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Friedrich Nietzsche Quotes

Philosopher

Friedrich Nietzsche was a German philosopher whose radical ideas about morality, individualism, and the meaning of life have left a lasting impact on Western thought. Known for his critiques of traditional values and his concept of the "will to power," Nietzsche challenged conventional ideas about religion, society, and self-identity. The following quotes capture his provocative and often controversial views on human nature, the pursuit of greatness, and the struggle for personal freedom.
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He who has a why to live for can bear almost any how.
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There is a certain right by which we many deprive a man of life, but none by which we may deprive him of death; this is mere cruelty.
From Human, All Too Human: A Book for Free Spirits
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However modest one may be in one's demand for intellectual cleanliness, one cannot help feeling, when coming into contact with the New Testament, a kind of inexpressible discomfiture: for the unchecked impudence with which the least qualified want to raise their voice on the greatest problems, and even claim to be judges of things, surpasses all measure. The shameless levity with which the most intractable problems (life, world, God, purpose of life) are spoken of, as if they were not problems at all but simply things that these little bigots KNEW!
From The Will to Power
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If one goes through the individual moral statements of the documents of Christianity, one will find everywhere that the demands have been exaggerated so that man cannot satisfy them; the intention is not that the become moral, but rather than he feel as sinful as possible.
From Human, All Too Human: A Book for Free Spirits
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I would believe only in a God that knows how to dance.
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As soon as a religion comes to dominate it has as its opponents all those who would have been its first disciples.
From Human, All Too Human
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We know that the destruction of an ideal does not necessarily produce a truth, but only one more piece of ignorance; it is the extension of our ‘empty space,’ an increase in our ‘waste.
From The Will to Power
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Business people - Your business - is your greatest prejudice: it ties you to your locality, to the company you keep, to the inclinations you feel. Diligent in business - but indolent in spirit, content with your inadequacy, and with the cloak of duty hung over this contentment: that is how you live, that is how you want your children to live!
From Daybreak: Thoughts on the Prejudices of Morality
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Hope, in reality, is the worst of all evils because it prolongs the torments of man.
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Is life not a thousand times too short for us to bore ourselves?
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The higher we soar the smaller we appear to those who cannot fly.
From Thus Spoke Zarathustra
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He who would learn to fly one day must first learn to walk and run and climb and dance; one cannot fly into flying.
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Is man merely a mistake of God's? Or God merely a mistake of man?
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Two great European narcotics, alcohol and Christianity.
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New struggles. -- After Buddha was dead, they still showed his shadow in a cave for centuries -- a colossal, horrible shadow. God is dead, but given the way people are, there may still be caves for millennia in which his shadow is displayed. -- And we -- we must still defeat his shadow as well!
From The Gay Science: With a Prelude in Rhymes and an Appendix of Songs
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He who cannot obey himself will be commanded. That is the nature of living creatures.
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The maturity of man—that means, to have reacquired the seriousness that one had as a child at play
From Beyond Good and Evil
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You say, it's dark. And in truth, I did place a cloud before your sun. But do you not see how the edges of the cloud are already glowing and turning light.
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One must reach out and try to grasp this astonishing finesse, that the value of life cannot be estimated.
From Twilight of the Idols
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To recognize untruth as a condition of life--that certainly means resisting accustomed value feelings in a dangerous way; and a philosophy that risks this would by that token alone place itself beyond good and evil.
From Beyond Good and Evil
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Their [philosophers] thinking is, in fact, far less a discovery than a re-recognizing, a remembering, a return and a home-coming to a far-off, ancient common-household of the soul, out of which those ideas formerly grew: philosophizing is so far a kind of atavism of the highest order.
From Beyond Good and Evil
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The greatest danger that always hovered over humanity, and still hovers over it, is the eruption of madness— which means the eruption of arbitrariness in feeling, seeing, and hearing, the enjoyment of the mind's lack of discipline, the joy in human unreason.
From The Gay Science: With a Prelude in Rhymes and an Appendix of Songs
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...we then find the sovereign individual as the ripest fruit on its tree, like only to itself, having freed itself from the morality of custom, an autonomous, supra-ethical individual (because ‘autonomous’ and ‘ethical’ are mutually exclusive), in short, we find a man with his own, independent, enduring will, whose prerogative it is to promise – and in him a proud consciousness quivering in every muscle of what he has finally achieved and incorporated, an actual awareness of power and freedom, a feeling that man in general has reached completion.
