Friedrich Nietzsche Quotations | Page 4

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.

A woman does not want the truth; what is truth to women? From the beginning, nothing has been more alien, repugnant, and hostile to woman than the truth - her great art is the lie, her highest concern is mere appearance and beauty.

The person lives most beautifully who does not reflect upon existence

Ultimately, no one can extract from things, books included, more than he already knows.

In a friend one should have ones best enemy. You should be closest to him with your heart when you resist him.

In all institutions from which the cold wind of open criticism is excluded, an innocent corruption begins to grow like a mushroom - for example, in senates and learned societies

One should adpot only those situations in which one is in no need of sham virtues, but rather, like the tight-rope dancer on his tight rope, in which one must either fall or stand--or escape.

We are most unfair to God; we do not allow Him to sin.

I love him whose soul is deep even in the wounding

Though the favourites of the Gods die young, they also live eternally in the company of Gods

Such men alone are my readers, my proper readers, my preordained readers. Of what account are the rest? The rest are simply... humanity. One must be superior to humanity in power, in loftiness of soul- in contempt.

The reason adultery is immoral is that it might lead to marriage.

To live as I incline, or not to live at all: so do I wish; so wisheth also the holiest. But alas! how have I still - inclination? Have I-still a goal? A haven towards which MY sail is set?A good wind? Ah, he only who knoweth WHITHER he saileth, knoweth what wind is good, and a fair wind for him.What still remaineth to me? A heart weary and flippant; and unstable will; fluttering wings; a broken backbone.This seeking for MY home: O Zarathustra, dost thou know that this seeking hath been MY home-sickening; it eateth me up.

When death brings at last the desired forgetfulness, it abolishes life and being together, and sets the seal on the knowledge that "being" is merely a continual "has been," a thing that lives by denying and destroying and contradicting itself.

I am the leading strings of the ego and the prompter of its concepts.

It is only great pain--that slow, sustained pain that takes its time, in which we are, as it were, burned with smoldering green firewood--that forces us philosophers to sink to our ultimate profundity and to do away with all the trust, everything good-natured, veil-imposing, mild and middling, on which we may have previously based our humanity. I doubt that such a pain makes us 'better'--but I know that it makes us deeper.

It is not your sin - it is your moderation that cries to heaven; your very sparingness in sin cries to heaven!

I have been casting shadows all my life without caring about how deeply they stain my soul.

The Hour-Hand of Life --- Life consists of rare, isolated moments of the greatest significance, and of innumerably many intervals, during which at best the silhouettes of those moments hover about us. Love, springtime, every beautiful melody, mountains, the moon, the sea - all these speak completely to the heart but once, if in fact they ever do get a chance to speak completely. For many men do not have those moments at all, and are themselves intervals and intermissions in the symphony of real life.

Whenever the truth is uncovered, the artist will always cling with rapt gaze to what still remains covering even after such uncovering; but the theoretical man enjoys and finds satisfaction in the discarded covering and finds the highest object of his pleasure in the process of an ever happy uncovering that succeeds through his own efforts.

Sins are indispensable to every society organized on an ecclesiastical basis; they are the only reliable weapons of power; the priest lives upon sins; it is necessary to him that there be sinning.

One does not kill by anger but by laughter.

One had better put on gloves before handling the New Testament. The presence of so much filth makes it highly advisable.

Parasitism is the only practice of the church; with its ideal of anaemia, its holiness, draining all blood, all love, all hope for life; the beyond as the will to negate every reality; the cross as the mark of recognition for the most subterranean conspiracy that ever existed-against health, beauty, whatever has turned out well, courage, spirit, graciousness of the soul, against life itself.

Faith means the will to avoid knowing what is true.

Christians call it faith ... I call it the herd.

One is not converted to christianity; one must be morbid enough for it.

The soul must have its chosen sewers to carry away its ordure. This function is performed by persons, relationships, professions, the fatherland, the world, or finally, for the really arrogant - I mean our modern pessimists - by the Good God himself.

