Friedrich Nietzsche on Philosophy
1844–1900 Germany
← All quotes by Friedrich Nietzsche
10 quotes
What does a philosopher demand of himself, first and last? To overcome his time in himself, to become “timeless.”
One is fruitful only at the cost of being rich in contradictions.
To grasp the limits of reason – only this is truly philosophy.
Now I dare to pursue wisdom itself and to be myself a philosopher; formerly I worshipped the philosophers.
After all, what would be "beautiful" if the contradiction had not first become conscious of itself, if the ugly had not first said to itself: "I am ugly"?
We must be physicists in order to be creative since so far codes of values and ideals have been constructed in ignorance of physics or even in contradiction to physics.
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.
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.
In every age the wisest have passed the identical judgement on life: it is worthless.... Everywhere and always their mouths have uttered the same sound - a sound full of doubt, full of melancholy, full of weariness with life, full of opposition to life.
"Appearance" is a word that contains many temptations, which is why I avoid it as much as possible. For it is not true that the essence of things "appears" in the empirical world. A painter without hands who wished to express in song the picture before his mind would, by means of this substitution of spheres, still reveal more about the essence of things than does the empirical world.
On Truth and Lie in an Extra-Moral Sense (1873)