From On the Genealogy of Morals
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Excess of strength alone is proof of strength
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He who has a why to live for can bear almost any how.
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
There is a certain right by which we many deprive a man of life, but none by which we may deprive him of death; this is mere cruelty.
From Human, All Too Human: A Book for Free Spirits
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
However modest one may be in one's demand for intellectual cleanliness, one cannot help feeling, when coming into contact with the New Testament, a kind of inexpressible discomfiture: for the unchecked impudence with which the least qualified want to raise their voice on the greatest problems, and even claim to be judges of things, surpasses all measure. The shameless levity with which the most intractable problems (life, world, God, purpose of life) are spoken of, as if they were not problems at all but simply things that these little bigots KNEW!
From The Will to Power
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
If one goes through the individual moral statements of the documents of Christianity, one will find everywhere that the demands have been exaggerated so that man cannot satisfy them; the intention is not that the become moral, but rather than he feel as sinful as possible.
From Human, All Too Human: A Book for Free Spirits
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
I would believe only in a God that knows how to dance.
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
As soon as a religion comes to dominate it has as its opponents all those who would have been its first disciples.
From Human, All Too Human
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
We know that the destruction of an ideal does not necessarily produce a truth, but only one more piece of ignorance; it is the extension of our ‘empty space,’ an increase in our ‘waste.
From The Will to Power
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
Business people - Your business - is your greatest prejudice: it ties you to your locality, to the company you keep, to the inclinations you feel. Diligent in business - but indolent in spirit, content with your inadequacy, and with the cloak of duty hung over this contentment: that is how you live, that is how you want your children to live!
From Daybreak: Thoughts on the Prejudices of Morality
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
Hope, in reality, is the worst of all evils because it prolongs the torments of man.
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
Is life not a thousand times too short for us to bore ourselves?
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
The higher we soar the smaller we appear to those who cannot fly.
From Thus Spoke Zarathustra
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
He who would learn to fly one day must first learn to walk and run and climb and dance; one cannot fly into flying.
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
Is man merely a mistake of God's? Or God merely a mistake of man?
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
Two great European narcotics, alcohol and Christianity.
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
New struggles. -- After Buddha was dead, they still showed his shadow in a cave for centuries -- a colossal, horrible shadow. God is dead, but given the way people are, there may still be caves for millennia in which his shadow is displayed. -- And we -- we must still defeat his shadow as well!
From The Gay Science: With a Prelude in Rhymes and an Appendix of Songs
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
He who cannot obey himself will be commanded. That is the nature of living creatures.
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
The maturity of man—that means, to have reacquired the seriousness that one had as a child at play
From Beyond Good and Evil
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
You say, it's dark. And in truth, I did place a cloud before your sun. But do you not see how the edges of the cloud are already glowing and turning light.
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
One must reach out and try to grasp this astonishing finesse, that the value of life cannot be estimated.
From Twilight of the Idols
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
To recognize untruth as a condition of life--that certainly means resisting accustomed value feelings in a dangerous way; and a philosophy that risks this would by that token alone place itself beyond good and evil.
From Beyond Good and Evil
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
Their [philosophers] thinking is, in fact, far less a discovery than a re-recognizing, a remembering, a return and a home-coming to a far-off, ancient common-household of the soul, out of which those ideas formerly grew: philosophizing is so far a kind of atavism of the highest order.
From Beyond Good and Evil
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
The greatest danger that always hovered over humanity, and still hovers over it, is the eruption of madness— which means the eruption of arbitrariness in feeling, seeing, and hearing, the enjoyment of the mind's lack of discipline, the joy in human unreason.
From The Gay Science: With a Prelude in Rhymes and an Appendix of Songs
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
...we then find the sovereign individual as the ripest fruit on its tree, like only to itself, having freed itself from the morality of custom, an autonomous, supra-ethical individual (because ‘autonomous’ and ‘ethical’ are mutually exclusive), in short, we find a man with his own, independent, enduring will, whose prerogative it is to promise – and in him a proud consciousness quivering in every muscle of what he has finally achieved and incorporated, an actual awareness of power and freedom, a feeling that man in general has reached completion.
