Friedrich Nietzsche Quotations | Page 5

Not infrequently, we encounter copies of important human beings; and here, too, as in the case of paintings, most people prefer the copies to the originals.

All rejection and negation indicates a deficiency in fertility: fundamentally, if only we were good plowland we would allow nothing to go unused, and in every thing, event, and person we would welcome manure, rain, or sunshine.

What saved me then? Nothing but pregnancy. And each time after I had given birth to my work my life hung suspended by a thin thread.

Pain makes hens and poets cackle.

As refined fare serves a hungry man as well as and no better than coarser food, the more pretentious artist will not dream of inviting the hungry man to his meal.

Assuming that rapture is nature's play with man, the Dionysian artist's creative activity is the play with rapture.

One is proud to worship when he cannot be an idol.

The enormous expectation having to do with sexual love and the shame involved in this expectation degrades all a woman's perspectives from the start.

Love brings to light the lofty and hidden characteristics of the lover--what is rare and exceptional in him: to that extent it caneasily be deceptive with respect to what is normal in him.

In every form of womanly love something of motherly love also comes to light.

Sometimes it just takes stronger eyeglasses to cure those who are in love--and someone with the ability to imagine a face or a figure twenty years older might perhaps pass through life quite undisturbed.

Every great love brings with it the cruel idea of killing the object of its love so that it may be removed once and for all from the wicked game of change: for love dreads change even more than annihilation.

The apprentice and the master love the master in different ways.

Just as soon as we notice that someone has to force himself to pay attention when dealing and talking with us, we have a valid demonstration that he does not love us or that he does not love us anymore.

What is it that you love in others?--My hopes.

I feel all those human beings to be pernicious who can no longer oppose what they love: they thereby ruin the best things and people.

I devote myself to what I love the most, and for this very reason I hesitate to designate it with lofty words: I do not want to risk believing that it is a sublime compulsion, a law, which I obey: I love what I love the most too much to wish to appear to it as one compelled.

Loving and perishing: it's been a rhyme all these eternities. The will to love: that is, also being willing to die.

The machine is impersonal, it takes the pride away from a piece of work, the individual merits and defects that go along with allwork that is not done by a machine--which is to say, its little bit of humanity.

The woman and the genius do not work. Up to now, woman has been mankind's supreme luxury. In all those moments when we do our best, we do not work. Work is merely a means to these moments.

The surest sign that two people no longer speak the same language is that both say ironic things to one another but that neither senses the irony.

The empty, the one, the unmoved, the full, satiation, wanting nothing--that would be my evil: in short, dreamless sleep.

Let us guard against saying that there are laws in nature. There are merely necessities: there is no one who commands, no one whoobeys, no one who transgresses. Once you understand that there are no purposes, then you also understand that nothing is accidental: for it is only in a world of purposes that the word "accident" makes sense.

It is doubtful whether anyone who has travelled widely has found anywhere in the world regions more ugly than in the human face.

Joy wants the eternity of all things, wants deep, wants deep eternity.

We should conserve evil just as we should conserve the forests. It is true that by thinning and clearing the forests the earth grew warmer.

Beware of spitting against the wind!

Shackled heart, free spirit.--Whoever binds his heart tightly and imprisons it may indulge his spirit in many liberties: I have already said that once. But no one believes me unless he already knows.

You call yourself free? I want to hear your ruling thought and not that you have escaped a yoke. Are you such a one as was permitted to escape a yoke? There are some who threw away their ultimate worth when they threw away their servitude. Free from what? What is that to Zarathustra! But your eyes should announce to me brightly: free for what?

Willing sets you free: that is the true doctrine of will and freedom--thus Zarathustra instructs you.

What a person is begins to betray itself when his talent weakens--when he stops showing what he can do. Talent, too, is ornamentation, and ornamentation, too, is a hiding place.

Having a talent is not enough: one must also have your permission to have it--right, my friends?

With one more talent one frequently stands with greater instability than with one less, as a table stands better on three legs than on four.

