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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
God is dead; but given the way of men, there may still be caves for thousands of years in which his shadow will be shown. — And we — we still have to vanquish his shadow, too.
The Gay Science (1882)
The rights a man arrogates to himself are related to the duties he imposes on himself, to the tasks to which he feels equal. The great majority of men have no right to existence, but are a misfortune to higher men.
The Will to Power (1888)
I do not know what meaning classical studies could have for our time if they were not untimely—that is to say, acting counter to our time and thereby acting on our time and, let us hope, for the benefit of a time to come.
The beautiful exists just as little as the true. In every case it is a question of the conditions of preservation of a certain type of man: thus the herd-man will experience the value feeling of the true in different things than will the overman.
The Will to Power (1888)
Because of the way that myth takes it for granted that miracles are always happening, the waking life of a mythically inspired people — the ancient Greeks, for instance — more closely resembles a dream than it does the waking world of a scientifically disenchanted thinker.
On Truth and Lie in an Extra-Moral Sense (1873)
Science rushes headlong, without selectivity, without “taste,” at whatever is knowable, in the blind desire to know all at any cost. Philosophical thinking, on the other hand, is ever on the scent of those things which are most worth knowing, the great and the important insights.
Suppose truth is a woman, what then?
Behold the good and the just! ... Behold the believers of all faiths! Whom do they hate most? The man who breaks their tables of values, the breaker, the lawbreaker. Yet he is the creator.
...the human being...Who has organized the chaos of his passions, given style to his character, and become creative. Aware of life's terrors, he affirms life without resentment.
The broad effects which can be obtained by punishment in man and beast are the increase of fear, the sharpening of the sense of cunning, the mastery of the desires; so it is that punishment tames man, but does not make him "better."
All that philosophers have handled for millennia, were conceptual mummies; there was nothing real to life from their hands. They kill, they fill out that these gentlemen term, idolaters, when they worship — they are all dangerous when they worship.
Twilight of the Idols : or How to Philosophize with a Hammer (1888)
When marrying, you should ask yourself this question: do you believe you are going to enjoy talking with this person into your old age? Everything else in marriage is transitory, but most of the time you are together will be devoted to conversation.
The democratic idea proceeds toward the fabrication of a human type fit for slavery in the most delicate sense of the word. Every democracy is simultaneously an involuntary institution for the breeding of tyrants in every sense of the word, even in the spiritual sense.
Beyond Good and Evil (1886)
Thus the man who is responsive to artistic stimuli reacts to the reality of dreams as does the philosopher to the reality of existence; he observes closely, and he enjoys his observation: for it is out of these images that he interprets life, out of these processes that he trains himself for life.
The Birth of Tragedy (1872)
Do you believe then that the sciences would ever have arisen and become great if there had not beforehand been magicians, alchemists, astrologers, and wizards who thirsted and hungered after... forbidden powers?
Where there have been powerful governments, societies, religions, public opinions, in short wherever there has been tyranny, there the solitary philosopher has been hated; for philosophy offers an asylum to a man into which no tyranny can force it way, the inward cave, the labyrinth of the heart.
Christianity ... is neither Apollonian nor Dionysian. It denies all aesthetic values, which are the only values that The Birth of Tragedy recognizes.
Ecce Homo (1908)
These philosophers show which dangers Greek culture harbored within itself:
The Struggle between Knowledge and Wisdom (1875)
How can a man know himself? He is a thing dark and veiled; and if the hare has seven skins, man can slough off seventy times seven and still not be able to say: “this is really you, this is no longer outer shell.”
Ascetic ideals reveal so many bridges to independence that a philosopher is bound to rejoice and clap his hands when he hears the story of all those resolute men who one day said No to all servitude and went into some desert.
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