Friedrich Nietzsche Quotes

Below you will find our collection of inspirational, wise, and humorous Friedrich Nietzsche quotes and Friedrich Nietzsche sayings, collected over the years from a variety of sources. Enjoy reading these insights and feel free to share this page on your social media to inspire others.

Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche(15 October 1844 – 25 August 1900) was a German philosopher, cultural critic, composer, poet, philologist, and Latin and Greek scholar 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 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.

‘Evil men have no songs.’ How is it that the Russians have songs?

A bad conscience is easier to cope with than a bad reputation.

A beautiful woman seductively dressed will never catch cold no matter how low-cut her gown.

A casual stroll through the lunatic asylum shows that faith does not prove anything.

A Dionysian life task needs the hardness of the hammer and one of its first essentials is without doubt the joy to be found even in destruction.

A friend should be a master at guessing and keeping still: you must not want to see everything.

A good writer possesses not only his own spirit but also the spirit of his friends.

A great value of antiquity lies in the fact that its writings are the only ones that modern men still read with exactness.

A joke is an epigram on the death of a feeling.

A life without music is an error.

A living being seeks, above all, to discharge its strength. Life is will to power.

A man far oftener appears to have a decided character from persistently following his temperament than from persistently following his principles.

A man who possesses genius is insufferable unless he also possesses at least two other things: gratitude and cleanliness.

A matter that becomes clear ceases to concern us.

A moral system valid for all is basically immoral.

A politician divides mankind into two classes: tools and enemies.

A sedentary life is the real sin against the Holy Spirit. Only those thoughts that come by walking have any value.

A small revenge is more human than no revenge at all.

A strong and well-constituted man digests his experiences (deeds and misdeeds all included) just as he digests his meats, even when he has some tough morsels to swallow.

A thinker sees his own actions as experiments and questions – as attempts to find out something. Success and failure are for him answers above all.

A thought comes when it will, not when I will.

A thought, even a possibility, can shatter and transform us.

A very popular error: having the courage of one’s convictions; rather it is a matter of having the courage for an attack on one’s convictions.

A woman may very well form a friendship with a man, but for this to endure, it must be assisted by a little physical antipathy.

Admiration for a quality or an art can be so strong that it deters us from striving to possess it.

After coming into contact with a religious man I always feel I must wash my hands.

Ah, women. They make the highs higher and the lows more frequent.

All credibility, all good conscience, all evidence of truth come only from the senses.

All great men are play actors of their own ideal.

All great things must first wear terrifying and monstrous masks in order to inscribe themselves on the hearts of humanity.

All I need is a sheet of paper and something to write with, and then I can turn the world upside down.

All in all and on the whole: some day I wish to be only a Yes-sayer.

All isolation is wrong so say the herd. And long didst thou belong to the herd.

All sciences are now under the obligation to prepare the ground for the future task of the philosopher, which is to solve the problem of value, to determine the true hierarchy of values.

All signs of superhuman nature appear in man as illness or insanity.

All things are subject to interpretation. Whichever interpretation prevails at a given time is a function of power and not truth.

All things that are truly great are at first thought impossible.

All truly great thoughts are conceived by walking.

All truly great thoughts are conceived while walking.

All truth is crooked, time itself is a circle.

All truth is simple… is that not doubly a lie?

All truths are bloody truths to me.

Along the journey, we commonly forget its goal. Almost every vocation is chosen and entered upon as a means to a purpose but is ultimately continued as a final purpose in itself. Forgetting our objectives is the most frequent stupidity in which we indulge ourselves.

Although the most acute judges of the witches and even the witches themselves, were convinced of the guilt of witchery, the guilt nevertheless was non-existent. It is thus with all guilt.

Amor Fati – “Love Your Fate”, which is in fact your life.

An artist has no home in Europe except in Paris.

And if your friend does evil to you, say to him, “I forgive you for what you did to me, but how can I forgive you for what you did to yourself?”

And it is the great noon when man stands at the midpoint of his course between beast and superman and celebrates his way to the evening as his highest hope: for it is the way to a new morning.

And once you are awake, you shall remain awake eternally.

And those who were seen dancing were thought to be insane by those who could not hear the music.

And we should consider every day lost on which we have not danced at least once.

And we should consider every day lost on which we have not danced at least once. And we should call every truth false which was not accompanied by at least one laugh.

Anyone who has declared someone else to be an idiot, a bad apple, is annoyed when it turns out in the end that he isn’t.

Arrogance on the part of the meritorious is even more offensive to us than the arrogance of those without merit: for merit itself is offensive.

Art is essentially the affirmation, the blessing, and the deification of existence.

Art is not merely an imitation of the reality of nature, but in truth a metaphysical supplement to the reality of nature, placed alongside thereof for its conquest.

Art is the highest task and the proper metaphysical activity of this life.

Art is the proper task of life.

Art raises its head where creeds relax.

As long as you still experience the stars as something “above you”, you lack the eye of knowledge.

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.

Asceticism is the right way of thinking for those who have to extirpate their sensual drives because they are ravening beasts of prey. But only for those!

At a certain place in Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony, for example, he might feel that he is floating above the earth in a starry dome, with the dream of immortality in his heart; all the stars seem to glimmer around him, and the earth seems to sink ever deeper downwards.

At bottom every man knows well enough that he is a unique being, only once on this earth; and by no extraordinary chance will such a marvelously picturesque piece of diversity in unity as he is, ever be put together a second time.

At the beginning of a marriage ask yourself whether this woman will be interesting to talk to from now until old age. Everything else in marriage is transitory: most of the time is spent in conversation.

At times one remains faithful to a cause only because its opponents do not cease to be insipid.

Battle not with Hello Kitty lest ye become Hello Kitty; and if you gaze into the abyss the abyss gazes into you with huge eyes and a helpless disposition.

Battle not with monsters, lest ye become a monster, and if you gaze into the abyss, the abyss gazes also into you.

Be careful when you cast out your demons that you don’t throw away the best of yourself.

Be careful when you fight the monsters, lest you become one.

Be careful who you choose as your enemy because that’s who you become most like.

Be careful, lest in casting out your demon you exorcise the best thing in you.

Become who you are.

Become who you are. Make what only you can make.

Before the effect one believes in different causes than one does after the effect.

Behind a remarkable scholar we not infrequently find an average human being, and behind an average artist we often find a very remarkable human being.

Behind all their personal vanity, women themselves always have an impersonal contempt for woman.

Belief means not wanting to know what is true.

Better know nothing than half-know many things.

Beware of spitting against the wind!

Beware that, when fighting monsters, you yourself do not become a monster… for when you gaze long into the abyss. The abyss gazes also into you.

Blessed are the forgetful: for they get the better even of their blunders.

Body am I entirely, and nothing else; and soul is only a word for something about the body.

Buddhism is a hundred times as realistic as Christianity it is part of its living heritage that it is able to face problems objectively and coolly; it is the product of long centuries of philosophical speculation.

But he who is hated by the people, as the wolf by the dogs – is the free spirit, the enemy of fetters, the non-adorer, the dweller in the woods.

But it is the same with man as with the tree. The more he seeks to rise into the height and light, the more vigorously do his roots struggle earthward, downward, into the dark, the deep – into evil.

But the worst enemy you can meet will always be yourself; you lie in wait for yourself in caverns and forests. Lonely one, you are going the way to yourself! And your way goes past yourself, and past your seven devils! You will be a heretic to yourself and witch and soothsayer and fool and doubter and unholy one and villain. You must be ready to burn yourself in your own flame: how could you become new, if you had not first become ashes?

But thus do I counsel you, my friends: distrust all in whom the impulse to punish is powerful! Distrust all those who talk much of their justice!

But what if pleasure and pain should be so closely connected that he who wants the greatest possible amount of the one must also have the greatest possible amount of the other, that he who wants to experience the heavenly high jubilation, must also be ready to be sorrowful unto death?

By losing your goal, You have lost your way.

Call me whatever you like; I am who I must be.

Can an ass be tragic? – To perish under a burden that one can neither bear nor cast off? The case of the philosopher.

Character is determined more by the lack of certain experiences than by those one has had.

Christianity gave Eros poison to drink; he did not die of it, certainly, but degenerated to Vice.

Christianity is a metaphysics of the hangman.

Christianity is Platonism for the people.

Christianity, alcohol the two great means of corruption.

Companions the creator seeks, not corpses, not herds and believers. Fellow creators the creator seeks – those who write new values on new tablets. Companions the creator seeks, and fellow harvesters; for everything about him is ripe for the harvest.

Convictions are more dangerous enemies of truth than lies.

Convictions are prisons.

Creating-that is the great salvation from suffering, and life’s alleviation. But for the creator to appear, suffering itself is needed, and much transformation.

Cynicism is the only form in which base souls approach honesty.

Dancing in all its forms cannot be excluded from the curriculum of all noble education; dancing with the feet, with ideas, with words, and, need I add that one must also be able to dance with the pen?

Danger alone acquaints us with our own resources, our virtues, our armor and weapons, our spirit, and forces us to be strong.

Death is close enough at hand so we do not need to be afraid of life.

Deeds need time, even after they are done, in order to be seen or heard.

Democratic institutions form a system of quarantine for tyrannical desires.

Denn was ist Freiheit? Dasz man den Willen zur Selbstverantwortlichkeit hat.

Disobedience — that is the nobility of slaves.

Distrust all in whom the impulse to punish is powerful.

Do not allow yourselves to be deceived: Great Minds are Skeptical.

Do whatever you will, but first be such as are able to will.

Do you want to have an easy life? Then always stay with the herd and lose yourself in the herd.

Does not the discipline of the scientific spirit just commence when one no longer harbours any conviction?

Does wisdom perhaps appear on the earth as a raven which is inspired by the smell of carrion?

Egoism is the very essence of a noble soul.

Enjoy life. This is not a dress rehearsal.

Evaluation is creation: hear it, you creators! Evaluating is itself the most valuable treasure of all that we value. It is only through evaluation that value exists: and without evaluation the nut of existence would be hollow. Hear it, you creators!

Every day I count wasted in which there has been no dancing.

Every deep thinker is more afraid of being understood than of being misunderstood.

Every man is a creative cause of what happens, a primum mobile with an original movement.

Every profound spirit needs a mask.

Every profound spirit needs a mask: even more, around every profound spirit a mask is continually growing.

Every talent must unfold itself in fighting.

Everyone who has ever built anywhere a new heaven first found the power thereto in his own hell.

Everything about woman is a riddle, and everything about woman has a single solution: that is, pregnancy.

Everything good, fine, or great men do is first of all an argument against the skeptic inside them.

Everything in the world displeases me: but, above all, my displeasure in everything displeases me.

Everything matters. Nothing’s important.

Everything the State says is a lie, and everything it has it has stolen.

Every deep thinker is more afraid of being understood than of being misunderstood.

Existence really is an imperfect tense that never becomes a present.

Experience, as a desire for experience, does not come off. We must not study ourselves while having an experience.

Extreme positions are not succeeded by moderate ones, but by contrary extreme positions.

Faith is the path of least resistance.

Faith: not wanting to know what is true.

Faith: not wanting to know what the truth is.

Family love is messy, clinging, and of an annoying and repetitive pattern, like bad wallpaper.

Fanatics are picturesque, mankind would rather see gestures than listen to reasons.

Fear is the mother of morality.

Few are made for independence, it is the privilege of the strong.

Folk music is the original melody of man; it is the musical mirror of the world.

For a tree to become tall it must grow tough roots among the rocks.

For art to exist, for any sort of aesthetic activity or perception to exist, a certain physiological precondition is indispensable: intoxication.

For art to exist, for any sort of aesthetic activity to exist, a certain physiological precondition is indispensable: intoxication.

For it is only as an aesthetic phenomenon that existence and the world are eternally justified.

For the woman, the man is a means: the end is always the child.

For what purpose humanity is there should not even concern us: why you are here, that you should ask yourself: and if you have no ready answer, then set for yourself goals, high and noble goals, and perish in pursuit of them!

Forgetting our intentions is the most frequent of all acts of stupidity.

Free from what? As if that mattered to Zarathustra! But your eyes should tell me brightly: free for what?

Free will without fate is no more conceivable than spirit without matter, good without evil.

Freedom is the will to be responsible for ourselves. It is to preserve the distance which separates us from other men. To grow more indifferent to hardship, to severity, to privation, and even to life itself.

Freedom means that the manly instincts which delight in war and victory dominate over other instincts, for example, over those of ‘pleasure.’

From the Sun I learned this: when he goes down, overrich; he pours gold into the sea out of inexhaustible riches, so that even the poorest fisherman still rows with golden oars. For this I once saw and I did not tire of my tears as I watched it.

From which stars have we fallen to meet each other here?

Generally speaking, the greater a woman’s beauty, the greater her modesty.

Genteel women suppose that those things do not really exist about which it is impossible to talk in polite company.

Germany is a great nation only because its people have so much Polish blood in their veins.

Give me today, for once, the worst throw of your dice, destiny. Today I transmute everything into gold.

Glance into the world just as though time were gone: and everything crooked will become straight to you.

Go up close to your friend, but do not go over to him! We should also respect the enemy in our friend.

Great indebtedness does not make men grateful, but vengeful; and if a little charity is not forgotten, it turns into a gnawing worm.

Great intellects are skeptical.

Great men’s errors are to be venerated as more fruitful than little men’s truths.

Happiness is a fata morgana. the only way to not end up unhappy is to not long for happiness.

Happiness is the feeling that power increases — that resistance is being overcome.

Happiness: being able to forget or, to express in a more learned fashion.

He that humbleth himself wishes to be exalted.

He who cannot command himself should obey. And many can command themselves, but much is still lacking before they can obey themselves.

He who cannot give anything away cannot feel anything either.

He who cannot obey himself will be commanded. That is the nature of living creatures.

He who cannot put his thoughts on ice should not enter into the heat of dispute.

He who fights too long against dragons becomes a dragon himself; and if you gaze too long into the abyss, the abyss will gaze into you.

He who fights with monsters might take care lest he thereby become a monster. And if you gaze for long into an abyss, the abyss gazes also into you.

He who fights with monsters might take care lest he thereby become a monster. Is not life a hundred times too short for us to bore ourselves?

He who has a why to live can bear almost any how.

He who has a why to live for can bear almost any how.

He who has always spared himself much will in the end become sickly of so much consideration. Praised be what hardens!

He who humbleth himself wants to be exalted.

He who laughs best today, will also laughs last.

He who obeys does not listen to himself!

He who possesseth little is so much the less possessed. Blessed be moderate poverty!

He who would learn to fly one day must first learn to stand and walk and run and climb and dance; one cannot fly into flying.

Here the ways of men divide. If you wish to strive for peace of soul and happiness, then believe; if you wish to be a disciple of truth, then inquire.

Hope, in reality, is the worst of all evils because it prolongs the torments of man.

How is freedom measured, in individuals as in nations? By the resistance which must be overcome, by the effort it costs to remain on top.

How little it takes to make us happy! The sound of a bagpipe. Without music, life would be a mistake.

How much rationality and higher protection there is in such self-deception, and how much falseness I still require in order to allow myself again and again the luxury of my sincerity.

Human, all too human.

I am a forest, and a night of dark trees: but he who is not afraid of my darkness, will find banks full of roses under my cypresses.

I am a pure-blooded Polish nobleman without a single drop of bad blood – certainly not German blood.

I am alone again and I want to be so; alone with the pure sky and open sea.

I am not a human being, I am dynamite.

I am not upset that you lied to me, I am upset that from now on I cannot believe you.

I am one thing, my writings are another.

I am really very, very tired of everything – more than tired.

I and me are always too deeply in conversation.

I assess the power of a will by how much resistance, pain, torture it endures and knows how to turn to its advantage

I change too quickly: my today refutes my yesterday. When I ascend I often jump over steps, and no step forgives me that.

I consist of body and soul – in the worlds of a child. And why shouldn’t we speak like children? But the enlightened, the knowledgealbe would say: I am body through and through, nothing more; and the soul is just a word for something on the body.

I do not know what the spirit of a philosopher could more wish to be than a good dancer. For the dance is his ideal, also his fine art, finally also the only kind of piety he knows, his ‘divine service.’

I fear animals regard man as a creature of their own kind which has in a highly dangerous fashion lost its healthy animal reason – as the mad animal, as the laughing animal, as the weeping animal, as the unhappy animal.

I go in solitude, so as not to drink out of everybody’s cistern. When I am among the many I live as the many do, and I do not think I really think; after a time it always seems as if they want to banish myself from myself and rob me of my soul.

I hate who steals my solitude, without really offer me in exchange company.

I hate you most because you attract, but are not strong enough to pull me to you.

I have exposed myself and am not ashamed to stand there naked. Shame is what we call the monster that attached itself to men when they aspired beyond the animals.

I have forgotten my umbrella.

I have often laughed at the weaklings who thought themselves good because they had no claws.

I know my fate. One day my name will be associated with the memory of something tremendous – a crisis without equal on earth, the most profound collision of conscience, a decision that was conjured up against everything that had been believed, demanded, hallowed so far. I am no man, I am dynamite.

I know no other way to associate with great tasks than as play: as a sign of greatness, this is an essential presupposition.

I know of no better life purpose than to perish in attempting the great and the impossible.

I looked for great men, but all I found were the apes of their ideals.

I mistrust all systematizers and avoid them. The will to a system is a lack of integrity.

I need solitude, which is to say, recovery, return to my self, the breath of a free, light, playful air.

I notice that Autumn is more the season of the soul than of nature.

I obviously do everything to be “hard to understand” myself

I overcame myself, the sufferer; I carried my own ashes to the mountains; I invented a brighter flame for myself.

I still live, I still think: I still have to live, for I still have to think.

I teach you the Overman. Man is something which shall be surpassed.

I tell you: one must still have chaos within oneself, to give birth to a dancing star.

