Friedrich Nietzsche Quotes on Man (45 Quotes)


    All beings so far have created something beyond themselves; and do you want to be the ebb of this great flood and even go back to the beasts rather than overcome man? What is the ape to man? A laughingstock or a painful embarrassment. And man shall be just that for the overman: a laughingstock or a painful embarrassmentà

    Man is something that shall be overcome.... Man is a rope, tied between beast and overman -- a rope over an abyss... What is great in man is that he is a bridge and not an end.

    The happiness of man is: I will. The happiness of woman is: he wills. æBehold, just now the world became perfect!Æùthus thinks every woman when she obeys out of entire love. And women must obey and find a depth for her surface. Surface is the disposition of woman: a mobile, stormy film over shallow water. ManÆs disposition, however, is deep; his river roars in subterranean caves: woman feels his strength but does not comprehend it.

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

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


    In the last analysis, even the best man is evil: in the last analysis, even the best woman is bad.

    Not necessity, not desire - no, the love of power is the demon of men. Let them have everything - health, food, a place to live, entertainment - they are and remain unhappy and low-spirited: for the demon waits and waits and will be satisfied.

    Many a man fails as an original thinker simply because his memory it too good.

    The abdomen is the reason why man does not readily take himself to be a god.


    Man wishes woman to be peaceable, but in fact she is essentially warlike, like the cat.

    In the consciousness of the truth he has perceived, man now sees everywhere only the awfulness or the absurdity of existence and loathing seizes him.

    What is good All that elevates the feeling of power, the will to power, the power itself in man.

    Reckoned physiologically, everything ugly weakens and afflicts man. It recalls decay, danger, impotence he actually suffers a loss of energy in its presence. The effect of the ugly can be measured with a dynamometer.


    It is not the strengths, but the durations of great sentiments that make great men.

    Nothing is beautiful, only man: on this piece of naivete rests all aesthetics, it is the first truth of aesthetics. Let us immediately add its second: nothing is ugly but degenerate man - the domain of aesthetic judgment is therewith defined.


    Man... cannot learn to forget, but hangs on the past however far or fast he runs, that chain runs with him.

    Physician, help yourself thus help your patient too. Let this be his best help that he may behold with his eyes the man who heals himself.

    I want to teach men the sense of their existence, which is the Superman, the lightning out of the dark cloud man.


    In the beautiful, man sets himself up as the standard of perfection in select cases he worships himself in it.... Man believes that the world itself is filled with beauty he forgets that it is he who has created it. He alone has bestowed beauty upon the world alas only a very human, an all too human, beauty.

    The abdomen is the reason why man does not easily take himself for a god.

    I teach you the Superman. Man is something that is to be surpassed. What have ye done to surpass man.


    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.




    Men are even lazier than they are timorous, and what they fear most is the troubles with which any unconditional honesty and nudity would burden them.

    Once spirit was God, then it became man, and now it is even becoming mob.

    If a man have a strong faith he can indulge in the luxury of skepticism.

    In the course of history, men come to see that iron necessity is neither iron nor necessary.

    Man is a rope stretched between the animal and the Superman a rope over an abyss.

    Every man is a creative cause of what happens, a primum mobile with an original movement.


    The true man wants two things: danger and play. For that reason he wants woman, as the most dangerous plaything.

    Stupid as a man, say the women: cowardly as a woman, say the men. Stupidity in a woman is unwomanly.

    Love is a state in which a man sees things most decidedly as the are not.

    Such a man as instinctively feeds on pure ambrosia and leaves alone the indigestible in things.


    Nothing on earth consumes a man more quickly than the passion of resentment.

    What is the vanity of the vainest man compared with the vanity which the most modest possesses when, in the midst of nature and the world, he feels himself to be man.

    Many a man fails to become a thinker for the sole reason that his memory is too good.


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    - Thus Spoke Zarathustra

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