Popular Friedrich Nietzsche's Quotes And Sayings

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

The best weapon against an enemy is another enemy.

For what purpose humanity is there should not even concern us: why you are here, that you should ask yourself: and if you have no ready answer, then set for yourself goals, high and noble goals, and perish in pursuit of them!

Most people are too stupid to act in their own interest

In the end one only experiences oneself.

He has drawn back, only in order to have enough room for his leap

Today as always, men fall into two groups: slaves and free men. Whoever does not have two-thirds of his day for himself, is a slave, whatever he may be: a statesman, a businessman, an official, or a scholar.

What is the task of higher education? To make a man into a machine. What are the means employed? He is taught how to suffer being bored.

No journey is too great, when one finds what one seeks.

Every profound spirit needs a mask.

But the worst enemy you can meet will always be yourself; you lie in wait for yourself in caverns and forests. Lonely one, you are going the way to yourself! And your way goes past yourself, and past your seven devils! You will be a heretic to yourself and witch and soothsayer and fool and doubter and unholy one and villain. You must be ready to burn yourself in your own flame: how could you become new, if you had not first become ashes?

To learn to see- to accustom the eye to calmness, to patience, and to allow things to come up to it; to defer judgment, and to acquire the habit of approaching and grasping an individual case from all sides. This is the first preparatory schooling of intellectuality. One must not respond immediately to a stimulus; one must acquire a command of the obstructing and isolating instincts.

I have found strength where one does not look for it: in simple, mild, and pleasant people, without the least desire to rule -- and, conversely, the desire to rule has often appeared to me a sign of inward weakness: they fear their own slave soul and shroud it in a royal cloak (in the end, they still become the slaves of their followers, their fame, etc.)

Become who you are!

The growth of wisdom may be gauged exactly by the diminution of ill-temper.

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

I am alone again and I want to be so; alone with the pure sky and open sea.

The secret of reaping the greatest fruitfulness and the greatest enjoyment from life is to live dangerously.

The visionary lies to himself, the liar only to others.

If virtue goes to sleep, it will be more vigorous when it awakes.

One is punished best for one's virtues.

In every real man a child is hidden that wants to play.

Convictions are more dangerous foes of truth than lies.

Shared joys make a friend, not shared sufferings.

Amor Fati – “Love Your Fate”, which is in fact your life.

If you want me to believe in your redeemer, you are going to have to look a lot more redeemed.

In truth,there was only one christian and he died on the cross.

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

People are always angry at anyone who chooses very individual standards for his life; because of the extraordinary treatment which that man grants to himself, they feel degraded, like ordinary beings.

What destroys a man more quickly than to work, think and feel without inner necessity, without any deep personal desire, without pleasure - as a mere automaton of duty?

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

Ultimately, it is the desire, not the desired, that we love.

Hope in reality is the worst of all evils because it prolongs the torments of man.

The value of a thing sometimes lies not in what one attains with it, but in what one pays for it - what it costs us

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

No one can construct for you the bridge upon which precisely you must cross the stream of life, no one but you yourself alone.

I overcame myself, the sufferer; I carried my own ashes to the mountains; I invented a brighter flame for myself.

Do not talk about giftedness, inborn talents! One can assume great men of all kinds who were very little gifted. They acquired greatness, became “geniuses” (as we put it), through qualities the lack of which no one who knew what they were would boast of: they all possessed that seriousness of the efficient workman which first learns to construct the parts properly before it ventures to fashion a great whole; they allowed themselves time for it, because they took more pleasure in making the little, secondary things well than in the effect of a dazzling whole.

Beware of spitting against the wind!

Your soul will be dead even before your body: fear nothing further.

The most intelligent men, like the strongest, find their happiness where others would find only disaster: in the labyrinth, in being hard with themselves and with others, in effort; their delight is self-mastery; in them asceticism becomes second nature, a necessity, as instinct.

In the mountains of truth, you never climb in vain.

You must climb above yourself-up and beyond, until you have even your stars under you.

What we do is never understood, but always merely praised or blamed.

Death is close enough at hand so we do not need to be afraid of life.

All I need is a sheet of paper and something to write with, and then I can turn the world upside down.

The most fundamental form of human stupidity is forgetting what we were trying to do in the first place.

A moral system valid for all is basically immoral.

The most perfidious way of harming a cause consists of defending it deliberately with faulty arguments.

Every achievement, every step forward in knowledge, is the consequence of courage, of toughness towards oneself, of sincerity to oneself

By losing your goal, You have lost your way.

But it is the same with man as with the tree. The more he seeketh to rise into the height and light, the more vigorously do his roots struggle earthward, downward, into the dark and deep — into the evil.

The man loves danger and sport. That is why he loves woman, the most dangerous of all sports.

Sit as little as possible. Give no credence to any thought that was not born outdoors while moving about freely.

The deeper minds of all ages have had pity for animals.

Only idiots fail to contradict themselves three times a day.