I understand by ‘freedom of spirit’ something quite definite – the unconditional will to say No, where it is dangerous to say No.

I was in darkness, but I took three steps and found myself in paradise. The first step was a good thought, the second, a good word; and the third, a good deed.

I wasn’t sure what day it was because life is meaningless. Turns out it’s Thursday. The thing about life still applies.

I will believe in the Redeemer when the Christians look a little more redeemed.

I’m not upset that you lied to me, I’m upset that from now on I can’t believe you.

Idleness is the parent of psychology.

If a man has a great deal to put in them, a day will have a hundred pockets.

If a man has character, he has also his typical experience, which always recurs.

If a man have a strong faith he can indulge in the luxury of skepticism.

If a man wishes to become a hero, then the serpent must first become a dragon: otherwise he lacks his proper enemy.

If a man wishes to rid himself of a feeling of unbearable oppression, he may have to take hashish.

If a woman possesses manly virtues one should run away from her; and if she does not possess them she runs away from herself.

If a woman seeks education it is probably because her sexual apparatus is malfunctioning.

If there is something to pardon in everything, there is also something to condemn.

If we have our own why of life, we shall get along with almost any how. Man does not strive for pleasure; only the Englishman does.

If we possess our why of life we can put up with almost any how.

If we train our conscience, it kisses us while it hurts

If you go to see the woman, do not forget the whip.

If you know the why, you can live any how.

If you look long enough into the void, the void begins to look back through you.

If you stare into the Abyss long enough the Abyss stares back at you.

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 Christianity, neither morality nor religion come into contact with reality at any point.

In every real man a child is hidden that wants to play.

In everything one thing is impossible: rationality.

In heaven, all the interesting people are missing.

In his lonely solitude, the solitary man feeds upon himself; in the thronging multitude, the many feed upon him. Now choose.

In individuals, insanity is rare; but in groups, parties, nations, and epochs, it is the rule.

In large states public education will always be mediocre, for the same reason that in large kitchens the cooking is usually bad.

In loneliness, the lonely one eats himself; in a crowd, the many eat him. Now choose.

In music the passions enjoy themselves.

In our interactions with people, a benevolent hypocrisy is frequently required – acting as though we do not see through the motives of their actions.

In praise there is more obtrusiveness than in blame.

In solitude there grows what anyone brings into it, the inner beast too. Therefore solitude is inadvisable to many.

In some remote corner of the universe, poured out and glittering among innumerable solar systems, there once was a star on which clever animals invented knowledge.

In the consciousness of the truth he has perceived, man now sees everywhere only the awfulness or the absurdity of existence and loathing seizes him.

In the course of history, men come to see that iron necessity is neither iron nor necessary.

In the end things must be as they are and have always been — the great things remain for the great, the abysses for the profound, the delicacies and thrills for the refined, and, to sum up shortly, everything rare for the rare.

In the last analysis, even the best man is evil: in the last analysis, even the best woman is bad.

In the mountains of truth, you never climb in vain.

In the mountains, the shortest way is from peak to peak: but for that, you need long legs. Aphorisms should be peaks: and those to whom they are spoken, big and tall.

In truth, there was only one Christian, and he died on the cross.

In war personal revenge maintains its silence.

Insanity in individuals is something rare – but in groups, parties, nations and epochs, it is the rule.

Invisible threads are the strongest ties.

In individuals, insanity is rare; but in groups, parties, nations, and epochs, it is the rule.

Is it better to out-monster the monster or to be quietly devoured?

Is it not better to fall into the hands of a murderer, than into the dreams of a lustful woman?

Is life not a thousand times too short for us to bore ourselves?

Is Wagner a human being at all? Is he not rather a disease? He contaminates everything he touches – he has made music sick.

It is always consoling to think of suicide: in that way one gets through many a bad night.

It is good to express a thing twice right at the outset and so to give it a right foot and also a left one. Truth can surely stand on one leg, but with two it will be able to walk and get around.

It is hard enough to remember my opinions, without also remembering my reasons for them!

It is impossible to suffer without making someone pay for it; every complaint already contains revenge.

It is my ambition to say in ten sentences what everyone else says in a whole book — what everyone else does not say in a whole book.

It is my ambition to say in ten sentences what others say in a whole book.

It is nobler to declare oneself wrong than to insist on being right –especially when one is right.

It is not the strength, but the duration, of great sentiments that makes great men.

It is not the struggle of opinions that has made history so violent, but rather the struggle of belief in opinions, that is, the struggle of convictions.

It is not when truth is dirty, but when it is shallow, that the lover of knowledge is reluctant to step into its waters.

It is some fundamental certainty which a noble soul has about itself, something which is not to be sought, is not to be found, and perhaps, also, is not to be lost. The noble soul has reverence for itself.

It is the most sensual men who need to flee women and torment their bodies.

It is very noble hypocrisy not to talk of one’s self.

It says nothing against the ripeness of a spirit that it has a few worms.

It seems to me that a human being with the very best of intentions can do immeasurable harm, if he is immodest enough to wish to profit those whose spirit and will are concealed from him.

I’m not upset that you lied to me, I’m upset that from now on I can’t believe you.

Joyous distrust is a sign of health. Everything absolute belongs to pathology.

Judgments, value judgments concerning life, for or against, can in the last resort never be true: they possess value only as symptoms, they come into consideration only as symptoms – in themselves such judgments are stupidities.

Knowledge kills action; action requires the veils of illusion.

Learn to laugh at yourselves as one must laugh!

Let us beware of saying that death is the opposite of life. The living being is only a species of the dead, and a very rare species.

Liberalism is the transformation of mankind into cattle.

Life is an instinct for growth, for survival, for the accumulation of forces, for power.

Life is continually shedding something that wants to die.

Life is that which must overcome itself again and again.

Life is the will to power; our natural desire to dominate and reshape the world to fit our own preferences and assert our personal strength to the fullest degree.

Linguistic danger to spiritual freedom.- Every word is a prejudice.

Live dangerously.

Live dangerously. Build your cities on the slopes of Vesuvius.

Loneliness is one thing, solitude another.

Madness is not a consequence of uncertainty but of certainty.

Madness is rare in individuals – but in groups, parties, nations, and ages it is the rule.

Madness is something rare in individuals — but in groups, parties, peoples, and ages, it is the rule.

Madness is the exception in individuals but the rule in groups.

Man alone suffers so excruciatingly in the world that he was compelled to invent laughter.

Man does not strive for happiness; only the Englishman does that.

Man is a rope stretched between the animal and the Superman-a rope over an abyss. A dangerous crossing, a dangerous wayfaring, a dangerous looking-back, a dangerous trembling and halting.

Man is a rope, tied between beast and Superman – a rope over an abyss.

Man Is Something That Must Be Overcome.

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.

Man is the cruelest animal. At tragedies, bullfights, and crucifixions he has so far felt best on earth; and when he invented hell for himself, behold, that was his very heaven.

Man is the only animal that must be encouraged to live.

Man would sooner have the Void for his purpose than be void of Purpose.

Man, a hybrid of plant and ghost.

Many a man fails as an original thinker simply because his memory it too good.

Many a peacock hides his peacock tail from all eyes – and calls it his pride.

Many are stubborn in pursuit of the path they have chosen. Few in pursuit of the goal.

Many people are obstinate about the path once it is taken, few people about the destination.

Many people wait throughout their whole lives for the chance to be good in their own fashion.

Man’s maturity: to have regained the seriousness that he had as a child at play.

Man’s task is simple. He should cease letting his existence be a thoughtless accident.

Man… cannot learn to forget, but hangs on the past: however far or fast he runs, that chain runs with him.

Meaning and morality of One’s life come from within oneself. Healthy, strong individuals seek self-expansion by experimenting and by living dangerously. Life consists of an infinite number of possibilities and the healthy person explores as many of them as possible. Religions that teach pity, self-contempt, humility, self-restraint, and guilt are incorrect. The good life is ever-changing, challenging, devoid of regret, intense, creative, and risky.

Memory says, ‘I did that.’ Pride replies, ‘I could not have done that.’ Eventually, memory yields.

Morality is the herd-instinct in the individual.

Most people are far too much occupied with themselves to be malicious.

My formula for greatness in a human being is amor fati: that one wants nothing to be different, not forward, not backward, not in all eternity. Not merely bear what is necessary, still less conceal it – all idealism is mendaciousness in the face of what is necessary – but love it.

My formula for happiness: a Yes, a No, a straight line, a goal.

My genius is in my nostrils.

My humanity is a constant self-overcoming.

My philosophy is inverted Platonism: the further a thing is from true being, the purer, the lovelier, the better it is. Living in illusion as a goal!

My solitude doesn’t depend on the presence or absence of people; on the contrary, I hate who steals my solitude without, in exchange, offering me true company.

Mystical explanations are thought to be deep; the truth is that they are not even shallow.

Necessity is not an established fact, but an interpretation.

Never trust a thought that didn’t come by walking.

Nihilism: any aim is lacking, any answer to the question why is lacking. What does nihilism mean? – that the supreme values devaluate themselves.

No artist tolerates reality.

No honey is sweeter than that of knowledge.

No journey is too great, when one finds what one seeks.

No one can construct for you the bridge upon which precisely you must cross the stream of life, no one but you yourself alone.

No one lies so boldly as the man who is indignant.

No power can maintain itself if only hypocrites represent it.

No price is too high to pay for the privilege of owning yourself.

No shepherd and one herd! Everybody wants the same, everybody is the same: whoever feels different goes voluntarily into a madhouse.

No shepherd, and one herd! Everyone wants the same, everyone is the same: whoever feels different goes willingly into the madhouse.

No victor believes in chance.

Nobody is more inferior than those who insist on being equal.

Not by wrath does one kill, but by laughter.

Not when truth is dirty, but when it is shallow, does the enlightened man dislike to wade into its waters.

Not with wrath do we kill, but with laughter. Come, let us kill the spirit of gravity!

Nothing has been purchased more dearly than the little bit of reason and sense of freedom which now constitutes our pride.

Nothing in life possesses value except the degree of power – assuming that life itself is the will to power.

Nothing is beautiful, only man: on this piece of naivete rests all aesthetics, it is the first truth of aesthetics. Let us immediately add its second: nothing is ugly but degenerate man – the domain of aesthetic judgment is therewith defined.

Nothing on earth consumes a man more quickly than the passion of resentment.

O my brothers, am I then cruel? But I say: that which is falling should also be pushed!

O Voltaire! O humanity! O idiocy! There is something ticklish in the truth, and in the SEARCH for the truth; and if man goes about it too humanely-il ne cherche le vrai que pour faire le bien-I wager he finds nothing!

Objectivity and justice have nothing to do with one another.

Of all evil I deem you capable: Therefore I want good from you. Verily, I have often laughed at the weaklings who thought themselves good because they had no claws.

Oh great star! What would your happiness be if you did not have us to shine for?

On the mountains of truth you can never climb in vain: either you will reach a point higher up today, or you will be training your powers so that you will be able to climb higher tomorrow.

Once the decision has been made, close your ear even to the best counter argument: sign of a strong character. Thus an occasional will to stupidity.

One can lie with the mouth, but with the accompanying grimace one nevertheless tells the truth.

One day soon you will meet a man, and he will rise like a phoenix from the ashes, and it is my greatest hope that he will not give you syphilis.

One does not only wish to be understood when one writes; one wishes just as surely not to be understood.

One has to pay dearly for immortality; one has to die several times while one is still alive.

One has to take a somewhat bold and dangerous line with this existence: especially as, whatever happens, we are bound to lose it.

One may sometimes tell a lie, but the grimace that accompanies it tells the truth.

One must be a sea, to receive a polluted stream without becoming impure.

One must give value to their existence by behaving as if ones very existence were a work of art.

One must have a good memory to be able to keep the promises one makes.

One must have all the virtues to sleep well. Shall I bear false witness? Shall I commit adultery? Shall I covet my neighbor’s maid? All that would go ill with good sleep.

One must need to be strong, otherwise one will never become strong.

One must not let oneself be misled: they say ‘Judge not!’ but they send to Hell everything that stands in their way.

One must pay dearly for immortality; one has to die several times while still alive.

One must shed the bad taste of wanting to agree with many. “Good” is no longer good when one’s neighbor mouths it. And how should there be a “common good”! The term contradicts itself: whatever can be common always has little value. In the end it must be as it is and always has been: great things remain for the great, abysses for the profound, nuances and shudders for the refined, and, in brief, all that is rare for the rare.

One often contradicts an opinion when what is uncongenial is really the tone in which it was conveyed.

One ought to hold on to one’s heart; for if one lets it go, one soon loses control of the head too.

One should die proudly when it is no longer possible to live proudly.

One should part from life as Odysseus parted from Nausicaa-blessing it rather than in love with it.

One will rarely err if extreme actions be ascribed to vanity, ordinary actions to habit, and mean actions to fear.

Only he who is man enough will release the woman in woman.

Only ideas won by walking have any value.

Only idiots fail to contradict themselves three times a day.

Only individuals have a sense of responsibility.

Only sick music makes money today.

Only strong personalities can endure history, the weak ones are extinguished by it.

Only those who keep changing remain akin to me.

Only where there are graves are there resurrections.

Original minds are not distinguished by being the first to see a new thing, but instead by seeing the old, familiar thing that is over-looked as something new.

Our destiny exercises its influence over us even when, as yet, we have not learned its nature: it is our future that lays down the law of our today.

Our greatest experiences are our quietest moments.

Our treasure lies in the beehive of our knowledge. We are perpetually on the way thither, being by nature winged insects and honey gatherers of the mind.

Our vanity is hardest to wound precisely when our pride has just been wounded.

Pardon me, my friends, I have ventured to paint my happiness on the wall.

People are always angry at anyone who chooses very individual standards for his life; because of the extraordinary treatment which that man grants to himself, they feel degraded, like ordinary beings.

People who have given us their complete confidence believe that they have a right to ours. The inference is false, a gift confers no rights.

People who live in an age of corruption are witty and slanderous; they know that there are other kinds of murder than by dagger or assault; they also know that whatever is well said is believed.

Perhaps I know best why it is man alone who laughs; he alone suffers so deeply that he had to invent laughter.

Perhaps no philosopher is more correct than the cynic. The happiness of the animal, that thorough cynic, is the living proof of cynicism.

Pity is extolled as the virtue of prostitutes.

Pity makes suffering contagious.

Plato was a bore.

Poets are shameless with their experiences: they exploit them.

Precisely the least, the softest, lightest, a lizard’s rustling, a breath, a flash, a moment – a little makes the way of the best happiness.

Probability but no truth, facility but no freedom – it is owing to these two fruits that the tree of knowledge cannot be confused with the tree of life.

Rather perish than hate and fear, and twice rather perish than make oneself hated and feared – this must some day become the highest maxim for every single commonwealth.

Rational thought is interpretation according to a scheme which we cannot escape.

Reality is captured in the categorical nets of Language only at the expense of fatal distortion.

Regarding life, the wisest men of all ages have judged alike: it is worthless.

Rejoicing in our joy, not suffering over our suffering, makes someone a friend.

Remorse. – Never yield to remorse, but at once tell yourself: remorse would simply mean adding to the first act of stupidity a second.

Shared joys make a friend, not shared sufferings.

Should not the giver be thankful that the receiver received? Is not giving a need? Is not receiving, mercy?

Show me that you are redeemed, and I will believe in your Redeemer.

Sing me a new song; the world is transfigured; all the Heavens are rejoicing.

Sleeping is no mean art: for its sake one must stay awake all day.

So long as men praise you, you can only be sure that you are not yet on your own true path but on someone else’s.

Society tames the wolf into a dog. And man is the most domesticated animal of all.

Solitude makes us tougher towards ourselves and tenderer towards others. In both ways it improves our character.

Some are made modest by great praise, others insolent.

Someone who does not write books, who thinks a lot, and who lives in unsatisfying society will usually be a good letter- writer.

Sometimes it is harder to accede to a thing than it is to see its truth.

Sometimes people don’t want to hear the truth because they don’t want their illusions destroyed.

Spirit is the life that itself cuts into life: with its own torment, it increases its own knowledge. Did you already know that?

Strength is the morality of the man who stands out from the rest, and it is mine.

Strong hope is a much greater stimulant to life than any single realized joy could be.

Stupid as a man, say the women: cowardly as a woman, say the men. Stupidity in a woman is unwomanly.

Stupidity in a woman is unfeminine.

Success has always been a great liar.

Surrounded by the flames of jealousy, the jealous one winds up, like the scorpion, turning the poisoned sting against himself.

Suspicious.- To admit a belief merely because it is a custom – but that means to be dishonest, cowardly, lazy! – And so could dishonesty, cowardice and laziness be the preconditions for morality?

Talking much about oneself can also be a means to conceal oneself.

That every will must consider every other will its equal — would be a principle hostile to life, an agent of the dissolution and destruction of man, an attempt to assassinate the future of man, a sign of weariness, a secret path to nothingness.

That for which we find words is something already dead in our hearts.

That which does not kill me, makes me stronger.

That which does not kill us makes us stronger.

That which needs to be proved cannot be worth much.

The ‘kingdom of Heaven’ is a condition of the heart – not something that comes ‘upon the earth’ or ‘after death.’

The advantage of a bad memory is that one enjoys several times the same good things for the first time.

The advocates of a criminal are seldom artists enough to turn the beautiful terribleness of the deed to the advantage of the doer.

The aphorism in which I am the first master among Germans, are the forms of ‘eternity’; my ambition is to say in ten sentences what everyone else says in a book – what everyone else does not say in a book.

The author must keep his mouth shut when his work starts to speak.

The bad gains respect through imitation, the good loses it especially in art.

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 best author will be the one who is ashamed to become a writer.

The best friend will probably acquire the best wife, because a good marriage is founded on the talent for friendship.

The best weapon against an enemy is another enemy.

The bite of conscience, like the bite of a dog into a stone, is a stupidity.

