274 quotes
The secret for harvesting from existence the greatest fruitfulness and greatest enjoyment is — to live dangerously.
The Gay Science (1882)
The vanity of others is only counter to our taste when it is counter to our vanity.
Beyond Good and Evil (1886)
I tell you: one must still have chaos in one, to give birth to a dancing star.
Thus Spoke Zarathustra (1883)
He who thinks a great deal is not suited to be a party man: he thinks his way through the party and out the other side too soon.
Human, All Too Human (1878)
What will we do as the Earth is set loose from the sun?
In art, man enjoys himself as perfection.
Without myth, however, every culture loses its healthy creative natural power: it is only a horizon encompassed with myth that rounds off to unity a social movement.
The Birth of Tragedy (1872)
Everything which distinguishes man from the animals depends upon this ability to volatilize perceptual metaphors in a schema, and thus to dissolve an image into a concept.
On Truth and Lies in a Nonmoral Sense (1873)
State I call it where all drink poison, the good and the wicked; state, where all lose themselves, the good and the wicked; state, where the slow suicide of all is called “life.”
The drive toward the formation of metaphors is the fundamental human drive, which one cannot for a single instant dispense with in thought, for one would thereby dispense with man himself.
On Truth and Lies in a Nonmoral Sense (1873)
He who is related to me through loftiness of will experiences genuine raptures of understanding in my books.
Ecce Homo (1908)
Underneath this reality in which we live and have our being, another and altogether different reality lies concealed...
The Birth of Tragedy (1872)
Feminism, whether in mankind or man, is likewise a barrier to my writings; with it, no one could ever enter into this labyrinth of fearless knowledge.
Ecce Homo (1908)
To escape one's virtues.—What of a thinker who does not occasionally know how to escape his own virtues? Is he supposed to be more than a moral being?
The works of Friedrich Nietzsche (1903)
What does not kill me, makes me stronger.
Twilight of the Idols (1889)
Without music, life would be a mistake.
Twilight of the Idols (1889)
The civilized classes and nations are swept away by the grand rush for contemptible wealth. Never was the world worldlier, never was it emptier of love and goodness.
A few hours' mountain climbing make of a rogue and a saint two fairly equal creatures. Tiredness is the shortest path to equality and fraternity — and sleep finally adds to them liberty.
So long as thou feelest the stars as an ‘above thee’, thou lackest the eye of the discerning one.
Beyond Good and Evil (1886)
Maturity consists in having rediscovered the seriousness one had as a child at play.
Beyond Good and Evil (1886)