischen Drang' darstelle, 'über den Bann der Individuation hinauszuschreiten', stellt er den 'semitischen Sündenfallmythus [entgegen], in welchem die Neugierde, die lügnerische Vorspiegelung, die Verführbarkeit, die Lüsternheit [...] als der Ursprung des übels angesehen wurde'.

Verily, too early died that Hebrew whom the preachers of slow death honour: and to many hath it proved a calamity that he died too early.   As yet had he known only tears, and the melancholy of the Hebrews, together with the hatred of the good and just—the Hebrew Jesus: then was he seized with the longing for death.   Had he but remained in the wilderness, and far from the good and just! Then, perhaps, would he have learned to live, and love the earth—and laughter also!   Believe it, my brethren! He died too early; he himself would have disavowed his doctrine had he attained to my age! Noble enough was he to disavow!

God is Dead; but given the way of men, therem ay still be caves for thousands of years in which his shadow will be shown. And we - we still have to vanquish his shadow, too. -- The death of the fundamental principle which gave life a meaning is just the beginning. People are not ready to accept nihilism and cling to old values for comfort. Thus, we as humanity still have to get over the "shadow" of the old thinking which still permeates society.

A veces contemplo la esencia de la vida de una manera tan profunda que de repente miro a mi alrededor y veo que nadie me acompaña, que mi único compañero es el tiempo...

Assuming that life itself is the will to power, then there is nothing to life that has value, except the degree of power

...And to invoke the inestimable authority of Zarathustra: Zarathustra goes as far as to confess, 'I would only believe in a god who knew how to dance...

Bằng cách chối bỏ nhân tính cơ bản của chúng ta, những ham muốn, những bản năng, các nhà đạo đức học đang cố gắng xóa bỏ chính bản chất của con người chúng ta

No te enfades conmigo melancolía, porque tome la pluma para alabarte y al hacerlo incline la cabeza como una anacoreta sentado en un tronco. Nietzsche, An Die Melancholie

Una vez que nos hemos encontrado, debemos entender cómo, de vez en cuando, perdernos, y luego cómo volver a encontrarnos. Para quien piensa es desventajoso estar atada a uan persona todo el tiempo

Pek çok ülkeyi ve ulusu ve birkaç kıtayı görmüş olan bir gezgine, tüm insanlığın ortak özellikleri olarak ne tür nitelikleri keşfettiği sorulduğunda, şöyle cevap vermişti: “tembelliğe meyillidirler.” Çoğu kişiye öyle geliyor ki, eğer gezgin şöyle deseydi, cevabı daha doğru ve geçerli olurdu: “Hepsi korku içinde. Geleneklerin ve fikirlerin arkasına gizleniyorlar.” Temelde her insan, dünyada yalnızca bir kez, bir Unicum[1] olarak yaşadığını ve kendisinin birliğini teşkil eden bu şaşırtıcı ölçüdeki rengârenk çeşitliliğin içinden, ne kadar tuhaf olursa olsun, hiçbir rastlantının ikinci bir kez çıkmayacağını gayet iyi bilir. İnsan bunu bilir, ama bildiğini kara bir vicdan gibi saklar. Neden acaba? Geleneğe uyulmasını talep eden ve kendisini gelenek maskesinin arkasına gizleyen komşusundan duyduğu korkudan dolayı. Peki, ama bireyi (einzeln), komşusundan korkmaya, kendisi olmak yerine, sürünün bir parçası olarak düşünüp hareket etmeye zorlayan şey nedir? Birkaç nadir örnekte bu belki de utangaçlıktır (Schamhafigkeit). Çoğu zaman ise rahatlık ve bezginliktir – kısacası, gezginin sözünü ettiği tembellik eğilimi. Gezgin haklıdır: İnsanlar korkak olduklarından daha fazla tembeldir ve en çok korktukları şey de, o koşulsuz dürüstlüğün ve çıplaklığın onlara yamayacağı zorluklardır. Ödünç alınmış davranışlarda ve kendine mal edilmiş fikirlerde saklı olan bu uyuşturucu gezintiyi yalnızca sanatçılar küçümserler ve onlar gizli sırrı, herkesin kara vicdanı (böses Gewissen), insanoğlunun şahsına münhasır bir mucize olduğu ilkesini teşhir ederler. Sanatçılar her insanın, kaslarının her hareketine varıncaya dek, kendisi ve yalnızca kendisi olduğunu bize göstermeyi göze alırlar; daha da önemlisi, sanatçılar bize, insanın, kendi biricikliğinin katı tutarlılığı içinde, güzel, doğanın her ayrıksı ve harika eseri gibi, üzerinde düşünülmeye değer olduğunu ve sıkıcı olmaktan başka her şey olduğunu gösterirler. Büyük düşünür insanları küçümsediğinde, onun küçümsediği şey onların tembelliğidir, çünkü onların seri halde üretilmiş mallar gibi görünmelerine, kayıtsız, insanca etkileşim ve bilgilendirmeye layık değillermiş gibi görünmelerine yol açan şey tembelliktir. Kitlelerin bir parçası olmak istemeyen insanoğlunun yapması gereken tek şey, içinde olduğu rahatlığa son vermektir; ona şöyle seslenen vicdanının sesine kulak versin: “Kendin ol! Şu anda yaptıklarının düşündüklerinin, istediklerinin hiçbiri değilsin.

For this is the truth: I have departed from the house of the scholars, and the door have I also slammed behind me. Too long did my soul sit hungry at their table: not like them have I got the knack of investigating, as the knack of nut-cracking. Freedom do I love, and the air over fresh soil; rather would I sleep on ox-skins than on their honours and dignities. - thus spoke zarathustra

What makes Heroic? — To face simultaneously one's greatest suffering and one's highest hope