The child is innocence and forgetting, a new beginning, a game, a wheel rolling on its own, a prime movement, a sacred Yes.

The Christian faith from the beginning, is sacrifice the sacrifice of all freedom, all pride, all self-confidence of spirit, it is at the same time subjection, self-derision, and self-mutilation.

The Christian resolution to find the world ugly and bad has made the world ugly and bad.

The craving for equality can express itself either as a desire to pull everyone down to our own level (by belittling them, excluding them, tripping them up) or as a desire to raise ourselves up along with everyone else (by acknowledging them, helping them, and rejoicing in their success).

The deeper minds of all ages have had pity for animals.

The definition of morality: Morality is the idiosyncrasy of decadents having the hidden desire to revenge themselves upon life – and being successful.

The desire to annoy no one, to harm no one, can equally well be the sign of a just as of an anxious disposition.

The devotion of the greatest is to encounter risk and danger, and play dice for death.

The discipline of suffering, of great suffering – do you not know that it is this discipline alone that has produced all the elevations of humanity so far?

The doer alone learneth.

The earth has a skin and that skin has diseases; one of its diseases is called man.

The earth has become small, and on it hops the last man, who makes everything small. His race can no more be exterminated than the flea can be. The last man lives the longest.

The earth is like the breasts of a woman: useful as well as pleasing.

The end of a melody is not its goal: but nonetheless, had the melody not reached its end it would not have reached its goal either. A parable.

The essence of all beautiful art, all great art, is gratitude.

The essential thing ‘in heaven and earth’ is that there should be a long obedience in the same direction; there thereby results, and has always resulted in the long run, something which has made life worth living.

The existence of forgetting has never been proved: We only know that some things don’t come to mind when we want them.

The final reward of the dead – to die no more.

The first opinion that occurs to us when we are suddenly asked about a matter is usually not our own, but only the customary one, appropriate to our caste, position, or parentage; our own opinions seldom swim near the surface.

The flame is not so bright to itself as to those on whom it shines: so too the wise man.

The free man is a warrior.

The future influences the present just as much as the past.

The Germans are like women, you can scarcely ever fathom their depths – they haven’t any.

The good four. Honest with ourselves and with whatever is friend to us; courageous toward the enemy; generous toward the vanquished; polite-always that is how the four cardinal virtues want us.

The grand style arises when beauty wins a victory over the monstrous.

The great end of art is to strike the imagination with the power of a soul that refuses to admit defeat even in the midst of a collapsing world.

The great epochs of our life are the occasions when we gain the courage to rebaptize our evil qualities as our best qualities.

The Great Man… is colder, harder, less hesitating, and without fear of ‘opinion’; he lacks the virtues that accompany respect and ‘respectability,’ and altogether everything that is the ‘virtue of the herd.’ If he cannot lead, he goes alone… He knows he is incommunicable: he finds it tasteless to be familiar… When not speaking to himself, he wears a mask. There is a solitude within him that is inaccessible to praise or blame.

The greater the obstacle the more glory in overcoming it. – What does not destroy makes me stronger.

The Greeks, with their truly healthy culture, have once and for all justified philosophy simply by having engaged in it, and having engaged in it more fully than any other people.

The growth of wisdom may be gauged exactly by the diminution of ill-temper.

The higher man is distinguished from the lower by his fearlessness and his readiness to challenge misfortune.

The higher we soar the smaller we appear to those who cannot fly.

The higher we soar, the smaller we appear to those who cannot fly.

The higher you ascend, the smaller you appear to the eye of envy. But most of all they hate those who fly.

The idealist is incorrigible: if he is thrown out of his heaven he makes an ideal of his hell.

The individual has always had to struggle to keep from being overwhelmed by the tribe. If you try it, you will be lonely often, and sometimes frightened. But no price is too high to pay for the privilege of owning yourself.

The irrationality of a thing is no argument against its existence, rather a condition of it.

The knight of knowledge must be able not only to love his enemies, but also to hate his friends.

The last Christian died on a cross.

The lie is a condition of life.

The life of the enemy. Whoever lives for the sake of combating an enemy has an interest in the enemy’s staying alive.

The moral earth, too, is round! The moral earth, too, has its antipodes! The antipodes, too, have their right to exist! There is still another world to be discovered – and more than one! Set sail, you philosophers!

The more abstract the truth you wish to teach, the more you need to seduce the senses to it.

The more one seeks to rise into height and light, the more vigorously do ones roots struggle earthward, downward, into the dark, the deep — into evil.

The most common lie is that which one lies to himself; lying to others is relatively an exception.

The most fundamental form of human stupidity is forgetting what we were trying to do in the first place.

The most intelligent men, like the strongest, find their happiness where others would find only disaster: in the labyrinth, in being hard with themselves and with others, in effort; their delight is self-mastery; in them asceticism becomes second nature, a necessity, as instinct.

The most perfidious way of harming a cause consists of defending it deliberately with faulty arguments.

The most spiritual men, as the strongest, find their happiness where others would find their destruction: in the labyrinth, in hardness against themselves and others, in experiments. Their joy is self-conquest: asceticism becomes in them nature, need, and instinct. Difficult tasks are a privilege to them; to play with burdens that crush others, a recreation. Knowledge-a form of asceticism. They are the most venerable kind of man: that does not preclude their being the most cheerful and the kindliest.

The overman…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 poison by which the weaker nature is destroyed is strengthening to the strong individual and he does not call it poison.

The press, the machine, the railway, the telegraph are premises whose thousand-year conclusion no one has yet dared to draw.

The pure soul is a pure lie.

The purpose of criminal law is to punish the enemies of those in power.

The real question is – How much truth can I stand?

The real world is much smaller than the imaginary

The reasons and purposes for habits are always lies that are added only after some people begin to attack these habits and to ask for reasons and purposes. At this point the conservatives of all ages are thoroughly dishonest: they add lies.

The secret for harvesting from existence the greatest fruitfulness and the greatest enjoyment is: to live dangerously!

The secret of reaping the greatest fruitfulness and the greatest enjoyment from life is to live dangerously.

The sick are the greatest danger for the healthy; it is not from the strongest that harm comes to the strong, but from the weakest.

The snake that cannot shed its skin perishes.

The snake which cannot cast its skin has to die. As well the minds which are prevented from changing their opinions; they cease to be mind.

The spirit now wills his own will, and he who had been lost to the world now conquers the world.

The spiritualization of sensuality is called love: it is a great triumph over Christianity.

The state lies in all languages of good and evil; and whatever it says, it lies-and whatever it has, it has stolen.

The strength of a person’s spirit would then be measured by how much ‘truth’ he could tolerate, or more precisely, to what extent he needs to have it diluted, disguised, sweetened, muted, falsified.

The strength required for the vision of the most powerful reality is not only compatible with the most powerful strength for action, for monstrous action, for crime – it even presupposes it.

The superman is the meaning of the earth. Let your will say: the superman is to be the meaning of the earth! I beseech you, my brothers, be true to the earth, and do not believe those who speak to you of otherworldly hopes! They are poisoners, whether they know it or not.

The surest way to corrupt a youth is to instruct him to hold in higher esteem those who think alike than those who think differently.

The text has disappeared under the interpretation.

The thirst for equality can express itself either as a desire to draw everyone down to one’s level, or to raise oneself and everyone else up.

The thought of suicide is a great consolation: by means of it one gets through many a dark night.

The tree that would grow to heaven must send its roots to hell.

The true man wants two things: danger and play. For that reason he wants woman, as the most dangerous plaything.

The vain.- We are like shop windows in which we are continually arranging, concealing or illuminating the supposed qualities other ascribe to us – in order to deceive ourselves.

The value of a thing sometimes lies not in what one attains with it, but in what one pays for it – what it costs us.

The vanity of others runs counter to our taste only when it runs counter to our vanity.

The very word Christianity is a misunderstanding — in truth, there was only one Christian, and he died on the cross.

The visionary lies to himself, the liar only to others.

The voice of beauty speaks softly; it creeps only into the most fully awakened souls

The weak and misbegotten shall perish: first principle of our brotherly love. And they shall be given every assistance.

The will to overcome an emotion, is ultimately only the will of another, or of several other, emotions.

The wisest man would be the one richest in contradictions, who has, as it were, antennae for all types of men – as well as his great moments of grand harmony – a rare accident even in us! A sort of planetary motion –.

The woman and the genius do not work. Up to now, woman has been mankind’s supreme luxury. In all those moments when we do our best, we do not work. Work is merely a means to these moments.

The word ‘Christianity’ is already a misunderstanding – in reality there has been only one Christian, and he died on the Cross.

The world is a work of art that gives birth to itself.

The world is beautiful but has a disease called man.

The world itself is the will to power – and nothing else! And you yourself are the will to power – and nothing else!

The worst readers are those who behave like plundering troops: they take away a few things they can use, dirty and confound the remainder, and revile the whole.

There are horrible people who, instead of solving a problem, tangle it up and make it harder to solve for anyone who wants to deal with it. Whoever does not know how to hit the nail on the head should be asked not to hit it at all.

There are more idols than realities in the world: that is my evil eye for this world, which is also my evil ear…

There are no beautiful surfaces without a terrible depth.

There are no eternal facts, as there are no absolute truths.

There are no facts, only interpretations.

There are no moral phenomena at all, but only a moral interpretation of phenomena.

There are people who want to make men’s lives more difficult for no other reason than the chance it provides them afterwards to offer their prescription for alleviating life; their Christianity, for instance.

There are slavish souls who carry their appreciation for favors done them so far that they strangle themselves with the rope of gratitude.

There are two different types of people in the world, those who want to know, and those who want to believe.

There are various eyes. Even the Sphinx has eyes: and as a result there are various truths, and as a result there is no truth.

There is a false saying: How can someone who can’t save himself save others? Supposing I have the key to your chains, why should your lock and my lock be the same?

There is a rollicking kindness that looks like malice.

There is an innocence in admiration: it occurs in one who has not yet realized that they might one day be admired.

There is an innocence in admiration; it is found in those to whom it has never yet occurred that they, too, might be admired some day.

There is an old illusion. It is called good and evil.

There is more wisdom in your body than in your best wisdom. And who then knows why your body needs precisely your best wisdom?

There is no such thing as moral phenomena, but only a moral interpretation of phenomena

There is not enough religion in the world even to destroy religion.

There is not enough religion in the world to destroy the world’s religions.

There is nothing we like to communicate to others as much as the seal of secrecy together with what lies under it.

There will always be rocks in the road ahead of us. They will be stumbling blocks or stepping stones; it all depends on how you use them.

There’s no defense against stupidity.

These small things – nutrition, place, climate, recreation, the whole casuistry of selfishness – are inconceivably more important than everything one has taken to be important so far.

They muddy the water, to make it seem deep.

This crown to crown the laughing man, this rose-wreath crown: I myself have set this crown upon my head, I myself have pronounced my laughter holy.

This is one of the stout-hearted old warriors: he is angry with civilization because he supposes that its aim is to make all good things – honors, treasures, beautiful women – accessible even to cowards.

This is the hardest of all: to close the open hand out of love, and keep modest as a giver.

This verse gets me through each day, what doesn’t kill us makes us stronger! I am not afraid of anything because the lord is my shepherd!

This world is the will to power and nothing besides!

Those who cannot understand how to put their thoughts on ice should not enter into the heat of debate.

Those who were seen dancing were thought to be insane by those who could not hear the music.

Those you cannot teach to fly, teach to fall faster.

Thoughts are the shadows of our feelings – always darker, emptier and simpler.

Three metamorphoses of the spirit I relate to you: how the spirit becomes a camel; and the camel, a lion; and the lion, finally, a child.

Throw roses into the abyss and say: ‘Here is my thanks to the monster who didn’t succeed in swallowing me alive’.

Thus I spoke, more and more softly; for I was afraid of my own thoughts and the thoughts behind my thoughts.

Time, space, and causality are only metaphors of knowledge, with which we explain things to ourselves.

To be ashamed of one’s immorality: that is a step on the staircase at whose end one is also ashamed of one’s morality.

To do great things is difficult, but to command great things is more difficult.

To escape boredom, man works either beyond what his usual needs require, or else he invents play, that is, work that is designed to quiet no need other than that for working in general.

To find everything profound – that is an inconvenient trait. It makes one strain one’s eyes all the time, and in the end one finds more than one might have wished.

To forget one’s purpose is the commonest form of stupidity.

To live is to suffer, to survive is to find some meaning in the suffering.

To predict the behavior of ordinary people in advance, you only have to assume that they will always try to escape a disagreeable situation with the smallest possible expenditure of intelligence.

To the mediocre, mediocrity is a form of happiness.

To those human beings who are of any concern to me, I wish suffering, desolation, sickness, ill treatment, indignities, profound self-contempt, the torture of self-mistrust, and the wretchedness of the vanquished.

To those human beings who are of any concern to me, I wish suffering, desolation, sickness, ill-treatment, indignities—I wish that they should not remain unfamiliar with profound self-contempt, the torture of self-mistrust, the wretchedness of the vanquished: I have no pity for them because I wish them the only thing that can prove today whether one is worth anything or not—that one endures.

To use the same words is not a sufficient guarantee of understanding; one must use the same words for the same genus of inward experience; ultimately one must have one’s experiences in common.

Today as always, men fall into two groups: slaves and free men. Whoever does not have two-thirds of his day for himself, is a slave, whatever he may be: a statesman, a businessman, an official, or a scholar.

Truth is the kind of error without which a certain species of life could not live. The value for life is ultimately decisive.

Truth tends to reveal its highest wisdom in the guise of simplicity.

Truths are illusions which we have forgotten are illusions.

Two great European narcotics, alcohol and Christianity.

Ultimately, it is the desire, not the desired, that we love.

Under peaceful conditions a warlike man sets upon himself.

Underneath this reality in which we live and have our being, another and altogether different reality lies concealed.

Undeserved praise causes more pangs of conscience later than undeserved blame, but probably only for this reason, that our power of judgment are more completely exposed by being over praised than by being unjustly underestimated.

Virtue has come to consist of doing something in less time than someone else.

War has always been the grand sagacity of every spirit which has grown too inward and too profound; its curative power lies even in the wounds one receives.

Was that life? Well then, once more!

We are so fond of being out among nature, because it has no opinions about us.

We belong to a time in which culture is in danger of being destroyed by the means of culture.

We do not belong to those who only get their thought from books, or at the prompting of books, – it is our custom to think in the open air, walking, leaping, climbing, or dancing on lonesome mountains by preference, or close to the sea, where even the paths become thoughtful.

We do not hate as long as we still attach a lesser value, but only when we attach an equal or a greater value.

We do not place especial value on the possession of a virtue until we notice its total absence in our opponent.

We forget our guilt when we have confessed it to another, but the other does not usually forget it.

We have art in order not to die of the truth.

We have art so that we shall not die of reality.

We hear only those questions for which we are in a position to find answers.

We labor at our daily work more ardently and thoughtlessly than is necessary to sustain our life because it is even more necessary not to have leisure to stop and think. Haste is universal because everyone is in flight from himself.

We love life, not because we are used to living but because we are used to loving.

We often contradict an opinion for no other reason than that we do not like the tone in which it is expressed.

We often refuse to accept an idea merely because the tone of voice in which it has been expressed is unsympathetic to us.

We ought to face our destiny with courage.

We should consider every day lost on which we have not danced at least once. And we should call every truth false which was not accompanied by at least one laugh.

What can everyone do? Praise and blame. This is human virtue, this is human madness.

What destroys a man more quickly than to work, think and feel without inner necessity, without any deep personal desire, without pleasure – as a mere automaton of duty?

What do you regard as most humane? To spare someone shame.

What does not kill me makes me stronger.

What does your conscience say? — ‘You should become the person you are’.

What I understand by philosopher: a terrible explosive in the presence of which everything is in danger.

What is evil?-Whatever springs from weakness.

What is good? All that heightens the feeling of power, the will to power, power itself. What is bad? All that is born of weakness. What is happiness? The feeling that power is growing, that resistance is overcome.

What is great in man is that he is a bridge and not a goal.

What is great in man is that he is a bridge and not an end.

What is more harmful than any vice? Practical sympathy and pity for all the failures and all the weak: Christianity.

What is not intelligible to me is not necessarily unintelligent.

What is the seal of liberation? Not to be ashamed in front of oneself.

What is the seal of liberation? — No longer being ashamed in front of oneself.

What is the truth, but a lie agreed upon.

What labels me, negates me.

What makes us heroic? – Confronting simultaneously our supreme suffering and our supreme hope.

What really raises one’s indignation against suffering is not suffering intrinsically, but the senselessness of suffering.

What separates two people most profoundly is a different sense and degree of cleanliness.

What then in the last resort are the truths of mankind? They are the irrefutable errors of mankind.

What was a lie in the father becomes a conviction in the son.

What we do in dreams we also do when we are awake: we invent and fabricate the person with whom we associate-and immediately forget we have done so.

What? You seek something? You wish to multiply yourself tenfold, a hundredfold? You seek followers? Seek zeros!

Whatever has its price has little value.

When a hundred men stand together, each of them loses his mind and gets another one.

When a woman has scholarly inclinations there is usually something wrong with her sexuality.

When art dresses in worn-out material it is most easily recognized as art.

When marrying, ask yourself this question: Do you believe that you will be able to converse well with this person into your old age? Everything else in marriage is transitory.

When one does away with oneself one does the most estimable thing possible: one thereby almost deserves to live.

When one has a great deal to put into it a day has a hundred pockets.

When one has finished building one’s house, one suddenly realizes that in the process one has learned something that one really needed to know in the worst way – before one began.

When one has not had a good father, one must create one.

When we are tired, we are attacked by ideas we conquered long ago.

When you gaze long into an abyss the abyss also gazes into you.

When you look into an abyss, the abyss also looks into you.

Whence come the highest mountains? I once asked. Then I learned that they came out of the sea. The evidence is written in their rocks and in the walls of their peaks. It is out of the deepest depth that the highest must come to its height.