Some people appear to be more meager in talent than they are, just because the tasks they set themselves are always too great.

Where the past is venerated the clean and those who clean things up should be kept out. Piety is never happy without a little dust, dirt, and rubbish.

The great advantage in noble parentage is that enables one to endure poverty more easily.

When the gratitude that many owe to one discards all modesty, then there is fame.

For it is only as an aesthetic phenomenon that existence and the world are eternally justified.

That the world is not the embodiment of an eternal rationality can be conclusively proved by the fact that the piece of the worldthat we know--I mean our human reason--is not so very rational. And if it is not eternally and completely wise and rational, then the rest of the world will not be either; here the conclusion a minori ad majus, a parte ad totum applies, and does so with decisive force.

Whoever has character also has his typical experience, which returns over and over again.

The sexes deceive themselves about one another: the reason being that at bottom they honor and love only themselves (or their ownideal, to express it more agreeably). Thus man wants woman to be peaceable--but woman is essentially, like the cat, not peaceable, however well she may have trained herself to assume the appearance of peace.

Men seldom persevere in a vocation unless they believe or can convince themselves that it is fundamentally more important than anyother calling. Women are the same with their lovers.

Some men have sighed over the abduction of their wives, but many more have sighed because no one wanted to abduct theirs.

Men subsequently put whatever is newly learned or experienced to use as a plowshare, perhaps even as a weapon: but women immediately include it among their ornaments.

Men are cowards when it comes to the "eternally feminine": and the little women know it.

Thus do I want man and woman to be: the one fit to wage war and the other fit to give birth, but both fit to dance with head and feet.

Life is fountain of joy; but where the rabble also gather to drink, all wells are poisoned.

The higher its type, the more rarely a thing succeeds.

We belong to an age whose culture is in danger of perishing through the means to culture.

Modern marriage has lost its meaning--consequently it is being abolished.

The child as a monument to the passion of two people; the will to oneness in two.

On all the walls, wherever walls exist, I will inscribe this eternal indictment of Christianity--I have letters to make even blindmen see.... I call Christianity the single great curse, the single great innermost depravity, the single great instinct of revenge, for which no means is poisonous, secretive, subterranean, small enough--I call it mankind's single immortal blemish.... And we reckon time from the dies nefastus with which this calamity arose--following Christianity's first day!--Why not following its last day, instead?--Following today?--Transvaluation of all values!

Time, space, and causality are only metaphors of knowledge, with which we explain things to ourselves.

We pay dearly for immortality: we die for it more than once during our lifetimes.

He who seeks intelligence lacks intelligence.

The wittiest authors evoke a barely perceptible smile.

Cows sometimes wear an expression resembling wonderment arrested on its way to becoming a question. In the eye of superior intelligence, on the other hand, lies the nil admirari spread out like the monotony of a cloudless sky.

Not with wrath do we kill, but with laughter. Come, let us kill the spirit of gravity!

Around the hero everything turns into a tragedy, around the demigod, a satyr-play, and around God--what? perhaps a "world"?

When I was twelve years old I thought up an odd trinity: namely, God the Father, God the Son, and God the Devil. My inference wasthat God, in contemplating himself, created the second person of the godhead; but that, in order to be able to contemplate himself, he had to contemplate, and thus to create, his opposite.--With this I began to do philosophy.

When gods die, they always die many sorts of death.

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").

Logic, too, also rests on assumptions that do not correspond to anything in the real world, e.g., on the assumption that there areequal things, that the same thing is identical at different points in time: but this science arose as a result of the opposite belief (that such things actually exist in the real world). And it is the same with mathematics, which would certainly never have arisen if it had been understood from the beginning that there is no such thing in nature as a perfectly straight line, a true circle, and absolute measure.

Mathematics is merely the means to a general and ultimate knowledge of man.

Noble and wise men once believed in the music of the spheres: noble and wise men still continue to believe in the "moral significance of existence." But one day even this sphere-music will no longer be audible to them! They will wake up and take note that their ears were dreaming.

