Welcome to our collection of quotes (with shareable picture quotes) by Friedrich Nietzsche. We hope you enjoy pondering them and that you will share them widely.
Wikipedia Summary for Friedrich Nietzsche
Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche (German: [ˈfʁiːdʁɪç ˈvɪlhɛlm ˈniːtʃə] or [ˈniːtsʃə]; 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. He began his career as a classical philologist before turning to philosophy. He became the youngest person ever to hold the Chair of Classical Philology at the University of Basel in 1869 at the age of 24. Nietzsche resigned in 1879 due to health problems that plagued him most of his life; he completed much of his core writing in the following decade. In 1889, at age 44, he suffered a collapse and afterward a complete loss of his mental faculties. He lived his remaining years in the care of his mother until her death in 1897 and then with his sister Elisabeth Förster-Nietzsche. Nietzsche died in 1900.
Nietzsche's writing spans philosophical polemics, poetry, cultural criticism, and fiction while displaying a fondness for aphorism and irony. Prominent elements of his philosophy include his radical critique of truth in favor of perspectivism; a genealogical critique of religion and Christian morality and related theory of master–slave morality; the aesthetic affirmation of life in response to both the "death of God" and the profound crisis of nihilism; the notion of Apollonian and Dionysian forces; and a characterization of the human subject as the expression of competing wills, collectively understood as the will to power. He also developed influential concepts such as the Übermensch and the doctrine of eternal return. In his later work, he became increasingly preoccupied with the creative powers of the individual to overcome cultural and moral mores in pursuit of new values and aesthetic health.
His body of work touched a wide range of topics, including art, philology, history, religion, tragedy, culture, and science, and drew inspiration from figures such as Socrates, Zoroaster, Arthur Schopenhauer, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Richard Wagner and Johann Wolfgang von Goethe.
After his death, his sister Elisabeth became the curator and editor of Nietzsche's manuscripts. She edited his unpublished writings to fit her German ultranationalist ideology while often contradicting or obfuscating Nietzsche's stated opinions, which were explicitly opposed to antisemitism and nationalism. Through her published editions, Nietzsche's work became associated with fascism and Nazism; 20th-century scholars contested this interpretation, and corrected editions of his writings were soon made available.
Nietzsche's thought enjoyed renewed popularity in the 1960s and his ideas have since had a profound impact on 20th and early-21st century thinkers across philosophy—especially in schools of continental philosophy such as existentialism, postmodernism and post-structuralism—as well as art, literature, psychology, politics, and popular culture.
Higher still than love of humankind is the love of causes and ghosts.
The thought of suicide is a great consolation: by means of it one gets through many a dark night.
We do not belong to those who have ideas only among books, when stimulated by books. It is our habit to think outdoors -- walking, leaping, climbing, dancing, preferably on lonely mountains or near the sea where even the trails become thoughtful.
As soon as you feel yourself against me you have ceased to understand my position and consequently my arguments! You have to be the victim of the same passion!
We have to be careful that in throwing out the devil, we don't throw out the best part of ourselves.
The voice of beauty speaks softly; it creeps only into the most fully awakened souls.
A person's maturity consists in having found again the seriousness one had as a child, at play.
Jealousy which keeps silent grows in its silence.
A man who is very busy seldom changes his opinions.
The growth of wisdom may be gauged accurately by the decline of ill temper.
Without music life would be a mistake.
To be independent is the business of a few only; it is the privilege of the strong.
There is an innocence in admiration: it occurs in one who has not yet realized that they might one day be admired.
A thought comes when it will, not when I will.
A thought, even a possibility, can shatter and transform us.
Man is something that shall be overcome. Man is a rope, tied between beast and overman -- a rope over an abyss. What is great in man is that he is a bridge and not an end.
For every man there exists a bait which he cannot resist swallowing.
He who attains his ideal, precisely thereby surpasses it.
Smooth ice is paradise for those who dance with expertise.
At times, our strengths propel us so far forward we can no longer endure our weaknesses and perish from them.
This woman is beautiful and clever: but how much cleverer she would have become if she were not beautiful!
Battle not with monsters lest you become one.
The visionary denies the truth to himself, the liar only to others.
Concerning great things one should either be silent or speak loftily.
In our interactions with people, a benevolent hypocrisy is frequently required -- acting as though we do not see through the motives of their actions.
Merchant and pirate were for a long period one and the same person. Even today mercantile morality is really nothing but a refinement of piratical morality.
No more fiction, for now we calculate; but that we may calculate, we had to make fiction first.
Immature is the love of the youth, and immature his hatred of man and earth. His mind and the wings of his spirit are still tied down and heavy.
In the world of high finance the shilling of the idle rich man can buy more than that of the poor, industrious man.
The greatest cure for love is still that time honoured medicine -- love returned.
Fathers have a lot to do to make up for having sons.
What the father kept silent the son speaks out.
