Friedrich Nietzsche Men Quotations [Page 4]

It is not enough to prove something, one also has to seduce or elevate people to it. That is why the man of knowledge should learns how to speak his wisdom: and often in such a way that it sounds like folly!

Let man fear woman when she loves: then she makes any sacrifice, and everything else seems without value to her

Wherever primitive man put up a word, he believed he had made a discovery. How utterly mistaken he really was! He had touched a problem, and while supposing he had solved it, he had created and obstacle to its solution. Now, with every new knowledge we stumble over flint-like and petrified words and, in so doing, break a leg sooner than a word.

In his heart every man knows quite well that, being unique, he will be in the world only once and that no imaginable chance will for a second time gather together into a unity so strangely variegated an assortment as he is: he knows it but hides it like a bad conscience.

There is a certain right by which we many deprive a man of life, but none by which we may deprive him of death; this is mere cruelty.

A man far oftener appears to have a decided character from persistently following his temperament than from persistently following his principles.

One thing a man must have: either a naturally light disposition or a disposition lightened by art and knowledge.

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

Which is it? Is man only a blunder of God? Or is God only a blunder of man?

Thus the man who is responsive to artistic stimuli reacts to the reality of dreams as does the philosopher to the reality of existence; he observes closely, and he enjoys his observation: for it is out of these images that he interprets life, out of these processes that he trains himself for life.

Because men really respect only that which was founded of old and has developed slowly, he who wants to live on after his death must take care not only of his posterity but even more of his past.

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.

History belongs above all to the man...who needs models, teachers, comforters and cannot find them among his contemporaries.

Hope, in its stronger forms, is a great deal more powerful stimulans to life than any sort of realized joy can ever be. Man must be sustained in suffering by a hope so high that no conflict with actuality can dash it - so high, indeed, that no fulfilment can satisfy it: a hope reaching out beyond this world.

There exists above the "productive" man a yet higher species.

Science ... has no consideration for ultimate purposes, any more than Nature has, but just as the latter occasionally achieves things of the greatest suitableness without intending to do so, so also true science, as the imitator of nature in ideas, will occasionally and in many ways further the usefulness and welfare of man,-but also without intending to do so.

Whoever does not know how to find the way to his ideal lives more frivolously and impudently than the man without an ideal.

The free man is a warrior.

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.

The man of the future who will redeem us not only from the hitherto reigning ideal but also from that which was bound to grow out of it, the great nausea, the will to nothingness, nihilism; this bell stroke of noon and of the great decision that liberates the will again and restores its goal to the earth and his hope to man; this Antichrist and anti-nihilist; this victor over God and nothingness - he must come one day.

Under conditions of peace the warlike man attacks himself.

How is freedom measured, in individuals as in nations? By the resistance which has to be overcome, by the effort it costs to stay aloft. One would have to seek the highest type of free man where the greatest resistance is constantly being overcome: five steps from tyranny, near the threshold of the danger of servitude.

What we know oman today is limited precisely by the extent to which we have regarded him as a machine.

Man is not equally moral at all hours, this is well known. If his morality is judged to be the capability for great self-sacrificing resolutions and self-denial (which, when continuous and grown habitual, are called holiness)

Without the errors which lie in the assumption of morality, man would have remained an animal.

The man who meets with a failure attributes this failure rather to the ill will of another than to fate.

Inexperienced girls flatter themselves with the notion that it is in their power to make a man happy.

It is only because man believes himself to be free, not because he is free, that he experiences remorse and pricks of conscience.

Every fact and every work exercises a fresh persuasion over every age and every new species of man. History always enunciates new truths.

Nobody thanks a witty man for politeness when he puts himself on a par with a society in which it would not be polite to show one's wit.

The less men are fettered by tradition, the greater becomes the inward activity of their motives, and greater again in proportion to their outer restlessness.

The most unequivocal sign of contempt for man is to regard everybody merely as a means to one's own ends, or of no account whatever.

Man is more sensitive to the contempt of others than to self-contempt.

When a scholar of the old culture vows no longer to have anything to do with men who believe in progress, he is right. For the old culture has its greatness and goodness behind it, and an historical education forces one to admit that it can never again be fresh.

Men submit from habit to everything that seeks power.

Speaking is a beautiful folly; with that man dances over all things.

In solitude the lonely man is eaten up by himself, among crowds by the many.

Error has made man so deep, sensitive, and inventive that he has put forth such blossoms as religions and arts. Pure knowledge could not have been capable of it.

Since Copernicus, man seems to have got himself on an inclined plane-now he is slipping faster and faster away from the center into-what? into nothingness? into a 'penetrating sense of his nothingness?' ... all science, natural as well as unnatural-which is what I call the self-critique of knowledge-has at present the object of dissuading man from his former respect for himself, as if this had been but a piece of bizarre conceit.

The errors of great men are venerable because they are more fruitful than the truths of little men.

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.

For such is man: a Theological Dogma might be refuted to him a thousand times - provided however, that he had need of it, he would again and again accept it as true. Belief is always most desired, most pressingly needed where there is a lack of will. Fanaticism is the sole "volitional strength" to which the weak and irresolute can be excited, as a sort of hypnotising of the entire sensory-intellectual system.

Why does man not see things? He is himself standing in the way: he conceals things.

What is new, however, is always evil, being that which wants to conquer and overthrow the old boundary markers and the old pieties; and only what is old is good. The good men are in all ages those who dig the old thoughts, digging deep and getting them to bear fruit - the farmers of the spirit. But eventually all land is depleted, and the ploughshare of evil must come again and again.

Everyone wants to be foremost in this future-and yet death and the stillness of death are the only things certain and common to all in this future! How strange that this sole thing that is certain and common to all, exercises almost no influence on men, and that they are the furthest from regarding themselves as the brotherhood of death! It makes me happy to see that men do not want to think at all of the idea of death!

In a man devoted to knowledge, pity seems almost ridiculous, like delicate hands on a cyclops.

If Islam despises Christianity, it has a thousandfold right to do so: Islam at least assumes that it is dealing with men.