Poets and writers who are in love with the superlative all want to do more than they can.

What verse is for the poet, dialectical thinking is for the philosopher. He grasps for it in order to get hold of his own enchantment, in order to perpetuate it.

The great wars of the present age are the effects of the study of history.

Only in war are you holy, and when you are robbers and cruel.

In war personal revenge maintains its silence.

Yet for all that, there is nothing in me of a founder of a religion--religions are affairs of the rabble; I find it necessary to wash my hands after I have come into contact with religious people.

Every god-man created his own god: and there is no worse enmity on earth than that between gods.

Generally speaking, the greater a woman's beauty, the greater her modesty.

The grand style arises when beauty wins a victory over the monstrous.

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.

Those with very loud voices in their throats are nearly incapable of thinking subtle thoughts.

We cannot even reproduce our thoughts entirely in words.

The thought is merely a sign, as the word is merely a sign for the thought.

The flame is not as bright to itself as it is to those it illuminates: so too the sage.

Scholarship has the same relationship to wisdom as righteousness has to holiness: it is cold and dry, it is loveless and knows nodeep feelings of inadequacy or longing.

It was modesty that invented the word "philosopher" in Greece and left the magnificent overweening presumption in calling oneselfwise to the actors of the spirit--the modesty of such monsters of pride and sovereignty as Pythagoras, as Plato.

To become wise you have to want to experience certain experiences, and so to run into their open jaws. This is very dangerous, tobe sure; many a "wise man" has been eaten up in doing so.

Once and for all, there are many things I choose not to know.--Wisdom sets limits even to knowledge.

Man is at his furthest remove from the animal as a child, his intellect most human. With his fifteenth year and puberty he comes astep closer to the animal; with the sense of possessions of his thirties (the median line between laziness and greediness), still another step. In his sixtieth year of life he frequently loses his modesty as well, then the septuagenarian steps up to us as a completely unmasked beast: one need only look at the eyes and the teeth.

Women want to serve, and this is where their happiness lies: but the free spirit does not want to be served, and this is where hishappiness lies.

Desire is happiness: satisfaction as happiness is merely the ultimate moment of desire. To be wish and wish alone is happiness, and a new wish over and over again.

This is one of the stout-hearted old warriors: he is angry with civilization because he supposes that its aim is to make all goodthings--honors, treasures, beautiful women--accessible even to cowards.

The ordinary man is as courageous and invulnerable as a hero when he does not recognize any danger, when he has no eyes to see it.Conversely, the hero's only vulnerable spot is on his back, and so exactly where he has no eyes.

Brave people may be persuaded to an action by representing it as being more dangerous than it really is.

It takes physical courage to indulge in wickedness. The "good" are too cowardly to do it.

A friend whose hopes we cannot satisfy is a friend we would rather have as an enemy.

The lack of closeness among friends is a fault that cannot be reprimanded without becoming incurable.

Sometimes in our relationship to another human being the proper balance of friendship is restored when we put a few grains of impropriety onto our own side of the scale.

We should not talk about our friends: otherwise we will talk away the feeling of friendship.

With sturdy shoulders, space stands opposing all its weight to nothingness. Where space is, there is being.

Our sense of the tragic waxes and wanes with our sensuality.

Is not wounded vanity the mother of all tragedies?

A philosophical mythology lies concealed in language, which breaks out again at every moment, no matter how cautious we may be.

The philosopher caught in the nets of language.

The spiritual activity of millennia is deposited in language.

Through searching out origins, one becomes a crab. The historian looks backwards, and finally he also believes backwards.

We are all afraid of the truth.

Error has made animals into men; is truth in a position to make men into animals again?

It is not when it is dangerous to tell the truth that its advocates are hardest to find, but when it is boring.

Women are constituted in such a way that all truth (regarding men, love, children, society, the purpose of life) disgusts them, and in such a way that they try to revenge themselves on anyone who opens their eyes.

Few serve truth in truth because only few have the pure will to be just, and of those again very few have the strength to be just.