Whenever I climb I am followed by a dog called ‘Ego’.

Where is the lightning to lick you with its tongue? Where is the madness with which you should be cleansed? Behold, I show you the Superman. He is this lightning, he is this madness.

While every noble morality develops from a triumphant affirmation of itself, slave morality from the outset says No to what is outside, what is different, what is not itself; and this No is its creative deed.

Who is better, they who promote truth over happiness, or happiness over truth?

Whoever despises himself nonetheless respects himself as one who despises.

Whoever does not have a good father should procure one.

Whoever does not have two-thirds of his day for himself, is a slave, whatever he may be: a statesman, a businessman, an official, or a scholar.

Whoever feels predestined to see and not to believe will find all believers too noisy and pushy: he guards against them.

Whoever fights monsters should see to it that in the process he does not become a monster. And if you gaze long enough into an abyss, the abyss will gaze back into you.

Whoever gives advice to the sick gains a sense of superiority over them, no matter whether his advice is accepted or rejected. That is why sick people who are sensitive and proud hate their advisors even more than their illnesses.

Whoever has not two-thirds of his time to himself, is a slave.

Whoever has provoked men to rage against him has always gained a party in his favor, too.

Whoever has witnessed another’s ideal becomes his inexorable judge and as it were his evil conscience.

Whoever knows he is deep tries to be clear, but whoever wants to seem deep to the crowd tries to be obscure. For the crowd supposes that anything it cannot see to the bottom must be deep: it is so timid and goes so unwillingly into the water.

Whoever writes in blood and aphorisms wants not to be learned but to be learned by heart.

Winter, a bad guest, sitteth with me at home; blue are my hands with his friendly handshaking.

Wit is the epitaph of an emotion.

Without cruelty there is no festival: thus the longest and most ancient part of human history teaches and in punishment there is so much that is festive!

Without forgetting it is quite impossible to live at all.

Without music, life would be a mistake.

Without passions you have no experience whatsoever.

Woman is essentially unpeaceful, like the cat, however well she may have trained herself to present an appearance of peace.

Women are considered deep – why? Because one can never discover any bottom to them. Women are not even shallow.

Women want to serve, and this is where their happiness lies: but the free spirit does not want to be served, and this is where his happiness lies.

Words are but symbols for the relations of things to one another and to us; nowhere do they touch upon absolute truth.

Yes, life is a woman!

You gave him an opportunity of showing greatness of character and he did not seize it. He will never forgive you for that.

You have your way. I have my way. As for the right way, the correct way, and the only way, it does not exist.

You know a moment is important when it is making your mind go numb with beauty.

You lack the courage to be consumed in flames and to become ashes: so you will never become new, and never young again!

You look up when you wish to be exalted. And I look down because I am exalted.

You may have enemies whom you hate, but not enemies whom you despise. You must be proud of your enemy: then the success of your enemy shall be your success too.

You must be ready to burn yourself in your own flame. How could you rise anew if you have not first become ashes?

You must have chaos within you to give birth to a dancing star.

You say ‘I’ and you are proud of this word. But greater than this- although you will not believe in it – is your body and its great intelligence, which does not say ‘I’ but performs ‘I’.

You say it is the good cause that hallows even war? I say unto you: it is the good war that hallows any cause.

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.

You who hate the Jews so, why did you adopt their religion?

Your educators can only be your liberators.

Your only problem, perhaps, is that you scream without letting yourself cry.

Your soul will be dead even before your body: fear nothing further.

You’re going to women? Don’t forget your whip!

‘Faith’ means not wanting to know what is true.

Quotes About God by Friedrich Nietzsche

A subject for a great poet would be God’s boredom after the seventh day of creation.

Against boredom even gods struggle in vain.

Dead are all gods: now we want the overman to live.

Every church is a stone on the grave of a god-man: it does not want him to rise up again under any circumstances.

God is a gross answer, an indelicacy against us thinkers- at bottom merely a gross prohibition for us: you shall not think!

God is a thought who makes crooked all that is straight.

God is dead! God remains dead! And we have killed him. How shall we comfort ourselves, the murderers of all murderers?

God is dead, but considering the state the species man is in, there will perhaps be caves, for ages yet, in which his shadow will be shown.

He who delights in solitude is either a wild beast or a god.

How little it takes to make us happy! The sound of a bagpipe. Without music life would be a mistake. The German even imagines God as singing songs.

I cannot believe in a God who wants to be praised all the time.

I have learned to walk: since then I have run. I have learned to fly: since then I do not have to be pushed in order to move. Now I am nimble, now I fly, now I see myself under myself, now a god dances within me.

I would believe only in a God that knows how to dance.

If Islam despises Christianity, it has a thousandfold right to do so: Islam at least assumes that it is dealing with men.

If the all powerful god controls satan he is an accomplice, and if he doesn’t, he is not an all powerful god.

If there were gods, how could I endure not to be a god? Therefore there are no gods.

In this moment, I am euphoric. Not because of any phony god’s blessing. But because, I am enlightened by my intelligence.

Is man merely a mistake of God’s? Or God merely a mistake of man?

Is man one of God’s blunders? Or is God one of man’s blunders?

Man makes god in his own image.

Once spirit was God, then it became man, and now it is even becoming mob.

The abdomen is the reason why man does not readily take himself to be a god.

The belly is the reason why man does not mistake himself for a god.

The god on the cross is a curse on life, a signpost to seek redemption from life; Dionysus cut to pieces is a promise of life: it will be eternally reborn and return again from destruction.

The only excuse for God is that he doesn’t exist.

There cannot be a God because if there were one, I could not believe that I was not He.

There is in general good reason to suppose that in several respects the gods could all benefit from instruction by us human beings. We humans are – more humane.

To live alone one must be a beast or a god, says Aristotle. Leaving out the third case: one must be both – a philosopher.

We are, all of us, growing volcanoes that approach the hour of their eruption, but how near or distant that is, nobody knows- not even God.

Without music, life would be a mistake. The German even imagines God as singing songs.

Woman was God’s second mistake.

Your god is dead and only the ignorant weep. And if you claim there is a hell, then we shall meet there!

Quotes About Love by Friedrich Nietzsche

A good writer possesses not only his own spirit but also the spirit of his friends.

A pair of powerful spectacles has sometimes sufficed to cure a person in love.

A politician divides mankind into two classes: tools and enemies.

A thought, even a possibility, can shatter and transform us.

And if your friend does evil to you, say to him, ”I forgive you for what you did to me, but how can I forgive you for what you did to yourself?”

And those who were seen dancing were thought to be insane by those who could not hear the music.

And we should consider every day lost on which we have not danced at least once. And we should call every truth false which was not accompanied by at least one laugh.

Anyone who has declared someone else to be an idiot, a bad apple, is annoyed when it turns out in the end that he isn’t.

Be careful when you cast out your demons that you don’t throw away the best of yourself.

Be careful when you fight the monsters, lest you become one.

Become who you are. Make what only you can make.

Belief means not wanting to know what is true.

But by my love and hope I beseech you: do not throw away the hero in your soul! Hold holy your highest hope!

Did you ever say yes to a pleasure? oh my friends, then you also said yes to all pain. all things are linked, entwined, in love with one another.

Even the most beautiful scenery is no longer assured of our love after we have lived in it for three months, and some distant coast attracts our avarice: possessions are generally diminished by possession.

Everything matters. Nothing’s important.

Existence really is an imperfect tense that never becomes a present.

He who cannot obey himself will be commanded. That is the nature of living creatures.

He who fights with monsters might take care lest he thereby become a monster. And if you gaze for long into an abyss, the abyss gazes also into you.

How little it takes to make us happy! The sound of a bagpipe. Without music, life would be a mistake. The German even imagines God as singing songs.

I am a forest, and a night of dark trees: but he who is not afraid of my darkness, will find banks full of roses under my cypresses.

I assess the power of a will by how much resistance, pain, torture it endures and knows how to turn to its advantage

I fear you close by; I love you far away.

I love him whose soul is deep even in the wounding.

I love the great despisers because they are the great adorers.

I love those who do not know how to live for today.

I was in darkness, but I took three steps and found myself in paradise. The first step was a good thought, the second, a good word; and the third, a good deed.

In individuals, insanity is rare; but in groups, parties, nations and epochs, it is the rule.

In loneliness, the lonely one eats himself; in a crowd, the many eat him. Now choose.

In revenge and in love, woman is more barbarous than man.

In the mountains of truth, you never climb in vain.

In true love it is the soul that envelops the body.

Invisible threads are the strongest ties.

It is my ambition to say in ten sentences; what others say in a whole book.

It is nobler to declare oneself wrong than to insist on being right –especially when one is right.

It is not a lack of love, but a lack of friendship that makes unhappy marriages.

I’m not upset that you lied to me, I’m upset that from now on I can’t believe you.

Loneliness is one thing, solitude another.

Love and hatred are not blind, but are blinded by the fire they bear within themselves.

Love brings to light a lover’s noble and hidden qualities-his rare and exceptional traits: it is thus liable to be deceptive of his normal qualities.

Love is a state in which a man sees things most decidedly as they are not.

Love is blind. Friendship closes its eyes.

Love is more afraid of change than destruction.

Love is not consolation. It is light.

Love matches, so called, have illusion for their father and need for their mother.

Love your enemies because they bring out the best in you.

Love, too, has to be learned.

Many a man fails as an original thinker simply because his memory it too good.

Marriage was contrived for ordinary people, for people who are capable of neither great love nor great friendship, which is to say, for most people – but also for those exceptionally rare ones who are capable of love as well as of friendship.

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.

Of all that is written, I love only what a man has written with his own blood.

One can promise actions, but not feelings, for the latter are involuntary. He who promises to love forever or hate forever or be forever faithful to someone is promising something that is not in his power.

One does not only wish to be understood when one writes; one wishes just as surely not to be understood.

One loves ultimately one’s desires, not the thing desired.

One may sometimes tell a lie, but the grimace that accompanies it tells the truth.

One must learn to love.— This is what happens to us in music: the first one has to learn to hear a figure and melody at all, to detect and distinguish it, to isolate it and delimit it as a separate life; then it requires some exertion and good will to tolerate it in spite of its strangeness, to be patient with its appearance and expression, and kindhearted about its oddity:—finally there comes a moment when we are used to it when we wait for it when we sense that we should miss it if it were missing: and now it continues to compel and enchant us relentlessly until we have become its humble and enraptured lovers who desire nothing better from the world than it and only it.

One ought to hold on to one’s heart; for if one lets it go, one soon loses control of the head too.

Only he who is man enough will release the woman in woman.

Out of damp and gloomy days, out of solitude, out of loveless words directed at us, conclusions grow up in us like fungus: one morning they are there, we know not how, and they gaze upon us, morose and gray. Woe to the thinker who is not the gardener but only the soil of the plants that grow in him.

Sensuality often hastens the “Growth of Love” so much that the roots remain weak and are easily torn up.

Sometimes it is harder to accede to a thing than it is to see its truth.

Sometimes people don’t want to hear the truth because they don’t want their illusions destroyed.

That which is done out of love is always beyond good and evil.

That which needs to be proved cannot be worth much.

The advantage of a bad memory is that one enjoys several times the same good things for the first time.

The demand to be loved is the greatest of all arrogant presumptions.

The earth has a skin and that skin has diseases; one of its diseases is called man.

The Great Man… is colder, harder, less hesitating, and without fear of ‘opinion’; he lacks the virtues that accompany respect and ‘respectability,’ and altogether everything that is the ‘virtue of the herd.’ If he cannot lead, he goes alone… He knows he is incommunicable: he finds it tasteless to be familiar… When not speaking to himself, he wears a mask. There is a solitude within him that is inaccessible to praise or blame.

The greatest cure for love is still that time honoured medicine – love returned.

The man of knowledge must be able not only to love his enemies but also to hate his friends.

The most spiritual men, as the strongest, find their happiness where others would find their destruction: in the labyrinth, in hardness against themselves and others, in experiments. Their joy is self-conquest: asceticism becomes in them nature, need, and instinct. Difficult tasks are a privilege to them; to play with burdens that crush others, a recreation. Knowledge-a form of asceticism. They are the most venerable kind of man: that does not preclude their being the most cheerful and the kindliest.

The secret of reaping the greatest fruitfulness and the greatest enjoyment from life is to live dangerously.

The tree that would grow to heaven must send its roots to hell.

There are no facts, only interpretations.

There are two different types of people in the world, those who want to know, and those who want to believe.

There is always some madness in love. But there is also always some reason in madness.

There is not enough love and goodness in the world to permit giving any of it away to imaginary beings.

There will always be rocks in the road ahead of us. They will be stumbling blocks or stepping stones; it all depends on how you use them.

There’s no defense against stupidity.

They call you heartless; but you have a heart and I love you for being ashamed to show it.

This is what is hardest: to close the open hand because one loves.

Thoughts are the shadows of our feelings — always darker, emptier and simpler.

To do great things is difficult, but to command great things is more difficult.

To find everything profound – that is an inconvenient trait. It makes one strain one’s eyes all the time, and in the end one finds more than one might have wished.

Today as always, men fall into two groups: slaves and free men. Whoever does not have two-thirds of his day for himself, is a slave, whatever he may be: a statesman, a businessman, an official, or a scholar.

Today I love myself as I love my god: who could charge me with a sin today? I know only sins against my god; but who knows my god?

True, we love life, not because we are used to living, but because we are used to loving. There is always some madness in love, but there is also always some reason in madness.

Truths are illusions which we have forgotten are illusions.

Ultimately, it is the desire, not the desired, that we love.

What do I care about the purring of one who cannot love, like the cat?

What does your conscience say? — ‘You should become the person you are’.

What else is love but understanding and rejoicing in the fact that another person lives acts and experiences otherwise than we do?

What is the truth, but a lie agreed upon.

Whatever is done for love always occurs beyond good and evil.

Without passions you have no experience whatsoever.

You have your way. I have my way. As for the right way, the correct way, and the only way, it does not exist.

You know a moment is important when it is making your mind go numb with beauty.

Close beside my knowledge lies my black ignorance.

He who climbs upon the highest mountains laughs at all tragedies, real or imaginary.

I would only believe in a god who could dance.

One must still have chaos in oneself to be able to give birth to a dancing star.

One repays a teacher badly if one always remains nothing but a pupil.

Silence is worse; all truths that are kept silent become poisonous.

The lonely one offers his hand too quickly to whomever he encounters.

There is more wisdom in your body than in your deepest philosophy.

Untroubled, scornful, outrageous – that is how wisdom wants us to be: she is a woman and never loves anyone but a warrior.

You must be ready to burn yourself in your own flame; how could you rise anew if you have not first become ashes?

Friedrich Nietzsche Quotes From Wikiquote

• I am utterly amazed, utterly enchanted! I have a precursor, and what a precursor! I hardly knew Spinoza: that I should have turned to him just now, was inspired by “instinct.” Not only is his overtendency like mine—namely to make all knowledge the most powerful affect — but in five main points of his doctrine I recognize myself; this most unusual and loneliest thinker is closest to me precisely in these matters: he denies the freedom of the will, teleology, the moral world-order, the unegoistic, and evil. Even though the divergencies are admittedly tremendous, they are due more to the difference in time, culture, and science. In summa: my lonesomeness, which, as on very high mountains, often made it hard for me to breathe and make my blood rush out, is now at least a twosomeness. Strange! Incidentally, I am not at all as well as I had hoped. Exceptional weather here too! Eternal change of atmospheric conditions! — that will yet drive me out of Europe! I must have clear skies for months, else I get nowhere. Already six severe attacks of two or three days each. With affectionate love, Your friend.
  • Postcard to Franz Overbeck, Sils-Maria (30 July 1881) as translated by Walter Kaufmann in The Portable Nietzsche (1954)

• Here the ways of men part: if you wish to strive for peace of soul and pleasure, then believe; if you wish to be a devotee of truth, then inquire.
  • Letter to Elisabeth Nietzsche, Bonn, 1865-06-11^{[specific citation needed]}. Quoted in Walter Kaufmann, The Faith of a Heretic (opening epigram).