I awoke you from your sleep because I saw that you were having a nightmare. And now you are cross and say to me: "What are we supposed to do now? Everything is still night!" You ingrates! You should go to sleep again and dream better.

Scholars who become politicians are usually assigned the comic role of having to be the good conscience of state policy.

At one time or another, almost every politician needs an honest man so badly that, like a ravenous wolf, he breaks into a sheep-fold: not to devour the ram he has stolen, however, but rather to conceal himself behind its wooly back.

We are in the greatest danger of being run over when we have just gotten out of the way of a carriage.

We seldom break a leg as long as we are climbing wearily upwards in our lives, instead we do it when we start going easy on ourselves and choosing the comfortable paths.

A matter that becomes clear ceases to concern us.--What was that god thinking who counseled, "Know thyself!" Did he perhaps mean,"Cease to concern yourself! Become objective!"--And Socrates?--And "scientific men"?

Whatever may be your desire to accomplish great deeds, the deep silence of pregnancy never comes to you! The event of the day sweeps you along like straws before the wind whilst ye lie under the illusion that ye are chasing the event,-poor fellows! If a man wishes to act the hero on the stage he must not think of forming part of the chorus; he should not even know how the chorus is made up.

A thing can only live through a pious illusion.

One can lie with the mouth, but with the accompanying grimace one nevertheless tells the truth.

When you stare into an abyss for a long time, the abyss also stares into you.

Many find their heart when they have lost their head.

To those human beings who are of any concern to me, I wish suffering, desolation, sickness, ill treatment, indignities, profound self-contempt, the torture of self-mistrust, and the wretchedness of the vanquished.

He who strays from the customary becomes a sacrifice to the extraordinary; he who keeps to the customary becomes its slave. He iscondemned to perish in either case.

Every word has its fragrance: there is a harmony and a disharmony of fragrances, and hence of words.

The grand style follows suit with all great passion. It disdains to please, it forgets to persuade. It commands. It wills.

Our drives are reducible to the will to power. The will to power is the ultimate fact at which we arrive.

The will to power can express itself only against resistances; it seeks that which resists it--this is the native tendency of theamoeba when it extends its pseudopodia and gropes around.

The problem of culture is seldom grasped correctly. The goal of a culture is not the greatest possible happiness of a people, noris it the unhindered development of all their talents; instead, culture shows itself in the correct proportion of these developments. Its aim points beyond earthly happiness: the production of great works is the aim of culture.

Carlyle, a man of strong words and attitudes, a rhetorician out of necessity, constantly aroused by the craving for a strong faithas well as by the feeling of an incapacity for it (Min this respect a typical romantic!).... Fundamentally, Carlyle is an English atheist who makes it a point of honor not to be one.

There will be but few people who, when at a loss for topics of conversation, will not reveal the more secret affairs of their friends.

Antithesis is the narrow gateway through which error most prefers to worm its way towards truth.

Truth is the kind of error without which a certain species of life could not live. The value for life is ultimately decisive.

Many a peacock hides his peacock tail from all eyes--and calls it his pride.

It is only when we have ceased to be the followers of our followers that we comprehend how meaningless followers are.

Among twelve apostles there must always be one who is as hard as stone, so that the new church may be built upon him.

One who has given up any hope of winning a fight or has clearly lost it wants his style in fighting to be admired all the more.

Everything good is the transmutation of something evil: every god has a devil for a father.

One should only question gods where none but gods can reply.

But let me open up my heart to you completely, my friends: if there were gods, how could I bear not being a god! Hence, there areno gods. I drew this conclusion, to be sure--but now it draws me.

Precisely this is godliness--that there are gods, but no God.

In order to be somebody you have to hold even your shadow in high regard.

The way to transmute your iron duty into gold in everyone's eyes is this: always deliver more than you promise.

He who possesses greatness is cruel towards his secondary virtues and considerations.

One who dresses in rags that have been washed clean dresses cleanly to be sure, but raggedly nonetheless.