From On the Genealogy of Morals
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
Excess of strength alone is proof of strength
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
He who has a why to live for can bear almost any how.
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
There is a certain right by which we many deprive a man of life, but none by which we may deprive him of death; this is mere cruelty.
From Human, All Too Human: A Book for Free Spirits
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
However modest one may be in one's demand for intellectual cleanliness, one cannot help feeling, when coming into contact with the New Testament, a kind of inexpressible discomfiture: for the unchecked impudence with which the least qualified want to raise their voice on the greatest problems, and even claim to be judges of things, surpasses all measure. The shameless levity with which the most intractable problems (life, world, God, purpose of life) are spoken of, as if they were not problems at all but simply things that these little bigots KNEW!
From The Will to Power
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
If one goes through the individual moral statements of the documents of Christianity, one will find everywhere that the demands have been exaggerated so that man cannot satisfy them; the intention is not that the become moral, but rather than he feel as sinful as possible.
From Human, All Too Human: A Book for Free Spirits
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
I would believe only in a God that knows how to dance.
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
As soon as a religion comes to dominate it has as its opponents all those who would have been its first disciples.
From Human, All Too Human
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
We know that the destruction of an ideal does not necessarily produce a truth, but only one more piece of ignorance; it is the extension of our ‘empty space,’ an increase in our ‘waste.
From The Will to Power
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
Business people - Your business - is your greatest prejudice: it ties you to your locality, to the company you keep, to the inclinations you feel. Diligent in business - but indolent in spirit, content with your inadequacy, and with the cloak of duty hung over this contentment: that is how you live, that is how you want your children to live!
From Daybreak: Thoughts on the Prejudices of Morality
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
Hope, in reality, is the worst of all evils because it prolongs the torments of man.
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
Is life not a thousand times too short for us to bore ourselves?
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
The higher we soar the smaller we appear to those who cannot fly.
From Thus Spoke Zarathustra
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
He who would learn to fly one day must first learn to walk and run and climb and dance; one cannot fly into flying.
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
Is man merely a mistake of God's? Or God merely a mistake of man?
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
Two great European narcotics, alcohol and Christianity.
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
New struggles. -- After Buddha was dead, they still showed his shadow in a cave for centuries -- a colossal, horrible shadow. God is dead, but given the way people are, there may still be caves for millennia in which his shadow is displayed. -- And we -- we must still defeat his shadow as well!
From The Gay Science: With a Prelude in Rhymes and an Appendix of Songs
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
He who cannot obey himself will be commanded. That is the nature of living creatures.
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
The maturity of man—that means, to have reacquired the seriousness that one had as a child at play
From Beyond Good and Evil
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
You say, it's dark. And in truth, I did place a cloud before your sun. But do you not see how the edges of the cloud are already glowing and turning light.
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
One must reach out and try to grasp this astonishing finesse, that the value of life cannot be estimated.
From Twilight of the Idols
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
To recognize untruth as a condition of life--that certainly means resisting accustomed value feelings in a dangerous way; and a philosophy that risks this would by that token alone place itself beyond good and evil.
From Beyond Good and Evil
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
Their [philosophers] thinking is, in fact, far less a discovery than a re-recognizing, a remembering, a return and a home-coming to a far-off, ancient common-household of the soul, out of which those ideas formerly grew: philosophizing is so far a kind of atavism of the highest order.
From Beyond Good and Evil
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
The greatest danger that always hovered over humanity, and still hovers over it, is the eruption of madness— which means the eruption of arbitrariness in feeling, seeing, and hearing, the enjoyment of the mind's lack of discipline, the joy in human unreason.
From The Gay Science: With a Prelude in Rhymes and an Appendix of Songs
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
...we then find the sovereign individual as the ripest fruit on its tree, like only to itself, having freed itself from the morality of custom, an autonomous, supra-ethical individual (because ‘autonomous’ and ‘ethical’ are mutually exclusive), in short, we find a man with his own, independent, enduring will, whose prerogative it is to promise – and in him a proud consciousness quivering in every muscle of what he has finally achieved and incorporated, an actual awareness of power and freedom, a feeling that man in general has reached completion.
From On the Genealogy of Morals
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
Excess of strength alone is proof of strength
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
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