• There are no facts, only interpretations.
  • Notebooks (Summer 1886 – Fall 1887)
  • Variant translation: Against that positivism which stops before phenomena, saying “there are only facts,” I should say: no, it is precisely facts that do not exist, only interpretations…
    • As translated in The Portable Nietzsche (1954) by Walter Kaufmann, p. 458

• In Germany there is much complaining about my “eccentricities.” But since it is not known where my center is, it won’t be easy to find out where or when I have thus far been “eccentric.” That I was a philologist, for example, meant that I was outside my center (which fortunately does not mean that I was a poor philologist). Likewise, I now regard my having been a Wagnerian as eccentric. It was a highly dangerous experiment; now that I know it did not ruin me, I also know what significance it had for me — it was the most severe test of my character.
  • Letter to Carl Fuchs (14 December 1887)

• I now myself live, in every detail, striving for wisdom, while I formerly merely worshipped and idolized the wise.
  • Letter to Mathilde Mayer, July 16, 1878, cited in Karl Jaspers, Nietzsche (Baltimore: 1997), p. 46

• So far no one had had enough courage and intelligence to reveal me to my dear Germans. My problems are new, my psychological horizon frighteningly comprehensive, my language bold and clear; there may well be no books written in German which are richer in ideas and more independent than mine.
  • Letter to Carl Fuchs (14 December 1887)

• I’ve seen proof, black on white, that Herr Dr. Förster has not yet severed his connection with the anti-Semitic movement. … Since then I’ve had difficulty coming up with any of the tenderness and protectiveness I’ve so long felt toward you. The separation between us is thereby decided in really the most absurd way. Have you grasped nothing of the reason why I am in the world? … Now it has gone so far that I have to defend myself hand and foot against people who confuse me with these anti-Semitic canaille; after my own sister, my former sister, and after Widemann more recently have given the impetus to this most dire of all confusions. After I read the name Zarathustra in the anti-Semitic Correspondence my forbearance came to an end. I am now in a position of emergency defense against your spouse’s Party. These accursed anti-Semite deformities shall not sully my ideal!!
  • Draft for a letter^{[dead link]} to his sister Elisabeth Förster-Nietzsche (December 1887).^{[specific citation needed]}

• You have committed one of the greatest stupidities — for yourself and for me! Your association with an anti-Semitic chief expresses a foreignness to my whole way of life which fills me again and again with ire or melancholy. … It is a matter of honor with me to be absolutely clean and unequivocal in relation to anti-Semitism, namely, opposed to it, as I am in my writings. I have recently been persecuted with letters and Anti-Semitic Correspondence Sheets. My disgust with this party (which would like the benefit of my name only too well!) is as pronounced as possible, but the relation to Förster, as well as the aftereffects of my former publisher, the anti-Semitic Schmeitzner, always brings the adherents of this disagreeable party back to the idea that I must belong to them after all. … It arouses mistrust against my character, as if publicly I condemned something which I have favored secretly — and that I am unable to do anything against it, that the name of Zarathustra is used in every Anti-Semitic Correspondence Sheet, has almost made me sick several times.
  • Objecting to his sister Elisabeth, about her marriage to the anti-semite Bernhard Förster, in a Christmas letter (1887) in Friedrich Nietzsche’s Collected Letters, Vol. V, #479

• Everything the State says is a lie, and everything it has it has stolen.
  • Thus Spoke Zarathustra: A Book for All and None, Part I, Chapter 11, “Vom neuen Götzen” (“The New Idol”). Published in four parts between 1883 and 1891 Another translation: “But the state lieth in all languages of good and evil; and whatever it saith it lieth; and whatever it hath it hath stolen.”

• State is the name of the coldest of all cold monsters. Coldly it lies; and this lie slips from its mouth: ‘I, the state, am the people’.
  • Thus Spoke Zarathustra; A Book for All and None, trans. Kaufmann, New York: NY, Modern Library (1995) p. 48, 1.11: “On the New Idol”

• I have somehow something like “influence” … In the Anti-Semitic Correspondence … my name is mentioned in almost every issue. Zarathustra … has charmed the anti-Semites; there is a special anti-Semitic interpretation of it that made me laugh very much.
  • As quoted in “Idea of Anti-Semitism Filled Nietzsche With Ire and Melancholy” in The New York Times (19 December 1987)

• Mathematics would certainly have not come into existence if one had known from the beginning that there was in nature no exactly straight line, no actual circle, no absolute magnitude.
  • As quoted in The Puzzle Instinct : The Meaning of Puzzles in Human Life‎ (2004) by Marcel Danesi, p. 71 from Human All-Too-Human

• Wer mit Ungeheuern kämpft, mag zusehn, dass er nicht dabei zum Ungeheuer wird. Und wenn du lange in einen Abgrund blickst, blickt der Abgrund auch in dich hinein.
  • He who fights with monsters should look to it that he himself does not become a monster. And if you gaze long into an abyss, the abyss also gazes into you.
  • Beyond Good and Evil, Aphorism 146

• Ist das Leben nicht hundert Mal zu kurz, sich in ihm— zu langweilen?
  • Is not life a hundred times too short for us— to bore ourselves?
  • Beyond Good and Evil, Chapter VII, 227

• Für jede hohe Welt muß man geboren sein; deutlicher gesagt, man muß für sie gezüchtet sein: ein Recht auf Philosophie — das Wort im grossen Sinne genommen — hat man nur Dank seiner Abkunft, die Vorfahren, das »Geblüt« entscheidet auch hier. Viele Geschlechter müssen der Entstehung des Philospohen vorgearbeitet haben; jede seiner Tungenden muß einzeln erworben, gepflegt, fortgeerbt, einverleibt worden sein…
• One must be born to any superior world — to make it plainer, one must be bred for it. One has a right to philosophy (taking the word in its greatest sense) only by virtue of one’s breeding; one’s ancestors, one’s “blood,” decides this, too. Many generations must have worked on the origin of a philosopher; each one of his virtues must have been separately earned, cared for, passed on, and embodied.
  • Beyond Good and Evil, translated by Marianne Cowan [Henry Regnery Company, 1955, p. 139]; Jenseits von Gut und Böse [Philipp Reclam, Stuttgart, 1988, p. 130]

• wir vermeinen, daß Härte, Gewaltsamkeit, Sklaverie, Gefahr auf der Gasse und im Herzen, Verborgenheit, Stoicismus, Versucherkunst und Teufelei jeder Art, daß alles Böse, Furchtbare, Tyrannische, Raubthier- und Schlangenhafte am Menschen so gut zur Erhöhung der Species »Mensch« dient, als sein Gegensatz…
• We imagine that hardness, violence, slavery, peril in the street and in the heart, concealment, Stoicism, temptation, and deviltry of every sort, everything evil, frightful, tyrannical, raptor- and snake-like in man, serves as well for the advancement of the species “man” as their opposite.
  • Beyond Good and Evil, translated by Marianne Cowan [Henry Regnery Company, 1955, p. 50]; Jenseits von Gut und Böse [Philipp Reclam, Stuttgart, 1988, p. 130]

• Man verdirbt einen Jüngling am sichersten, wenn man ihn anleitet, den Gleichdenkenden höher zu achten, als den Andersdenkenden.
  • The surest way to corrupt a youth is to instruct him to hold in higher esteem those who think alike than those who think differently.
  • The Dawn, Sec. 297

• Although the most acute judges of the witches and even the witches themselves, were convinced of the guilt of witchery, the guilt nevertheless was non-existent. It is thus with all guilt.
  • As translated in The Portable Nietzsche (1954) by Walter Kaufmann, p. 96

• Freier Wille ohne Fatum ist ebenso wenig denkbar, wie Geist ohne Reelles, Gutes ohne Böses.
  • Free will without fate is no more conceivable than spirit without matter, good without evil.
    • “Fatum und Geschichte,” April 1862

• Sobald es aber möglich wäre, durch einen starken Willen die ganze Weltvergangenheit umzustürzen, sofort träten wir in die Reihe der unabhängigen Götter, und Weltgeschichte hieße dann für uns nichts als ein träumerisches Selbstentrücktsein; der Vorhang fällt, und der Mensch findet sich wieder, wie ein Kind mit Welten spielend, wie ein Kind, das beim Morgenglühen aufwacht und sich lachend die furchtbaren Träume von der Stirn streicht.
  • As soon as it becomes possible, by dint of a strong will, to overthrow the entire past of the world, then, in a single moment, we will join the ranks of independent gods. World history for us will then be nothing but a dreamlike otherworldly being. The curtain falls, and man once more finds himself a child playing with whole worlds—a child, awoken by the first glow of morning, who laughingly wipes the frightful dreams from his brow.
    • “Fatum und Geschichte,” April 1862

• The modern scientific counterpart to belief in God is the belief in the universe as an organism: this disgusts me. This is to make what is quite rare and extremely derivative, the organic, which we perceive only on the surface of the earth, into something essential, universal, and eternal! This is still an anthropomorphizing of nature!
  • KS 9,11 [201]

• Is Wagner a human being at all? Is he not rather a disease? He contaminates everything he touches – he has made music sick.
  • Der Fall Wagner (1888)

• May I really say it! All truths are bloody truths to me—take a look at my previous writings.
  • Notebooks (Summer 1880) 4[271]

The Birth of Tragedy (1872)

• Nochmals gesagt, heute ist es mir ein unmögliches Buch, – ich heisse es schlecht geschrieben, schwerfällig, peinlich, bilderwüthig und bilderwirrig, gefühlsam, hier und da verzuckert bis zum Femininischen, ungleich im Tempo, ohne Willen zur logischen Sauberkeit, sehr überzeugt und deshalb des Beweisens sich überhebend, misstrauisch selbst gegen die Schicklichkeit des Beweisens, als Buch für Eingeweihte, als “Musik” für Solche, die auf Musik getauft, die auf gemeinsame und seltene Kunst-Erfahrungen hin von Anfang der Dinge an verbunden sind, als Erkennungszeichen für Blutsverwandte in artibus, – ein hochmüthiges und schwärmerisches Buch, das sich gegen das profanum vulgus der “Gebildeten” von vornherein noch mehr als gegen das “Volk” abschliesst, welches aber, wie seine Wirkung bewies und beweist, sich gut genug auch darauf verstehen muss, sich seine Mitschwärmer zu suchen und sie auf neue Schleichwege und Tanzplätze zu locken.
  • To say it once again: today I find it an impossible book — badly written, clumsy and embarrassing, its images frenzied and confused, sentimental, in some places saccharine-sweet to the point of effeminacy, uneven in pace, lacking in any desire for logical purity, so sure of its convictions that it is above any need for proof, and even suspicious of the propriety of proof, a book for initiates, ‘music’ for those who have been baptized in the name of music and who are related from the first by their common and rare experiences of art, a shibboleth for first cousins in artibus [in the arts] an arrogant and fanatical book that wished from the start to exclude the profanum vulgus [the profane mass] of the ‘educated’ even more than the ‘people’; but a book which, as its impact has shown and continues to show, has a strange knack of seeking out its fellow-revellers and enticing them on to new secret paths and dancing-places.
  • “Attempt at a Self-Criticism”, p. 5

• Oh wie ferne war mir damals gerade dieser ganze Resignationismus!
  • How far I was then from all that resignationism!
  • “Attempt at a Self-criticism”, p. 10

• Diesen Ernsthaften diene zur Belehrung, dass ich von der Kunst als der höchsten Aufgabe und der eigentlich metaphysischen Thätigkeit dieses Lebens im Sinne des Mannes überzeugt bin, dem ich hier, als meinem erhabenen Vorkämpfer auf dieser Bahn, diese Schrift gewidmet haben will.
  • Art is the supreme task and the truly metaphysical activity in this life…
  • “Preface to Richard Wagner”, p. 13

• Wie nun der Philosoph zur Wirklichkeit des Daseins, so verhält sich der künstlerisch erregbare Mensch zur Wirklichkeit des Traumes; er sieht genau und gern zu: denn aus diesen Bildern deutet er sich das Leben, an diesen Vorgängen übt er sich für das Leben. Nicht etwa nur die angenehmen und freundlichen Bilder sind es, die er mit jener Allverständigkeit an sich erfährt: auch das Ernste, Trübe, Traurige, Finstere, die plötzlichen Hemmungen, die Neckereien des Zufalls, die bänglichen Erwartungen, kurz die ganze “göttliche Komödie” des Lebens, mit dem Inferno, zieht an ihm vorbei, nicht nur wie ein Schattenspiel – denn er lebt und leidet mit in diesen Scenen – und doch auch nicht ohne jene flüchtige Empfindung des Scheins; und vielleicht erinnert sich Mancher, gleich mir, in den Gefährlichkeiten und Schrecken des Traumes sich mitunter ermuthigend und mit Erfolg zugerufen zu haben: “Es ist ein Traum! Ich will ihn weiter träumen!” Wie man mir auch von Personen erzählt hat, die die Causalität eines und desselben Traumes über drei und mehr aufeinanderfolgende Nächte hin fortzusetzen im Stande waren: Thatsachen, welche deutlich Zeugniss dafür abgeben, dass unser innerstes Wesen, der gemeinsame Untergrund von uns allen, mit tiefer Lust und freudiger Nothwendigkeit den Traum an sich erfährt.
  • 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. It is not only pleasant and agreeable images that he experiences with such universal understanding: the serious, the gloomy, the sad and the profound, the sudden restraints, the mockeries of chance, fearful expectations, in short the whole ‘divine comedy’ of life, the Inferno included, passes before him, not only as a shadow-play — for he too lives and suffers through these scenes — and yet also not without that fleeting sense of illusion; and perhaps many, like myself, can remember calling out to themselves in encouragement, amid the perils and terrors of the dream, and with success: ‘It is a dream! I want to dream on!’ Just as I have often been told of people who have been able to continue one and the same dream over three and more successive nights: facts which clearly show that our innermost being, our common foundation, experiences dreams with profound pleasure and joyful necessity.
  • p. 15

• In diesen Sanct-Johann- und Sanct-Veittänzern erkennen wir die bacchischen Chöre der Griechen wieder, mit ihrer Vorgeschichte in Kleinasien, bis hin zu Babylon und den orgiastischen Sakäen. Es giebt Menschen, die, aus Mangel an Erfahrung oder aus Stumpfsinn, sich von solchen Erscheinungen wie von “Volkskrankheiten”, spöttisch oder bedauernd im Gefühl der eigenen Gesundheit abwenden: die Armen ahnen freilich nicht, wie leichenfarbig und gespenstisch eben diese ihre “Gesundheit” sich ausnimmt, wenn an ihnen das glühende Leben dionysischer Schwärmer vorüberbraust.
  • In these dancers of Saint John and Saint Vitus we can recognize the Bacchic choruses of the Greeks, with their prehistory in Asia Minor, as far back as Babylon and the orgiastic Sacaea. Some people, either through a lack of experience or through obtuseness, turn away with pity or contempt from phenomena such as these as from ‘folk diseases’, bolstered by a sense of their own sanity; these poor creatures have no idea how blighted and ghostly this ‘sanity’ of theirs sounds when the glowing life of Dionysiac revellers thunders past them.
  • p. 17

• Es geht die alte Sage, dass König Midas lange Zeit nach dem weisen Silen, dem Begleiter des Dionysus, im Walde gejagt habe, ohne ihn zu fangen. Als er ihm endlich in die Hände gefallen ist, fragt der König, was für den Menschen das Allerbeste und Allervorzüglichste sei. Starr und unbeweglich schweigt der Dämon; bis er, durch den König gezwungen, endlich unter gellem Lachen in diese Worte ausbricht: `Elendes Eintagsgeschlecht, des Zufalls Kinder und der Mühsal, was zwingst du mich dir zu sagen, was nicht zu hören für dich das Erspriesslichste ist? Das Allerbeste ist für dich gänzlich unerreichbar: nicht geboren zu sein, nicht zu sein, nichts zu sein. Das Zweitbeste aber ist für dich – bald zu sterben.
  • According to the old story, King Midas had long hunted wise Silenus, Dionysus’ companion, without catching him. When Silenus had finally fallen into his clutches, the king asked him what was the best and most desirable thing of all for mankind. The daemon stood still, stiff and motionless, until at last, forced by the king, he gave a shrill laugh and spoke these words: ‘Miserable, ephemeral race, children of hazard and hardship, why do you force me to say what it would be much more fruitful for you not to hear? The best of all things is something entirely outside your grasp: not to be born, not to be, to be nothing. But the second-best thing for you — is to die soon.’
  • p. 22

• Der philosophische Mensch hat sogar das Vorgefühl, dass auch unter dieser Wirklichkeit, in der wir leben und sind, eine zweite ganz andre verborgen liege…
  • Underneath this reality in which we live and have our being, another and altogether different reality lies concealed…
  • p. 23, William Haussmann translation

• Mit dem Tode der griechischen Tragödie dagegen entstand eine ungeheure, überall tief empfundene Leere; wie einmal griechische Schiffer zu Zeiten des Tiberius an einem einsamen Eiland den erschütternden Schrei hörten “der grosse Pan ist todt”: so klang es jetzt wie ein schmerzlicher Klageton durch die hellenische Welt: “die Tragödie ist todt! Die Poesie selbst ist mit ihr verloren gegangen! Fort, fort mit euch verkümmerten, abgemagerten Epigonen! Fort in den Hades, damit ihr euch dort an den Brosamen der vormaligen Meister einmal satt essen könnt!”
  • Greek tragedy met her death in a different way from all the older sister arts: she died tragically by her own hand, after irresolvable conflicts, while the others died happy and peaceful at an advanced age. If a painless death, leaving behind beautiful progeny, is the sign of a happy natural state, then the endings of the other arts show us the example of just such a happy natural state: they sink slowly, and with their dying eyes they behold their fairer offspring, who lift up their heads in bold impatience. The death of Greek tragedy, on the other hand, left a great void whose effects were felt profoundly, far and wide; as once Greek sailors in Tiberius’ time heard the distressing cry ‘the god Pan is dead’ issuing from a lonely island, now, throughout the Hellenic world, this cry resounded like an agonized lament: ‘Tragedy is dead! Poetry itself died with it! Away, away with you, puny, stunted imitators! Away with you to Hades, and eat your fill of the old masters’ crumbs!’
  • p. 54

• Bei diesem Zusammenhange ist die leidenschaftliche Zuneigung begreiflich, welche die Dichter der neueren Komödie zu Euripides empfanden; so dass der Wunsch des Philemon nicht weiter befremdet, der sich sogleich aufhängen lassen mochte, nur um den Euripides in der Unterwelt aufsuchen zu können: wenn er nur überhaupt überzeugt sein dürfte, dass der Verstorbene auch jetzt noch bei Verstande sei.
  • This context enables us to understand the passionate affection in which the poets of the New Comedy held Euripides; so that we are no longer startled by the desire of Philemon, who wished to be hanged at once so that he might meet Euripides in the underworld, so long as he could be sure that the deceased was still in full possession of his senses.
  • p. 55

• …aesthetischen Sokratismus…dessen oberstes Gesetz ungefähr so lautet: “alles muss verständig sein, um schön zu sein”; als Parallelsatz zu dem sokratischen “nur der Wissende ist tugendhaft.”
  • …aesthetic Socratism, the chief law of which is, more or less: “to be beautiful everything must first be intelligible” — a parallel to the Socratic dictum: “only the one who knows is virtuous.”
  • p. 62