One lives for the day, one lives very fast, one lives very irresponsibly: precisely this is called "freedom."

Without music, life would be a mistake.

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

The higher man is distinguished from the lower by his fearlessness and his readiness to challenge misfortune.

We labour at our daily work more ardently and thoughtlessly than is necessary to sustain our life because it is even more necessary not to have leisure to stop and think. Haste is universal because everyone is in flight from himself.

Faith: not wanting to know what is true.

What, if some day or night a demon were to steal after you into your loneliest loneliness and say to you: 'This life as you now live it and have lived it, you will have to live once more and innumerable times more' ... Would you not throw yourself down and gnash your teeth and curse the demon who spoke thus? Or have you once experienced a tremendous moment when you would have answered him: 'You are a god and never have I heard anything more divine.

Every man has his price. This is not true. But for every man there exists a bait which he cannot resist swallowing. To win over certain people to something, it is only necessary to give it a gloss of love of humanity, nobility, gentleness, self-sacrifice - and there is nothing you cannot get them to swallow. To their souls, these are the icing, the tidbit; other kinds of souls have others.

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

...lust is only a sweet poison for the weakling, but for those who will with a lion's heart it is the reverently reserved wine of wines.

It is certain that the Jew, if he desired-or if they were driven to it, as the antisemites seem to wish-could now have the ascendancy, nay, literally the supremacy, over Europe; that they are not working or planning for that end is equally sure... The resourcefulness of the modern Jews, both in mind and soul, is extraordinary.

When self control is lacking in small things, the ability to apply it to matters of importance withers away. Every day in which one does not at least deny himself some trifle is badly spent and a threat to the day following.

Mediocrity is the most effective mask a superior spirit can wear, because to the great majority, which is to say, to the mediocre,it will not suggest a disguise:--and yet it is precisely for their sake that he puts it on--so as not to arouse them, and, indeed, not infrequently to avoid this out of pity and benevolence.

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.

Is life not a thousand times too short for us to bore ourselves?

Let us not underestimate the privileges of the mediocre. As one climbs higher, life becomes ever harder, the coldness increases, responsibility increases.

One must renounce the bad taste of wishing to agree with many people.

I hate who steals my solitude, without really offer me in exchange company.

Danger alone acquaints us with our own resources, our virtues, our armor and weapons, our spirit, and forces us to be strong.

There is an old illusion. It is called good and evil.

The free man is a warrior.

Most thinkers write badly, because they communicate not only their thoughts, but also the thinking of them.

Everything goes, everything comes back; eternally rolls the wheel of being. Everything dies, everything blossoms again; eternally runs the year of being. Everything breaks, everything is joined anew; eternally the same House of Being is built. Everything parts, everything greets every other thing again; eternally the ring of being remains faithful to itself. In every Now, being begins; round every Here rolls the sphere There. The center is everywhere. Bent is the path of eternity.

What is evil?-Whatever springs from weakness.

No artist tolerates reality.

After coming into contact with a religious man I always feel I must wash my hands.

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

For a tree to become tall it must grow tough roots among the rocks.

Companions the creator seeks, not corpses, not herds and believers. Fellow creators the creator seeks -- those who write new values on new tablets. Companions the creator seeks, and fellow harvesters; for everything about him is ripe for the harvest.

My formula for greatness in a human being is amor fati: that one wants nothing to be other than it is, not in the future, not in the past, not in all eternity.

The man who does not wish to be one of the mass only needs to cease to be easy on himself.

Madness is not a consequence of uncertainty but of certainty.

Socialism is the phantastic younger brother of despotism, which it wants to inherit. Socialism wants to have the fullness of state force which before only existed in despotism. ... However, it goes further than anything in the past because it aims at the formal destruction of the individual ... who ... can be used to improve communities by an expedient organ of government.

Fear is the mother of morality.

Convictions are more dangerous enemies of truth than lies.Courageous, untroubled, mocking and violent-that is what Wisdom wants us to be. Wisdom is a woman, and loves only a warrior.

The greatest cure for love is still that time honoured medicine - love returned.

Those who cannot understand how to put their thoughts on ice should not enter into the heat of debate.

The 'kingdom of Heaven' is a condition of the heart - not something that comes 'upon the earth' or 'after death.'

The followers of a great man often put their eyes out, so that they may be the better able to sing his praise.

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

To one who is accustomed to thinking a lot, every new thought that he hears or reads about immediately appears as a link in a chain.

The strong individual loves the earth so much he lusts for recurrence. He can smile in the face of the most terrible thought: meaningless, aimless existence recurring eternally. The second characteristic of such a man is that he has the strength to recognize - and to live with the recognition - that the world is valueless in itself and that all values are human ones. He creates himself by fashioning his own values; he has the pride to live by the values he wills.

Freedom is the will to be responsible for ourselves. It is to preserve the distance which separates us from other men. To grow more indifferent to hardship, to severity, to privation, and even to life itself.

What makes us heroic?--Confronting simultaneously our supreme suffering and our supreme hope.