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Friedrich Nietzsche Quotes
1844–1900 Germany
Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche (15 October 1844 – 25 August 1900) was a German philosopher, cultural critic, composer, poet, writer, and philologist whose work has exerted a profound influence on modern intellectual history. His critiques of contemporary culture, religion, and philosophy centered on a basic question regarding the foundation of values and morality.
Germany Composers Journalists Novelists Philosophers Also known as: Friedric Nietzsche, Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche, Nietzsche, Nietzsche, Friedrich, Ecce Homo, Neitzsche
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274 quotes
It is difficult to preach, this morality of mediocrity! It may never admit what it is and what it wants! It must speak about restraint and worth and duty and love of one’s neighbor.
Mathematics would certainly have not come into existence if one had known from the beginning that there was in nature no exactly straight line, no actual circle, no absolute magnitude.
The Puzzle Instinct : The Meaning of Puzzles in Human Life (2004)
When we speak of values, we speak under the inspiration, and through the optics, of life. Life itself urges us to determine values. Life itself values through us when we determine values.
The weak and ill-constituted shall perish: first principle of our philanthropy. And one shall help them to do so.
Democratic institutions are quarantine mechanisms for that old pestilence, tyrannic lust. As such they are very useful and very boring.
One should observe our scholars closely: they have reached the point where they think only “reactively,” i.e. they must read before they can think.
While every noble morality develops from a triumphant affirmation of itself, slave morality from the outset says No to what is "outside," what is "different," what is "not itself"; and this No is its creative deed.
On the Genealogy of Morality (1887)
I teach you beyond Man [Uebermensch; overman-superman]. Man is something that shall be surpassed. What have you done to surpass him?
It’s the music in our conscience, the dance in our spirit, which wants to make all Puritan litanies, all moral sermons, and petty bourgeois respectability sound out of tune.
A law-book never recites the utility, the grounds, the casuistical antecedents of a law: for if it did so it would lose the imperative tone, the “thou shall,” on which obedience is based.
The Greeks have a word for indignation at another’s unhappiness: this affect was inadmissible among Christian peoples and failed to develop, so they also lack a name for this more manly brother of pity.
Daybreak (1881)
My formula for the greatness of a human being is amor fati: that one wants nothing to be different—not forward, not backward, not in all eternity. Not merely to bear what is necessary, still less conceal it … but love it.
Ecce Homo (1908)
The man who does not wish to belong to the mass needs only to cease taking himself easily; let him follow his conscience, which calls to him: “Be your self! All you are now doing, thinking, desiring, is not you yourself.”
There exists no more repulsive and desolate creature in the world than the man who has evaded his genius and who now looks furtively to left and right, behind him and all about him. ... He is wholly exterior, without kernel, a tattered, painted bag of clothes.
Jesus said to his Jews: “The law was for slaves—love god as I love him, as his son! What do we sons of God have to do with morality!”
Beware: "In revenge and in love woman is more barbarous than man."
You must have chaos within you to give birth to a dancing star.
Wisdom sets bounds even to knowledge ... I want, once and for all, not to know many things. Wisdom requires moderation in knowledge as in other things.
Twilight of the Idols (1889)
It is not the ferocity of the beast of prey that requires a moral disguise but the herd animal with its profound mediocrity, timidity, and boredom with itself.
Man … thinks continually without knowing it. The thinking that rises to consciousness is only the smallest part of this—the most superficial and worst part.
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