• Nun aber schien Sokrates die tragische Kunst nicht einmal “die Wahrheit zu sagen”: abgesehen davon, dass sie sich an den wendet, der “nicht viel Verstand besitzt”, also nicht an den Philosophen: ein zweifacher Grund, von ihr fern zu bleiben. Wie Plato, rechnete er sie zu den schmeichlerischen Künsten, die nur das Angenehme, nicht das Nützliche darstellen und verlangte deshalb bei seinen Jüngern Enthaltsamkeit und strenge Absonderung von solchen unphilosophischen Reizungen; mit solchem Erfolge, dass der jugendliche Tragödiendichter Plato zu allererst seine Dichtungen verbrannte, um Schüler des Sokrates werden zu können.
  • But for Socrates, tragedy did not even seem to “tell what’s true”, quite apart from the fact that it addresses “those without much wit”, not the philosopher: another reason for giving it a wide berth. Like Plato, he numbered it among the flattering arts which represent only the agreeable, not the useful, and therefore required that his disciples abstain most rigidly from such unphilosophical stimuli — with such success that the young tragedian, Plato, burnt his writings in order to become a pupil of Socrates.
  • p. 68

• Darum hat Lessing, der ehrlichste theoretische Mensch, es auszusprechen gewagt, dass ihm mehr am Suchen der Wahrheit als an ihr selbst gelegen sei…
  • Lessing, the most honest of theoretical men, dared to say that he took greater delight in the quest for truth than in the truth itself.
  • p. 73

• …der kann sich nicht entbrechen, in Sokrates den einen Wendepunkt und Wirbel der sogenannten Weltgeschichte zu sehen. Denn dächte man sich einmal diese ganze unbezifferbare Summe von Kraft, die für jene Welttendenz verbraucht worden ist, nicht im Dienste des Erkennens, sondern auf die praktischen d.h. egoistischen Ziele der Individuen und Völker verwendet, so wäre wahrscheinlich in allgemeinen Vernichtungskämpfen und fortdauernden Völkerwanderungen die instinctive Lust zum Leben so abgeschwächt, dass, bei der Gewohnheit des Selbstmordes, der Einzelne vielleicht den letzten Rest von Pflichtgefühl empfinden müsste, wenn er, wie der Bewohner der Fidschiinseln, als Sohn seine Eltern, als Freund seinen Freund erdrosselt: ein praktischer Pessimismus, der selbst eine grausenhafte Ethik des Völkermordes aus Mitleid erzeugen könnte – der übrigens überall in der Welt vorhanden ist und vorhanden war, wo nicht die Kunst in irgend welchen Formen, besonders als Religion und Wissenschaft, zum Heilmittel und zur Abwehr jenes Pesthauchs erschienen ist.
  • We cannot help but see Socrates as the turning-point, the vortex of world history. For if we imagine that the whole incalculable store of energy used in that global tendency had been used not in the service of knowledge but in ways applied to the practical — selfish — goals of individuals and nations, universal wars of destruction and constant migrations of peoples would have enfeebled man’s instinctive zest for life to the point where, suicide having become universal, the individual would perhaps feel a vestigial duty as a son to strangle his parents, or as a friend his friend, as the Fiji islanders do: a practical pessimism that could even produce a terrible ethic of genocide through pity, and which is, and always has been, present everywhere in the world where art has not in some form, particularly as religion and science, appeared as a remedy and means of prevention for this breath of pestilence.
  • p. 73

• Aber wie verändert sich plötzlich jene eben so düster geschilderte Wildniss unserer ermüdeten Cultur, wenn sie der dionysische Zauber berührt! Ein Sturmwind packt alles Abgelebte, Morsche, Zerbrochne, Verkümmerte, hüllt es wirbelnd in eine rothe Staubwolke und trägt es wie ein Geier in die Lüfte. Verwirrt suchen unsere Blicke nach dem Entschwundenen: denn was sie sehen, ist wie aus einer Versenkung an’s goldne Licht gestiegen, so voll und grün, so üppig lebendig, so sehnsuchtsvoll unermesslich. Die Tragödie sitzt inmitten dieses Ueberflusses an Leben, Leid und Lust, in erhabener Entzückung, sie horcht einem fernen schwermüthigen Gesange – er erzählt von den Müttern des Seins, deren Namen lauten: Wahn, Wille, Wehe. – Ja, meine Freunde, glaubt mit mir an das dionysische Leben und an die Wiedergeburt der Tragödie. Die Zeit des sokratischen Menschen ist vorüber: kränzt euch mit Epheu, nehmt den Thyrsusstab zur Hand und wundert euch nicht, wenn Tiger und Panther sich schmeichelnd zu euren Knien niederlegen. Jetzt wagt es nur, tragische Menschen zu sein: denn ihr sollt erlöst werden. Ihr sollt den dionysischen Festzug von Indien nach Griechenland geleiten! Rüstet euch zu hartem Streite, aber glaubt an die Wunder eures Gottes!
  • But what changes come upon the weary desert of our culture, so darkly described, when it is touched by the magic of Dionysus! A storm seizes everything decrepit, rotten, broken, stunted; shrouds it in a whirling red cloud of dust and carries it into the air like a vulture. In vain confusion we seek for all that has vanished; for what we see has risen as if from beneath he earth into the gold light, so full and green, so luxuriantly alive, immeasurable and filled with yearning. Tragedy sits in sublime rapture amidst this abundance of life, suffering and delight, listening to a far-off, melancholy song which tells of the Mothers of Being, whose names are Delusion, Will, Woe. –
    Yes, my friends, join me in my faith in this Dionysiac life and the rebirth of tragedy. The age of Socratic man is past: crown yourselves with ivy, grasp the thyrsus and do not be amazed if tigers and panthers lie down fawning at your feet. Now dare to be tragic men, for you will be redeemed. You shall join the Dionysiac procession from India to Greece! Gird yourselves for a hard battle, but have faith in the miracles of your god!
  • p. 98

Anti-Education (1872)

• Diese doppelte Selbständigkeit preist man mit Hochgefühl als ›akademische Freiheit‹: … nur daß hinter beiden Gruppen in bescheidener Entfernung der Staat mit einer gewissen gespannten Aufsehermiene steht, um von Zeit zu Zeit daran zu erinnern, daß er Zweck, Ziel und Inbegriff der sonderbaren Sprech- und Hörprozedur sei.
  • This independence is glorified as “academic freedom,” … except that in the background, a discreet distance away, stands the state watching with a certain supervisory look on its face, making sure to remind everybody from time to time that it is the aim, the purpose, the essence of this whole strange process.

• So ist langsam an Stelle einer tiefsinnigen Ausdeutung der ewig gleichen Probleme ein historisches, ja selbst ein philologisches Abwägen und Fragen getreten: was der und jener Philosoph gedacht habe oder nicht, oder ob die und jene Schrift ihm mit Recht zuzuschreiben sei oder gar ob diese oder jene Lesart den Vorzug verdiene. Zu einem derartigen neutralen Sichbefassen mit Philosophie werden jetzt unsere Studenten in den philosophischen Seminarien unserer Universitäten angereizt: weshalb ich mich längst gewöhnt habe, eine solche Wissenschaft als Abzweigung der Philologie zu betrachten und ihre Vertreter danach abzuschätzen, ob sie gute Philologen sind oder nicht. Demnach ist nun freilich die Philosophie selbst von der Universität verbannt: womit unsre erste Frage nach dem Bildungswert der Universitäten beantwortet ist.
  • Philological considerations have slowly but surely taken the place of profound explorations of eternal problems. The question becomes: What did this or that philosopher think or not think? And is this or that text rightly ascribed to him or not? And even: Is this variant of a classical text preferable to that other? Students in university seminars today are encouraged to occupy themselves with such emasculated inquiries. As a result, of course, philosophy itself is banished from the university altogether.

• Not one of these nobly equipped young men has escaped the restless, exhausting, confusing, debilitating crisis of education. … He feels that he cannot guide himself, cannot help himself—and then he dives hopelessly into the world of everyday life and daily routine, he is immersed in the most trivial activity possible, and his limbs grow weak and weary.

On Truth and Lie in an Extra-Moral Sense (1873)

Part 1.

• Once upon a time, in some out of the way corner of that universe which is dispersed into numberless twinkling solar systems, there was a star upon which clever beasts invented knowing. That was the most arrogant and mendacious minute of “world history,” but nevertheless, it was only a minute. After nature had drawn a few breaths, the star cooled and congealed, and the clever beasts had to die. One might invent such a fable, and yet he still would not have adequately illustrated how miserable, how shadowy and transient, how aimless and arbitrary the human intellect looks within nature. There were eternities during which it did not exist. And when it is all over with the human intellect, nothing will have happened.
  • Variant translation: In some remote corner of the universe, poured out and glittering in innumerable solar systems, there once was a star on which clever animals invented knowledge. That was the highest and most mendacious minute of “world history” — yet only a minute. After nature had drawn a few breaths the star grew cold, and the clever animals had to die.
    One might invent such a fable and still not have illustrated sufficiently how wretched, how shadowy and flighty, how aimless and arbitrary, the human intellect appears in nature. There have been eternities when it did not exist; and when it is done for again, nothing will have happened.
• The pride connected with knowing and sensing lies like a blinding fog over the eyes and senses of men, thus deceiving them concerning the value of existence. For this pride contains within itself the most flattering estimation of the value of knowing. Deception is the most general effect of such pride, but even its most particular effects contain within themselves something of the same deceitful character.
• Deception, flattering, lying, deluding, talking behind the back, putting up a false front, living in borrowed splendor, wearing a mask, hiding behind convention, playing a role for others and for oneself — in short, a continuous fluttering around the solitary flame of vanity — is so much the rule and the law among men that there is almost nothing which is less comprehensible than how an honest and pure drive for truth could have arisen among them. They are deeply immersed in illusions and in dream images; their eyes merely glide over the surface of things and see “forms.”
  • Variant translation: The constant fluttering around the single flame of vanity is so much the rule and the law that almost nothing is more incomprehensible than how an honest and pure urge for truth could make its appearance among men.

• What does man actually know about himself? Is he, indeed, ever able to perceive himself completely, as if laid out in a lighted display case? Does nature not conceal most things from him — even concerning his own body — in order to confine and lock him within a proud, deceptive consciousness, aloof from the coils of the bowels, the rapid flow of the blood stream, and the intricate quivering of the fibers! She threw away the key.

• The liar is a person who uses the valid designations, the words, in order to make something which is unreal appear to be real. He says, for example, “I am rich,” when the proper designation for his condition would be “poor.” He misuses fixed conventions by means of arbitrary substitutions or even reversals of names. If he does this in a selfish and moreover harmful manner, society will cease to trust him and will thereby exclude him. What men avoid by excluding the liar is not so much being defrauded as it is being harmed by means of fraud. Thus, even at this stage, what they hate is basically not deception itself, but rather the unpleasant, hated consequences of certain sorts of deception. It is in a similarly restricted sense that man now wants nothing but truth: he desires the pleasant, life-preserving consequences of truth. He is indifferent toward pure knowledge which has no consequences; toward those truths which are possibly harmful and destructive he is even hostilely inclined.

• Are designations congruent with things? Is language the adequate expression of all realities?
  It is only by means of forgetfulness that man can ever reach the point of fancying himself to possess a “truth” of the grade just indicated. If he will not be satisfied with truth in the form of tautology, that is to say, if he will not be content with empty husks, then he will always exchange truths for illusions.
• The various languages placed side by side show that with words it is never a question of truth, never a question of adequate expression; otherwise, there would not be so many languages. The “thing in itself” (which is precisely what the pure truth, apart from any of its consequences, would be) is likewise something quite incomprehensible to the creator of language and something not in the least worth striving for. This creator only designates the relations of things to men, and for expressing these relations he lays hold of the boldest metaphors.’ To begin with, a nerve stimulus is transferred into an image: first metaphor. The image, in turn, is imitated in a sound: second metaphor. And each time there is a complete overleaping of one sphere, right into the middle of an entirely new and different one.

• We believe that we know something about the things themselves when we speak of trees, colors, snow, and flowers; and yet we possess nothing but metaphors for things — metaphors which correspond in no way to the original entities.

• Every word instantly becomes a concept precisely insofar as it is not supposed to serve as a reminder of the unique and entirely individual original experience to which it owes its origin; but rather, a word becomes a concept insofar as it simultaneously has to fit countless more or less similar cases — which means, purely and simply, cases which are never equal and thus altogether unequal. Every concept arises from the equation of unequal things. Just as it is certain that one leaf is never totally the same as another, so it is certain that the concept “leaf” is formed by arbitrarily discarding these individual differences and by forgetting the distinguishing aspects.

• We obtain the concept, as we do the form, by overlooking what is individual and actual; whereas nature is acquainted with no forms and no concepts, and likewise with no species, but only with an X which remains inaccessible and undefinable for us.

• Was ist also Wahrheit? Ein bewegliches Heer von Metaphern, Metonymien, Anthropomorphismen, kurz eine Summe von menschlichen Relationen, die, poetisch und rhetorisch gesteigert, übertragen, geschmückt wurden, und die nach langem Gebrauch einem Volke fest, kanonisch und verbindlich dünken: die Wahrheiten sind Illusionen, von denen man vergessen hat, daß sie welche sind, Metaphern, die abgenutzt und sinnlich kraftlos geworden sind, Münzen, die ihr Bild verloren haben und nun als Metall, nicht mehr als Münzen, in Betracht kommen.
  • What then is truth? A movable host of metaphors, metonymies, and anthropomorphisms: in short, a sum of human relations which have been poetically and rhetorically intensified, transferred, and embellished, and which, after long usage, seem to a people to be fixed, canonical, and binding. Truths are illusions which we have forgotten are illusions — they are metaphors that have become worn out and have been drained of sensuous force, coins which have lost their embossing and are now considered as metal and no longer as coins.

• We still do not yet know where the drive for truth comes from. For so far we have heard only of the duty which society imposes in order to exist: to be truthful means to employ the usual metaphors. Thus, to express it morally, this is the duty to lie according to a fixed convention, to lie with the herd and in a manner binding upon everyone. Now man of course forgets that this is the way things stand for him. Thus he lies in the manner indicated, unconsciously and in accordance with habits which are centuries’ old; and precisely by means of this unconsciousness and forgetfulness he arrives at his sense of truth.
• The venerability, reliability, and utility of truth is something which a person demonstrates for himself from the contrast with the liar, whom no one trusts and everyone excludes. As a “rational” being, he now places his behavior under the control of abstractions. He will no longer tolerate being carried away by sudden impressions, by intuitions.
• 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. For something is possible in the realm of these schemata which could never be achieved with the vivid first impressions: the construction of a pyramidal order according to castes and degrees, the creation of a new world of laws, privileges, subordinations, and clearly marked boundaries — a new world, one which now confronts that other vivid world of first impressions as more solid, more universal, better known, and more human than the immediately perceived world, and thus as the regulative and imperative world.

• One may certainly admire man as a mighty genius of construction, who succeeds in piling an infinitely complicated dome of concepts upon an unstable foundation, and, as it were, on running water. Of course, in order to be supported by such a foundation, his construction must be like one constructed of spiders’ webs: delicate enough to be carried along by the waves, strong enough not to be blown apart by every wind.

• As a genius of construction man raises himself far above the bee in the following way: whereas the bee builds with wax that he gathers from nature, man builds with the far more delicate conceptual material which he first has to manufacture from himself.

• When someone hides something behind a bush and looks for it again in the same place and finds it there as well, there is not much to praise in such seeking and finding. Yet this is how matters stand regarding seeking and finding “truth” within the realm of reason. If I make up the definition of a mammal, and then, after inspecting a camel, declare “look, a mammal’ I have indeed brought a truth to light in this way, but it is a truth of limited value. That is to say, it is a thoroughly anthropomorphic truth which contains not a single point which would be “true in itself” or really and universally valid apart from man. At bottom, what the investigator of such truths is seeking is only the metamorphosis of the world into man.

• Only by forgetting this primitive world of metaphor can one live with any repose, security, and consistency: only by means of the petrification and coagulation of a mass of images which originally streamed from the primal faculty of human imagination like a fiery liquid, only in the invincible faith that this sun, this window, this table is a truth in itself, in short, only by forgetting that he himself is an artistically creating subject, does man live with any repose, security, and consistency. If but for an instant he could escape from the prison walls of this faith, his “self consciousness” would be immediately destroyed. It is even a difficult thing for him to admit to himself that the insect or the bird perceives an entirely different world from the one that man does, and that the question of which of these perceptions of the world is the more correct one is quite meaningless, for this would have to have been decided previously in accordance with the criterion of the correct perception, which means, in accordance with a criterion which is not available.

• Between two absolutely different spheres, as between subject and object, there is no causality, no correctness, and no expression; there is, at most, an aesthetic relation: I mean, a suggestive transference, a stammering translation into a completely foreign tongue — for which I there is required, in any case, a freely inventive intermediate sphere and mediating force. “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. Even the relationship of a nerve stimulus to the generated image is not a necessary one. But when the same image has been generated millions of times and has been handed down for many generations and finally appears on the same occasion every time for all mankind, then it acquires at last the same meaning for men it would have if it were the sole necessary image and if the relationship of the original nerve stimulus to the generated image were a strictly causal one. In the same manner, an eternally repeated dream would certainly be felt and judged to be reality. But the hardening and congealing of a metaphor guarantees absolutely nothing concerning its necessity and exclusive justification.

• If each us had a different kind of sense perception — if we could only perceive things now as a bird, now as a worm, now as a plant, or if one of us saw a stimulus as red, another as blue, while a third even heard the same stimulus as a sound — then no one would speak of such a regularity of nature, rather, nature would be grasped only as a creation which is subjective in the highest degree. After all, what is a law of nature as such for us? We are not acquainted with it in itself, but only with its effects, which means in its relation to other laws of nature — which, in turn, are known to us only as sums of relations. Therefore all these relations always refer again to others and are thoroughly incomprehensible to us in their essence.
• We produce these representations in and from ourselves with the same necessity with which the spider spins. If we are forced to comprehend all things only under these forms, then it ceases to be amazing that in all things we actually comprehend nothing but these forms. For they must all bear within themselves the laws of number, and it is precisely number which is most astonishing in things. All that conformity to law, which impresses us so much in the movement of the stars and in chemical processes, coincides at bottom with those properties which we bring to things. Thus it is we who impress ourselves in this way

Part 2

• We have seen how it is originally language which works on the construction of concepts, a labor taken over in later ages by science. Just as the bee simultaneously constructs cells and fills them with honey, so science works unceasingly on this great columbarium of concepts, the graveyard of perceptions.

