Friedrich Nietzsche Suffering Quotations

To live is to suffer, to survive is to find some meaning in the suffering.

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

Shared joys make a friend, not shared sufferings.

What really raises one's indignation against suffering is not suffering intrinsically, but the senselessness of suffering

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

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

Thus the will to power strives towards oppositions, towards displeasure. There is a will to suffering at the foundation of all organic life (contrary to "happiness" as "goal").

A martyr's disciples suffer more than the martyr.

What really makes one indignant about suffering isn't the thing itself but the senselessness of it.

Every step forward is made at the cost of mental and physical pain to someone.

One pays dearly for being immortal: one must die many times during his life.

There is nothing for which men ask to be paid dearer than for humiliation.

Illusions are certainly expensive amusements; but the destruction of illusions is still more expensive, if looked upon as an amusement, as it undoubtedly is by some people.

Does not the discipline of the scientific spirit just commence when one no longer harbours any conviction?

But what if pleasure and pain should be so closely connected that he who wants the greatest possible amount of the one must also have the greatest possible amount of the other, that he who wants to experience the "heavenly high jubilation," must also be ready to be "sorrowful unto death"?

Doing ill to those on whom we have to make our power felt; for pain is a far more sensitive means for that purpose than pleasure: pain always asks concerning the cause, while pleasure is inclined to keep within itself and not look backward.

The ability to suffer is a small matter - weak women and even slaves can acheive virtuosity in that.

He who bears injustice alone is terrible to behold.

But this word will I say to my enemies: What is all manslaughter in comparison with what you have done to me!

You are treading the path to your greatness: no one shall follow you here! Your passage has effaced the path behind you, and above that path stands written: Impossibility.

You have not yet suffered enough! For you suffer only from yourselves, you have not yet suffered from man.

Whoever possesses the will to suffering within himself has a different attitude towards cruelty: he does not regard it as inherently harmful and bad.

To see others suffer does one good, to make others suffer even more: this is a hard saying but an ancient, mighty, human, all-too-human principle [....] Without cruelty there is no festival.

Whoever commits to paper what he suffers becomes a melancholy author: but he becomes a serious author when he tells us what he suffered and why he now reposes in joy.

Creating-that is the great salvation from suffering.

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.

Pity makes suffering contagious.

Who can attain to anything great if he does not feel in himself the force and will to inflict great pain?

What makes one heroic? - Going out to meet at the same time one's highest suffering and one's highest hope.

So long as the spectator has to figure out the meaning of this or that person, or the presuppositions of this or that conflict of inclinations and purposes, he cannot become completely absorbed in the activities and sufferings of the chief characters or feel breathless pity and fear.

But not to perish from internal distress and doubt when one inflicts great suffering and hears the cry of suffering : that is great, that belongs to greatness.

Intoxicating joy is it for the sufferer to look away from his suffering and forget himself. Intoxicating joy and self-forgetting, did the world once seem to me.

In pain there is as much wisdom as in pleasure: like the latter it is one of the best self preservatives of a species.

Creation is the great redemption from suffering and all life's growing light. But the creator must be suffering if needed and accept much change.

It is only possible through the fact that sympathy for the general life and suffering of mankind is very weakly developed in the individual.