Friedrich Nietzsche Quotes (470 Quotes)

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

The irrationality of a thing is no argument against its existence, rather a condition of it.

Convictions are more dangerous enemies of the truth than lies.

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.

The most common lie is that which one lies to himself; lying to others is relatively an exception.

Love matches, so called, have illusion for their father and need for their mother.

The doctrine of equality There exists no more poisonous poison for it seems to be preached by justice itself, while it is the end of justice.

The lonely one offers his hand too quickly to whomever he encounters.

Nobody dies nowadays of fatal truths there are too many antidotes to them.

Again and again I am brought up against it, and again and again I resist it I don't want to believe it, even though it is almost palpable the vast majority lack an intellectual conscience. . .

All things are subject to interpretation whichever interpretation prevails at a given time is a function of power and not truth.

These people abstain, it is true: but the bitch Sensuality glares enviously out of all they do.

You say it is the good cause that hallows even war? I say unto you: it is the good war that hallows any cause.

There are few pains so grievous as to have seen, divined, or experienced how an exceptional man has missed his way and deteriorated.

He who despises himself nevertheless esteems himself as a self-despiser.

On the mountains of truth you can never climb in vain: either you will reach a point higher up today, or you will be training your powers so that you will be able to climb higher tomorrow.

It is not a lack of love, but a lack of friendship that makes unhappy marriages.

When a hundred men stand together, each of them loses his mind and gets another one.

Insanity in individuals is something rare - but in groups, parties, nations and epochs, it is the rule.

To use the same words is not a sufficient guarantee of understanding; one must use the same words for the same genus of inward experience; ultimately one must have one's experiences in common.

Before the effect one believes in different causes than one does after the effect.

Whoever fights monsters should see to it that in the process he does not become a monster. And if you gaze long enough into an abyss, the abyss will gaze back into you.

And as for sickness would we not almost be tempted to ask whether we can in any way do without it Only great pain is, as the teacher of great suspicion, the ultimate liberator of the spirit. . .

Although the most acute judges of the witches and even the witches themselves, were convinced of the guilt of witchery, the guilt nevertheless was non-existent. It is thus with all guilt.

Whoever has provoked men to rage against him has always gained a party in his favor, too.

Blessed are the forgetful: for they get the better even of their blunders.

Love is blind; friendship closes its eyes.

Man is the cruelest animal.

There are slavish souls who carry their appreciation for favors done them so far that they strangle themselves with the rope of gratitude.

The love of truth has its reward in heaven and even on earth.

Distrust all in whom the impulse to punish is powerful.

A pair of powerful spectacles has sometimes sufficed to cure a person in love.

Most of the time in married life is taken up by talk.

It is not when truth is dirty, but when it is shallow, that the lover of knowledge is reluctant to step into its waters.

Glance into the world just as though time were gone: and everything crooked will become straight to you.

Distrust everyone in whom the impulse to punish is powerful.

Active, successful natures act, not according to the dictum know thyself, but as if there hovered before them the commandment will a self and thou shalt become a self.

In every ascetic morality man worships a part of himself as God and for that he needs to diabolize the other part.

Nothing has been purchased more dearly than the little bit of reason and sense of freedom which now constitutes our pride.

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

Let us beware of saying there are laws in nature. There are only necessities there is no one to command, no one to obey, no one to transgress. When you realize there are no goals or objectives, then you realize, too, that there is no chance. . .

Great intellects are skeptical.

I know my fate. One day there will be associated with my name the recollection of something frightful -- of a crisis like no other before on earth, of the profoundest collision of conscience. . .

What do you regard as most humane? To spare someone shame.

Cynicism is the only form in which base souls approach honesty.

My time has not yet come either some are born posthumously.

It is obvious that all sense has gone out of modern marriage which is, however, no objection to marriage but to modernity.

Our vanity is hardest to wound precisely when our pride has just been wounded.

To live alone one must be an animal or a god --says Aristotle. There is yet a third case one must be both --a philosopher.

Wit is the epitaph of an emotion.