• Whereas the man of action binds his life to reason and its concepts so that he will not be swept away and lost, the scientific investigator builds his hut right next to the tower of science so that he will be able to work on it and to find shelter for himself beneath those bulwarks which presently exist. And he requires shelter, for there are frightful powers which continuously break in upon him, powers which oppose scientific “truth” with completely different kinds of “truths” which bear on their shields the most varied sorts of emblems.

• 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. This drive is not truly vanquished and scarcely subdued by the fact that a regular and rigid new world is constructed as its prison from its own ephemeral products, the concepts. It seeks a new realm and another channel for its activity, and it finds this in myth and in art generally. This drive continually confuses the conceptual categories and cells by bringing forward new transferences, metaphors, and metonymies. It continually manifests an ardent desire to refashion the world which presents itself to waking man, so that it will be as colorful, irregular, lacking in results and coherence, charming, and eternally new as the world of dreams. Indeed, it is only by means of the rigid and regular web of concepts that the waking man clearly sees that he is awake; and it is precisely because of this that he sometimes thinks that he must be dreaming when this web of concepts is torn by art.

• 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.

• Man has an invincible inclination to allow himself to be deceived and is, as it were, enchanted with happiness when the rhapsodist tells him epic fables as if they were true, or when the actor in the theater acts more royally than any real king. So long as it is able to deceive without injuring, that master of deception, the intellect, is free; it is released from its former slavery and celebrates its Saturnalia. It is never more luxuriant, richer, prouder, more clever and more daring.
• That immense framework and planking of concepts to which the needy man clings his whole life long in order to preserve himself is nothing but a scaffolding and toy for the most audacious feats of the liberated intellect. And when it smashes this framework to pieces, throws it into confusion, and puts it back together in an ironic fashion, pairing the most alien things and separating the closest, it is demonstrating that it has no need of these makeshifts of indigence and that it will now be guided by intuitions rather than by concepts. There is no regular path which leads from these intuitions into the land of ghostly schemata, the land of abstractions. There exists no word for these intuitions; when man sees them he grows dumb, or else he speaks only in forbidden metaphors and in unheard — of combinations of concepts. He does this so that by shattering and mocking the old conceptual barriers he may at least correspond creatively to the impression of the powerful present intuition.

• There are ages in which the rational man and the intuitive man stand side by side, the one in fear of intuition, the other with scorn for abstraction. The latter is just as irrational as the former is inartistic. They both desire to rule over life: the former, by knowing how to meet his principle needs by means of foresight, prudence, and regularity; the latter, by disregarding these needs and, as an “overjoyed hero,” counting as real only that life which has been disguised as illusion and beauty.

• The man who is guided by concepts and abstractions only succeeds by such means in warding off misfortune, without ever gaining any happiness for himself from these abstractions. And while he aims for the greatest possible freedom from pain, the intuitive man, standing in the midst of a culture, already reaps from his intuition a harvest of continually inflowing illumination, cheer, and redemption — in addition to obtaining a defense against misfortune. To be sure, he suffers more intensely, when he suffers; he even suffers more frequently, since he does not understand how to learn from experience and keeps falling over and over again into the same ditch.

Untimely Meditations (1876)

• Um aber unsere Klassiker so falsch beurteilen und so beschimpfend ehren zu können, muß man sie gar nicht mehr kennen: und dies ist die allgemeine Tatsache. Denn sonst müßte man wissen, daß es nur eine Art gibt, sie zu ehren, nämlich dadurch, daß man fortfährt, in ihrem Geiste und mit ihrem Mute zu suchen, und dabei nicht müde wird.
  • In order to be able thus to misjudge, and thus to grant left-handed veneration to our classics, people must have ceased to know them. This, generally speaking, is precisely what has happened. For, otherwise, one ought to know that there is only one way of honoring them, and that is to continue seeking with the same spirit and with the same courage, and not to weary of the search.
  • (A. Ludovici trans.), § 1.2

• [Philistines] only devised the notion of an epigone-age in order to secure peace for themselves, and to be able to reject all the efforts of disturbing innovators summarily as the work of epigones. With the view of ensuring their own tranquility, these smug ones even appropriated history, and sought to transform all sciences that threatened to disturb their wretched ease into branches of history. … No, in their desire to acquire an historical grasp of everything, stultification became the sole aim of these philosophical admirers of “nil admirari.” While professing to hate every form of fanaticism and intolerance, what they really hated, at bottom, was the dominating genius and the tyranny of the real claims of culture.
  • (A. Ludovici trans.), “David Strauss,” § 1.2

• In this way, a philosophy which veiled the Philistine confessions of its founder beneath neat twists and flourishes of language proceeded further to discover a formula for the canonization of the commonplace. It expatiated upon the rationalism of all reality, and thus ingratiated itself with the Culture-Philistine, who also loves neat twists and flourishes, and who, above all, considers himself real, and regards his reality as the standard of reason for the world. From this time forward he began to allow every one, and even himself, to reflect, to investigate, to aestheticise, and, more particularly, to make poetry, music, and even pictures—not to mention systems of philosophy; provided, of course, that … no assault were made upon the “reasonable” and the “real”—that is to say, upon the Philistine.
  • (A. Ludovici trans.), “David Strauss,” § 1.2, p. 17

• 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.
  • “On the uses and disadvantages of history for life,” R. Hollingdale, trans. (1983), § 2.0, p. 60

• Perhaps no philosopher is more correct than the cynic. The happiness of the animal, that thorough cynic, is the living proof of cynicism.
  • § 2.1, cited in Peter Sloterdijk, Critique of Cynical Reason (1987), p. ix

• In his heart every man knows quite well that, being unique, he will be in the world only once and that no imaginable chance will for a second time gather together into a unity so strangely variegated an assortment as he is: he knows it but he hides it like a bad conscience—why? From fear of his neighbor, who demands conventionality and cloaks himself with it. But what is it that constrains the individual to fear his neighbor, to think and act like a member of a herd, and to have no joy in himself? Modesty, perhaps, in a few rare cases. With the great majority it is indolence, inertia. … Men are even lazier than they are timid, and fear most of all the inconveniences with which unconditional honesty and nakedness would burden them. Artists alone hate this sluggish promenading in borrowed fashions and appropriated opinions and they reveal everyone’s secret bad conscience, the law that every man is a unique miracle.
  • “Schopenhauer as educator” (“Schopenhauer als Erzieher”), § 3.1, R. Hollingdale, trans. (1983), p. 127

• The man who does not wish to belong to the mass needs only to cease taking himself easily; let him follow his conscience, which calls to him: “Be your self! All you are now doing, thinking, desiring, is not you yourself.”
  • “Schopenhauer as educator,” § 3.1, R. Hollingdale, trans. (1983), p. 127

• Es gibt kein öderes und widrigeres Geschöpf in der Natur als den Menschen, welcher seinem Genius ausgewichen ist und nun nach rechts und nach links, nach rückwärts und überallhin schielt. Man darf einen solchen Menschen zuletzt gar nicht mehr angreifen, denn er ist ganz Außenseite ohne Kern, ein anbrüchiges, gemaltes, aufgebauschtes Gewand.
  • There exists no more repulsive and desolate creature in the world than the man who has evaded his genius and who now looks furtively to left and right, behind him and all about him. In the end such a man becomes impossible to get hold of, since he is wholly exterior, without kernel: a tattered, painted bag of clothes; a decked-out ghost that cannot inspire even fear and certainly not pity.
    • “Schopenhauer as educator,” § 3.1, R. Hollingdale, trans. (1983), p. 128

• Wenn man mit Recht vom Faulen sagt, er töte die Zeit, so muß man von einer Periode, welche ihr Heil auf die öffentlichen Meinungen, das heißt auf die privaten Faulheiten setzt, ernstlich besorgen, daß eine solche Zeit wirklich einmal getötet wird: ich meine, daß sie aus der Geschichte der wahrhaften Befreiung des Lebens gestrichen wird. Wie groß muß der Widerwille späterer Geschlechter sein, sich mit der Hinterlassenschaft jener Periode zu befassen, in welcher nicht die lebendigen Menschen, sondern öffentlich meinende Scheinmenschen regierten.
  • If it is true to say of the lazy that they kill time, then it is greatly to be feared that an era which sees its salvation in public opinion, this is to say private laziness, is a time that really will be killed: I mean that it will be struck out of the history of the true liberation of life. How reluctant later generations will be to have anything to do with the relics of an era ruled, not by living men, but by pseudo-men dominated by public opinion.
    • “Schopenhauer as educator,” § 3.1, R. Hollingdale, trans. (1983), p. 128

• Wir haben uns über unser Dasein vor uns selbst zu verantworten; folglich wollen wir auch die wirklichen Steuermänner dieses Daseins abgeben und nicht zulassen, daß unsre Existenz einer gedankenlosen Zufälligkeit gleiche.
  • We are responsible to ourselves for our own existence; consequently we want to be the true helmsman of this existence and refuse to allow our existence to resemble a mindless act of chance.
    • “Schopenhauer as educator,” § 3.1, R. Hollingdale, trans. (1983), p. 128

• I will make an attempt to attain freedom, the youthful soul says to itself; and is it to be hindered in this by the fact that two nations happen to hate and fight one another, or that two continents are separated by an ocean, or that all around it a religion is taught with did not yet exist a couple of thousand years ago. All that is not you, it says to itself.
  • “Schopenhauer as educator,” § 3.1, R. Hollingdale, trans. (1983), p. 128

• Niemand kann dir die Brücke bauen, auf der gerade du über den Fluß des Lebens schreiten mußt, niemand außer dir allein.
  • No one can construct for you the bridge upon which precisely you must cross the stream of life, no one but you yourself alone.
    • “Schopenhauer as educator,” § 3.1, R. Hollingdale, trans. (1983), p. 129

• Es gibt in der Welt einen einzigen Weg, auf welchem niemand gehen kann, außer dir: wohin er führt? Frage nicht, gehe ihn.
  • There exists in the world a single path along which no one can go except you: whither does it lead? Do not ask, go along it.
    • “Schopenhauer as educator,” § 3.1, R. Hollingdale, trans. (1983), p. 129

• Wie finden wir uns selbst wieder? Wie kann sich der Mensch kennen? Er ist eine dunkle und verhüllte Sache; und wenn der Hase sieben Häute hat, so kann der Mensch sich sieben mal siebzig abziehn und wird noch nicht sagen können: »das bist du nun wirklich, das ist nicht mehr Schale«.
  • 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.”
    • “Schopenhauer as educator,” § 3.1, R. Hollingdale, trans. (1983), p. 129

• Das ist das Geheimnis aller Bildung: sie verleiht nicht künstliche Gliedmaßen, wächserne Nasen, bebrillte Augen – vielmehr ist das, was diese Gaben zu geben vermöchte, nur das Afterbild der Erziehung. Sondern Befreiung ist sie, Wegräumung alles Unkrauts, Schuttwerks, Gewürms, das die zarten Keime der Pflanzen antasten will.
  • That is the secret of all culture: it does not provide artificial limbs, wax noses or spectacles—that which can provide these things is, rather, only sham education. Culture is liberation, the removal of all the weeds, rubble and vermin that want to attack the tender buds of the plant.
    • “Schopenhauer as educator,” § 3.1, R. Hollingdale, trans. (1983), p. 130

Compare: “Truth that has been merely learned is like an artificial limb, a false tooth, a waxen nose; at best, like a nose made out of another’s flesh; it adheres to us only because it is put on.”—Schopenhauer, Parerga and Paralipomena, Vol. 2, Ch. 22, § 261

• I always believed that at some time fate would take from me the terrible effort and duty of educating myself. I believed that, when the time came, I would discover a philosopher to educate me, a true philosopher whom one could follow without any misgiving because one would have more faith in him than one had in oneself. Then I asked myself: what would be the principles by which he would educate you?—and I reflected on what he might say about the two educational maxims which are being hatched in our time. One of them demands that the educator should quickly recognize the real strength of his pupil and then direct all his efforts and energy and heat at them so as to help that one virtue to attain true maturity and fruitfulness. The other maxim, on the contrary, requires that the educator should draw forth and nourish all the forces which exist in his pupil and bring them to a harmonious relationship with one another. … But where do we discover a harmonious whole at all, a simultaneous sounding of many voice in one nature, if not in such men as Cellini, men in whom everything, knowledge, desire, love, hate, strives towards a central point, a root force, and where a harmonious system is constructed through the compelling domination of this living centre? And so perhaps these two maxims are not opposites at all? Perhaps the one simply says that man should have a center and the other than he should also have a periphery? That educating philosopher of whom I dreamed would, I came to think, not only discover the central force, he would also know how to prevent its acting destructively on the other forces: his educational task would, it seemed to me, be to mould the whole man into a living solar and planetary system and to understand its higher laws of motion.
  • “Schopenhauer as educator,” § 3.2, R. Hollingdale, trans. (1983), pp. 130-131

• Die gebildeten Stände und Staaten werden von einer großartig verächtlichen Geldwirtschaft fortgerissen. Niemals war die Welt mehr Welt, nie ärmer an Liebe und Güte.
  • 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.
    • “Schopenhauer as educator,” § 3.4

• 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.
  • trans. Hollingdale, “Schopenhauer as educator,” § 3.3, p. 139

• These people who have fled inward for their freedom also have to live outwardly, become visible, let themselves be seen; they are united with mankind through countless ties of blood, residence, education, fatherland, chance, the importunity of others; they are likewise presupposed to harbour countless opinions simply because these are the ruling opinions of the time; every gesture which is not clearly a denial counts as agreement.
  • trans. Hollingdale, “Schopenhauer as educator,” § 3.3, p. 139

• All that exists that can be denied deserves to be denied; and being truthful means: to believe in an existence that can in no way be denied and which is itself true and without falsehood.
  • trans. Hollingdale, “Schopenhauer as educator,” p. 153

• The objective of all human arrangements is through distracting one’s thoughts to cease to be aware of life.
  • trans. Hollingdale (1983), “Schopenhauer as educator,” p. 154

• Haste is universal because everyone is in flight from himself.
  • trans. Hollingdale (1983), “Schopenhauer as educator,” p. 158

Human, All Too Human (1878)

• Life is, after all, not a product of morality.
  • Preface 1, tr. R.J. Hollingdale. The German original has slightly other meaning: “das Leben ist nun einmal nicht von der Moral ausgedacht” (“…and the life was not invented, one day, by morality”).
• Our destiny exercises its influence over us even when, as yet, we have not learned its nature: it is our future that lays down the law of our today.
  • Preface 7

• One common false conclusion is that because someone is truthful and upright towards us he is spreading the truth. Thus the child believes his parents’ judgements, the Christian believes the claims of the church’s founders. Likewise, people do not want to admit that all those things which men defended with the sacrifice of their lives and happiness in earlier centuries were nothing but errors.
  • I.53

• No power can maintain itself if only hypocrites represent it.
  • I. 55

• One must have a good memory to be able to keep the promises one makes.
  • I.59

• … die Hoffnung: sie ist in Wahrheit das übelste der Übel, weil sie die Qual der Menschen verlängert.
  • In reality, hope is the worst of all evils, because it prolongs man’s torments.
  • I.71

• One will rarely err if extreme actions be ascribed to vanity, ordinary actions to habit, and mean actions to fear.
  • I.74

• When virtue has slept, she will get up more refreshed.
  • I.83

• Most men are too concerned with themselves to be malicious.
  • I.85

• He who humbleth himself wants to be exalted.
  • I.87

• Every tradition grows ever more venerable — the more remote its origin, the more confused that origin is. The reverence due to it increases from generation to generation. The tradition finally becomes holy and inspires awe.
  • I.96

• Thoughts in a poem. The poet presents his thoughts festively, on the carriage of rhythm: usually because they could not walk.
  • 1.189

• Where there is happiness, there is found pleasure in nonsense. The transformation of experience into its opposite, of the suitable into the unsuitable, the obligatory into the optional (but in such a manner that this process produces no injury and is only imagined in jest), is a pleasure; …
  • I.213

• Main deficiency of active people. Active men are usually lacking in higher activity–I mean individual activity. They are active as officials, businessmen, scholars, that is, as generic beings, but not as quite particular, single and unique men. In this respect they are lazy.

It is the misfortune of active men that their activity is almost always a bit irrational. For example, one must not inquire of the money-gathering banker what the purpose for his restless activity is: it is irrational. Active people roll like a stone, conforming to the stupidity of mechanics.

Today as always, men fall into two groups: slaves and free men. Whoever does not have two-thirds of his day for himself, is a slave, whatever he may be: a statesman, a businessman, an official, or a scholar.