Could truth perhaps be a woman who has reasons for not permitting her reasons to be seen? Could her name perhaps be--to speak Greek--Baubo?... Oh, those Greeks! They understood how to live: to do that it is necessary to stop bravely at the surface, the fold, the skin, to adore the appearance, to believe in forms, in tones, in words, in the whole Olympus of appearance! Those Greeks were superficial--out of profundity!

Probability but no truth, facility but no freedom--it is owing to these two fruits that the tree of knowledge cannot be confused with the tree of life.

Look not into the sun! Even the moon is too bright for your nocturnal eyes!

What the philosopher is seeking is not truth, but rather the metamorphosis of the world into man.

The drive toward knowledge has a moral origin.

The unselective knowledge drive resembles the indiscriminate sexual drive--signs of vulgarity!

On every parable you ride to every truth.

In every philosophical school, three thinkers succeed one another in the following way: the first produces out of himself the sapand seed, the second draws it out into threads and spins a synthetic web, and the third waits in this web for the sacrificial victims that are caught in it--and tries to live off philosophy.

At the very moment when someone is beginning to take philosophy seriously, the whole world believes the opposite.

The Greeks, with their truly healthy culture, have once and for all justified philosophy simply by having engaged in it, and having engaged in it more fully than any other people.

This is the fundamental idea of culture, insofar as it sets but one task for each of us: to further the production of the philosopher, of the artist, and of the saint within us and outside us, and thereby to work at the consummation of nature.

Can an ass be tragic?--To perish under a burden that one can neither bear nor cast off? The case of the philosopher.

When an idea is just rising on the horizon, the soul's temperature with respect to it is usually very cold. Only gradually does the idea develop its warmth, and it is hottest (which is to say, exerting its greatest influence) when belief in the idea is already once again in decline.

We can speak very much to the purpose and yet in such a way that the whole world cries out in contradiction: namely, when we are not speaking to the whole world.

What is life? A continuous praise and blame.

Where I found the living, there I found the will to power; even in the will of servants I found the will to be master.

Spirit is the life that itself cuts into life: with its own torment it increases its own knowledge. Did you already know that?

Among austere men intimacy involves shame--and is something precious.

However closely people are attached to one another, their mutual horizon nonetheless includes all four compass directions, and nowand again they notice it.

Even the most honest writer lets slip a word too many when he wants to round off a period.

Writers ought to be regarded as wrongdoers who deserve to be acquitted or pardoned only in the rarest cases: that would be a way to keep books from getting out of hand.

The sensible author writes for no other posterity than his own--that is, for his age--so as to be able even then to take pleasurein himself.

We grow hostile to many an artist or writer, not because we finally come to see he has deceived us, but because he thought no subtler means were required to ensnare us.

Many writers are neither spirit nor wine, but rather spirits- of-wine: they can catch fire, and then they give off heat.

What good is a book that does not even transport us beyond all books?

A book should long for pen, ink, and writing-table: but usually it is pen, ink, and writing-table that long for a book. That is why books are so negligible nowadays.

Never to read another book that was born and baptized (with ink) at the same time.

What is it that endowed things with meaning, value, significance? The creating heart, which desired, and, out of its desire, created. It created joy and woe. It wanted to satiate itself with woe. We must take all the suffering that has been endured by men and animals upon ourselves and affirm it, and possess a goal in which it acquires reason.

The English are a nation of consummate cant.

Quidquid luce fuit tenebris agit: but also the other way around. What we experience in dreams, so long as we experience it frequently, is in the end just as much a part of the total economy of our soul as anything we "really" experience: because of it we are richer or poorer, are sensitive to one need more or less, and are eventually guided a little by our dream-habits in broad daylight and even in the most cheerful moments occupying our waking spirit.

Everyone nowadays lives through too much and thinks through too little: they have a ravenous appetite and colic at the same time so that they keep getting thinner and thinner no matter how much they eat.--Whoever says nowadays, "I have not experienced anything"--is a simpleton.