He who would learn to fly one day must first learn to stand and walk and run and climb anddance; one cannot fly into flying.
In our own presence, we all pretend to be simpler than we are: thus we take a break from our fellow human beings.
It is not lack of love, but a lack of friendship that makes unhappy marriages.
Everything good is the transmutation of something evil, every god has a devil for a father.
Not to he who is offensive to us are we most unfair but to he who does not concern us at all.
Whether in conversation we generally agree or disagree with others is largely a matter of habit: the one tendency makes as much sense as the other.
For believe me: The secret for harvesting from existence the greatest fruitfulness and greatest enjoyment is to live dangerously.
There is always one too many around me, thus thinks the hermit. Always one times one eventually that makes two. I and me are always too deep in conversation.
The charm of knowledge would be small indeed, were it not that there is so much shame to be overcome on the way to it.
In the mountains, the shortest way is from peak to peak: but for that you must have long legs.
The final reward of the dead -- to die no more.
Growth in wisdom may be exactly measured by decrease in bitterness.
Notice that autumn is more the season of the soul than of nature.
Ultimately, it is the desire, not the desired, that we love.
I deny morality as I deny alchemy.
Man's task is simple. He should cease letting his existence be a thoughtless accident.
We would not let ourselves be burned to death for our opinions: we are not sure enough of them for that.
The deeper minds of all ages have had pity for animals.
Is the world really beautified by the fact that man thinks it beautiful? He has humanized it, that is all.
Acknowledge your will and speak to us all, This alone is what I will to be! Hang your own penal code up above you: we want to be its enforcers!
Only the most acute and active animals are capable of boredom.
And if you are not a bird, then beware of coming to rest above an abyss.
There is always a certain noise in applause: even in the applause we give ourselves.
The apprentice and the master love the master in different ways.
Association with other people corrupts our character; especially when we have none.
Compulsion precedes morality, indeed morality itself is compulsion for a time, to which one submits for the avoidance of pain.
Enjoyment and innocence are the most bashful things: both do not want to be sought.
One does not attack a person merely to hurt and conquer him, but perhaps merely to become conscious of one's own strength.
One can only be silent and sit peacefully when one hath arrow and bow; otherwise one prateth and quarrelleth. Let your peace be a victory!
Vanity is the fear of appearing original: it is thus a lack of pride, but not necessarily a lack of originality.
Wisdom sets bounds even to knowledge.
When a man reaches his maturity in understanding and in years, the feeling comes over him that his father was wrong to beget him.
People have always wanted to 'improve' human beings; for the most part, this has been called morality.
And to me also, who appreciate life, the butterflies, and soap-bubbles, and whatever is like them amongst us, seem most to enjoy happiness.
We praise or blame as one or the other affords more opportunity for exhibiting our power of judgement.
Every society has a tendency to reduce it's opponents to caricatures.
The masters have been done away with; the morality of the common man has triumphed.
Perhaps man will rise ever higher as soon as he ceases to flow out into a god.
Pity is the most agreeable feeling among those who have little pride and no prospects of great conquests.
Not necessity, not desire
- no, the love of power is
the demon of men.
Longer Version:
Not necessity, not desire -- no, the love of power is the demon of men. Let them have everything -- health, food, a place to live, entertainment -- they are and remain unhappy and low-spirited: for the demon waits and waits and will be satisfied.
What is the difference between someone who is convinced and one who is deceived? None, if he is well deceived.
I am affected, not because you have deceived me, but because I can no longer believe in you.
Perhaps no philosopher is more correct than the cynic. The happiness of the animal, that thorough cynic, is the living proof of cynicism.
Pity makes suffering contagious.
It is out of the deepest depth that the highest must come to its height.
To him who feels himself preordained to contemplation and not to belief, all believers are too noisy and obtrusive; he guards against them.
The doer is merely a fiction added to the deed ? the deed is everything.
Man is more sensitive to the contempt of others than to self-contempt.
All concepts in which an entire process is semiotically concentrated elude definition; only that which has no history is definable.
I and me are always too deeply in conversation.
A man who has depths in his shame meets his destiny and his delicate decisions upon paths which few ever reach.
Women are still cats and birds. Or at the best, cows.
Discontent is the seed of ethics.
The devotion of the greatest is to encounter risk and danger, and play dice for death.
Triumph depends on a roll of Fate's dice; the ultimate prize is a place in Heaven.
In magnanimity there is the same amount of egoism as in revenge, but egoism of a different quality.
I am not a human being, I am dynamite.
I am no man, I am dynamite.
It is not in our hands to prevent our birth; but we can correct this mistake -- for in some cases it is a mistake.
One has been a poor spectator of life if one has not witnessed the hand -- that kills from mercy.
One never perishes through anybody but oneself.
In a certain state it is indecent to live longer.
We evaluate the services that anyone renders to us according to the value he puts on them, not according to the value they have for us.
Quotes by Friedrich Nietzsche are featured in:
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