• • 283

• We often contradict an opinion for no other reason than that we do not like the tone in which it is expressed.
  • I.303

• Arrogance on the part of the meritorious is even more offensive to us than the arrogance of those without merit: for merit itself is offensive.
  • I.332

• Unpleasant, even dangerous, qualities can be found in every nation and every individual: it is cruel to demand that the Jew be an exception. In him, these qualities may even be dangerous and revolting to an unusual degree; and perhaps the young stock-exchange Jew is altogether the most disgusting invention of mankind.
  • I.475

• 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.
  • I.579

• Socialism itself can hope to exist only for brief periods here and there, and then only through the exercise of the extremest terrorism. For this reason it is secretly preparing itself for rule through fear and is driving the word ‘justice’ into the heads of the half-educated masses like a nail so as to rob them of their reason… and to create in them a good conscience for the evil game they are to play.
  • Cambridge University Press, 1996, pp. 173-174

• The advantage of a bad memory is that one can enjoy the same good things for the first time several times.
  • I.580

• No one talks more passionately about his rights than he who in the depths of his soul doubts whether he has any. By enlisting passion on his side he wants to stifle his reason and its doubts: thus he will acquire a good conscience and with it success among his fellow men.
  • I.597

• If you have hitherto believed that life was one of the highest value and now see yourselves disappointed, do you at once have to reduce it to the lowest possible price?
  • II.1

• Die mutter der Ausschweifung ist nicht die Freude, sondern die Freudlosigkeit.[1]
  • The mother of excess is not joy but joylessness.[2]
  • II.77

• Mancher wird nur deshalb kein Denker, weil sein Gedächtnis zu gut ist.
  • Many a man fails to become a thinker only because his memory is too good.
  • II.122

• The worst readers are those who behave like plundering troops: they take away a few things they can use, dirty and confound the remainder, and revile the whole.
  • II.137

• A witticism is an epigram on the death of a feeling.
  • II.202

• Forgetting our intentions is the most frequent of all acts of stupidity.
  • II.206

• A Path to Equality. – A few hours of mountain climbing turn a rascal and a saint into two pretty similar creatures. Fatigue is the shortest way to Equality and Fraternity–and, in the end, Liberty will surrender to Sleep.
  • II.263

• It says nothing against the ripeness of a spirit that it has a few worms.
  • II.353

• With all great deceivers there is a noteworthy occurrence to which they owe their power. In the actual act of deception… they are overcome by belief in themselves. It is this which then speaks so miraculously and compellingly to those who surround them.^{[specific citation needed]}

• Im Gebirge der Wahrheit kletterst du nie umsonst: Entweder du kommst schon heute weiter hinauf oder übst deine Kräfte, um morgen höher steigen zu können.
  • In the mountains of truth you will never climb in vain: either you will get up higher today or you will exercise your strength so as to be able to get up higher tomorrow.
    • II.293, maxim 358

• It is mere illusion and pretty sentiment to expect much from mankind if he forgets how to make war. And yet no means are known which call so much into action as a great war, that rough energy born of the camp, that deep impersonality born of hatred, that conscience born of murder and cold-bloodedness, that fervor born of effort of the annihilation of the enemy, that proud indifference to loss, to one’s own existence, to that of one’s fellows, to that earthquake-like soul-shaking that a people needs when it is losing its vitality.^{[specific citation needed]}

Helen Zimmern translation

• Feinde der Wahrheit. – Überzeugungen sind gefährlichere Feinde der Wahrheit, als Lügen.
  • Enemies of truth. Convictions are more dangerous enemies of truth than lies.
  • Section IX, “Man Alone with Himself” / aphorism 483

• Ziel und Wege. – Viele sind hartnäckig in Bezug auf den einmal eingeschlagenen Weg, Wenige in Bezug auf das Ziel.
  • Destination and paths. Many people are obstinate about the path once it is taken, few people about the destination.
  • Section IX, “Man Alone with Himself” / aphorism 494

• Das Empörende an einer individuellen Lebensart. – Alle sehr individuellen Maassregeln des Lebens bringen die Menschen gegen Den, der sie ergreift, auf; sie fühlen sich durch die aussergewöhnliche Behandlung, welche jener sich angedeihen lässt, erniedrigt, als gewöhnliche Wesen.
  • The infuriating thing about an individual way of living. People are always angry at anyone who chooses very individual standards for his life; because of the extraordinary treatment which that man grants to himself, they feel degraded, like ordinary beings.
  • Section IX, “Man Alone with Himself” / aphorism 495

• Vorrecht der Grösse. – Es ist das Vorrecht der Grösse, mit geringen Gaben hoch zu beglücken.
  • Privilege of greatness. It is the privilege of greatness to grant supreme pleasure through trifling gifts.
  • Section IX, “Man Alone with Himself” / aphorism 496

• Jeder in Einer Sache überlegen. – In civilisirten Verhältnissen fühlt sich Jeder jedem Anderen in Einer Sache wenigstens überlegen: darauf beruht das allgemeine Wohlwollen, insofern Jeder einer ist, der unter Umständen helfen kann und desshalb sich ohne Scham helfen lassen darf.
  • Everyone superior in one thing. In civilized circumstances, everyone feels superior to everyone else in at least one way; this is the basis of the general goodwill, inasmuch as everyone is someone who, under certain conditions, can be of help, and need therefore feel no shame in allowing himself to be helped.
  • Section IX, “Man Alone with Himself” / aphorism 509

• Das Leben als Ertrag des Lebens. – Der Mensch mag sich noch so weit mit seiner Erkenntniss ausrecken, sich selber noch so objectiv vorkommen: zuletzt trägt er doch Nichts davon, als seine eigene Biographie.
  • Life as the product of life. However far man may extend himself with his knowledge, however objective he may appear to himself – ultimately he reaps nothing but his own biography.
  • Section IX, “Man Alone with Himself” / aphorism 513

• Aus der Erfahrung. – Die Unvernunft einer Sache ist kein Grund gegen ihr Dasein, vielmehr eine Bedingung desselben.
  • From experience. That something is irrational is no argument against its existence, but rather a condition for it.
  • Section IX, “Man Alone with Himself” / aphorism 515

• Gefahr unserer Cultur. – Wir gehören einer Zeit an, deren Cultur in Gefahr ist, an den Mitteln der Cultur zu Grunde zu gehen.
  • Danger of our culture. We belong to a time in which culture is in danger of being destroyed by the means of culture.
  • Section IX, “Man Alone with Himself” / aphorism 520

• Die Länge des Tages. – Wenn man viel hineinzustecken hat, so hat ein Tag hundert Taschen.
  • The day’s length. If a man has a great deal to put in them, a day will have a hundred pockets.
  • Section IX, “Man Alone with Himself” / aphorism 529

• Unglück. – Die Auszeichnung, welche im Unglück liegt (als ob es ein Zeichen von Flachheit, Anspruchslosigkeit, Gewöhnlichkeit sei, sich glücklich zu fühlen), ist so gross, dass wenn Jemand Einem sagt: “Aber wie glücklich Sie sind!” man gewöhnlich protestirt.
  • Unhappiness. The distinction that lies in being unhappy (as if to feel happy were a sign of shallowness, lack of ambition, ordinariness) is so great that when someone says, “But how happy you must be!” we usually protest.
  • Section IX, “Man Alone with Himself” / aphorism 534

• Den Andern zum Vorbild. – Wer ein gutes Beispiel geben will, muss seiner Tugend einen Gran Narrheit zusetzen: dann ahmt man nach und erhebt sich zugleich über den Nachgeahmten, – was die Menschen lieben.
  • Model for others. He who wants to set a good example must add a grain of foolishness to his virtue; then others can imitate and, at the same time, rise above the one being imitated – something which people love.
  • Section IX, “Man Alone with Himself” / aphorism 561

• Schatten in der Flamme. – Die Flamme ist sich selber nicht so hell, als den Anderen, denen sie leuchtet: so auch der Weise.
  • Shadow in the flame. The flame is not so bright to itself as to those on whom it shines: so too the wise man.
  • Section IX, “Man Alone with Himself” / aphorism 570

• Eigene Meinungen. – Die erste Meinung, welche uns einfällt, wenn wir plötzlich über eine Sache befragt werden, ist gewöhnlich nicht unsere eigene, sondern nur die landläufige, unserer Kaste, Stellung, Abkunft zugehörige; die eigenen Meinungen schwimmen selten oben auf.
  • Our own opinions. The first opinion that occurs to us when we are suddenly asked about a matter is usually not our own, but only the customary one, appropriate to our caste, position, or parentage; our own opinions seldom swim near the surface.
  • Section IX, “Man Alone with Himself” / aphorism 571

• Lebensalter und Wahrheit. – junge Leute lieben das Interessante und Absonderliche, gleichgültig wie wahr oder falsch es ist. Reifere Geister lieben Das an der Wahrheit, was an ihr interessant und absonderlich ist. Ausgereifte Köpfe endlich lieben die Wahrheit auch in Dem, wo sie schlicht und einfältig erscheint und dem gewöhnlichen Menschen Langeweile macht, weil sie gemerkt haben, dass die Wahrheit das Höchste an Geist, was sie besitzt, mit der Miene der Einfalt zu sagen pflegt.
  • Age and truth. Young people love what is interesting and odd, no matter how true or false it is. More mature minds love what is interesting and odd about truth. Fully mature intellects, finally, love truth, even when it appears plain and simple, boring to the ordinary person; for they have noticed that truth tends to reveal its highest wisdom in the guise of simplicity.
  • Section IX, “Man Alone with Himself” / aphorism 609

• Der Gegenwart entfremdet. – Es hat grosse Vortheile, seiner Zeit sich einmal in stärkerem Maasse zu entfremden und gleichsam von ihrem Ufer zurück in den Ocean der vergangenen Weltbetrachtungen getrieben zu werden. Von dort aus nach der Küste zu blickend, überschaut man wohl zum ersten Male ihre gesammte Gestaltung und hat, wenn man sich ihr wieder nähert, den Vortheil, sie besser im Ganzen zu verstehen, als Die, welche sie nie verlassen haben.
  • Alienated from the present. There are great advantages in for once removing ourselves distinctly from our time and letting ourselves be driven from its shore back into the ocean of former world views. Looking at the coast from that perspective, we survey for the first time its entire shape, and when we near it again, we have the advantage of understanding it better on the whole than do those who have never left it.
  • Section IX, “Man Alone with Himself” / aphorism 616

• Philosophisch gesinnt sein. – Gewöhnlich strebt man darnach, für alle Lebenslagen und Ereignisse eine Haltung des Gemüthes, eine Gattung von Ansichten zu erwerben, – das nennt man vornehmlich philosophisch gesinnt sein. Aber für die Bereicherung der Erkenntniss mag es höheren Werth haben, nicht in dieser Weise sich zu uniformiren, sondern auf die leise Stimme der verschiedenen Lebenslagen zu hören; diese bringen ihre eigenen Ansichten mit sich. So nimmt man erkennenden Antheil am Leben und Wesen Vieler, indem man sich selber nicht als starres, beständiges, Eines Individuum behandelt.
  • A philosophical frame of mind. Generally we strive to acquire one emotional stance, one viewpoint for all life situations and events: we usually call that being of a philosophical frame of mind. But rather than making oneself uniform, we may find greater value for the enrichment of knowledge by listening to the soft voice of different life situations; each brings its own views with it. Thus we acknowledge and share the life and nature of many by not treating ourselves like rigid, invariable, single individuals.
  • Section IX, “Man Alone with Himself” / aphorism 618

• Verkehr mit dem höheren Selbst. – Ein jeder hat seinen guten Tag, wo er sein höheres Selbst findet; und die wahre Humanität verlangt, jemanden nur nach diesem Zustande und nicht nach den Werktagen der Unfreiheit und Knechtung zu schätzen. Man soll zum Beispiel einen Maler nach seiner höchsten Vision, die er zu sehen und darzustellen vermochte, taxiren und verehren. Aber die Menschen selber verkehren sehr verschieden mit diesem ihrem höheren Selbst und sind häufig ihre eigenen Schauspieler, insofern sie Das, was sie in jenen Augenblicken sind, später immer wieder nachmachen. Manche leben in Scheu und Demuth vor ihrem Ideale und möchten es verleugnen: sie fürchten ihr höheres Selbst, weil es, wenn es redet, anspruchsvoll redet. Dazu hat es eine geisterhafte Freiheit zu kommen und fortzubleiben wie es will; es wird desswegen häufig eine Gabe der Götter genannt, während eigentlich alles Andere Gabe der Götter (des Zufalls) ist: jenes aber ist der Mensch selber.
  • Traffic with one’s higher self. Everyone has his good day, when he finds his higher self; and true humanity demands that we judge someone only when he is in this condition, and not in his workdays of bondage and servitude. We should, for example, assess and honor a painter according to the highest vision he was able to see and portray. But people themselves deal very differently with this, their higher self, and often act out the role of their own self, to the extent that they later keep imitating what they were in those moments. Some regard their ideal with shy humility and would like to deny it: they fear their higher self because, when it speaks, it speaks demandingly. In addition, it has a ghostly freedom of coming or staying away as it wishes; for that reason it is often called a gift of the gods, while actually everything else is a gift of the gods (of chance): this, however, is the man himself.
  • Section IX, “Man Alone with Himself” / aphorism 624

• Leben und Erleben. – Sieht man zu, wie Einzelne mit ihren Erlebnissen – ihren unbedeutenden alltäglichen Erlebnissen – umzugehen wissen, so dass diese zu einem Ackerland werden, das dreimal des Jahres Frucht trägt; während Andere – und wie Viele! – durch den Wogenschlag der aufregendsten Schicksale, der mannigfaltigsten Zeit- und Volksströmungen hindurchgetrieben werden und doch immer leicht, immer obenauf, wie Kork, bleiben: so ist man endlich versucht, die Menschheit in eine Minorität (Minimalität) Solcher einzutheilen, welche aus Wenigem Viel zu machen verstehen: und in eine Majorität Derer, welche aus Vielem Wenig zu machen verstehen; ja man trifft auf jene umgekehrten Hexenmeister, welche, anstatt die Welt aus Nichts, aus der Welt ein Nichts schaffen.
  • Life and experience. If one notices how some individuals know how to treat their experiences (their insignificant everyday experiences) so that these become a plot of ground that bears fruit three times a year; while others (and how many of them!) are driven through the waves of the most exciting turns of fate, of the most varied currents of their time or nation, and yet always stay lightly on the surface, like cork: then one is finally tempted to divide mankind into a minority (minimality) of those people who know how to make much out of little and a majority of those who know how to make a little out of much; indeed, one meets those perverse wizards who, instead of creating the world out of nothing, create nothing out of the world.
  • Section IX, “Man Alone with Himself” / aphorism 627

• Es ist nicht der Kampf der Meinungen, welcher die Geschichte so gewaltthätig gemacht hat, sondern der Kampf des Glaubens an die Meinungen, das heisst der Ueberzeugungen.
  • It is not the struggle of opinions that has made history so violent, but rather the struggle of belief in opinions, that is, the struggle of convictions.
  • Section IX, “Man Alone with Himself” / excerpt from aphorism 630

• Wir sind im Wesentlichen noch dieselben Menschen, wie die des Zeitalters der Reformation: wie sollte es auch anders sein? Aber dass wir uns einige Mittel nicht mehr erlauben, um mit ihnen unsrer Meinung zum Siege zu verhelfen, das hebt uns gegen jene Zeit ab und beweist, dass wir einer höhern Cultur angehören. Wer jetzt noch, in der Art der Reformations-Menschen, Meinungen mit Verdächtigungen, mit Wuthausbrüchen bekämpft und niederwirft, verräth deutlich, dass er seine Gegner verbrannt haben würde, falls er in anderen Zeiten gelebt hätte, und dass er zu allen Mitteln der Inquisition seine Zuflucht genommen haben würde, wenn er als Gegner der Reformation gelebt hätte. Diese Inquisition war damals vernünftig, denn sie bedeutete nichts Anderes, als den allgemeinen Belagerungszustand, welcher über den ganzen Bereich der Kirche verhängt werden musste, und der, wie jeder Belagerungszustand, zu den äussersten Mitteln berechtigte, unter der Voraussetzung nämlich (welche wir jetzt nicht mehr mit jenen Menschen theilen), dass man die Wahrheit, in der Kirche, habe, und um jeden Preis mit jedem Opfer zum Heile der Menschheit bewahren müsse. Jetzt aber giebt man Niemandem so leicht mehr zu, dass er die Wahrheit habe: die strengen Methoden der Forschung haben genug Misstrauen und Vorsicht verbreitet, so dass Jeder, welcher gewaltthätig in Wort und Werk Meinungen vertritt, als ein Feind unserer jetzigen Cultur, mindestens als ein zurückgebliebener empfunden wird. In der That: das Pathos, dass man die Wahrheit habe, gilt jetzt sehr wenig im Verhältniss zu jenem freilich milderen und klanglosen Pathos des Wahrheit-Suchens, welches nicht müde wird, umzulernen und neu zu prüfen.
  • Essentially, we are still the same people as those in the period of the Reformation – and how should it be otherwise? But we no longer allow ourselves certain means to gain victory for our opinion: this distinguishes us from that age and proves that we belong to a higher culture. These days, if a man still attacks and crushes opinions with suspicions and outbursts of rage, in the manner of men during the Reformation, he clearly betrays that he would have burnt his opponents, had he lived in other times, and that he would have taken recourse to all the means of the Inquisition, had he lived as an opponent of the Reformation. In its time, the Inquisition was reasonable, for it meant nothing other than the general martial law which had to be proclaimed over the whole domain of the church, and which, like every state of martial law, justified the use of the extremest means, namely under the assumption (which we no longer share with those people) that one possessed truth in the church and had to preserve it at any cost, with any sacrifice, for the salvation of mankind. But now we will no longer concede so easily that anyone has the truth; the rigorous methods of inquiry have spread sufficient distrust and caution, so that we experience every man who represents opinions violently in word and deed as any enemy of our present culture, or at least as a backward person. And in fact, the fervor about having the truth counts very little today in relation to that other fervor, more gentle and silent, to be sure, for seeking the truth, a search that does not tire of learning afresh and testing anew.
  • Section IX, “Man Alone with Himself” / aphorism 633

Daybreak — Thoughts on the Prejudices of Morality (1881)

• Being silent is something one completely unlearns if, like him, one has been for so long a solitary mole – – –
  • Preface

• Who is the most moral man? First, he who obeys the law most frequently, who … is continually inventive in creating opportunities for obeying the law. Then, he who obeys it even in the most difficult cases. The most moral man is he who sacrifices the most to custom. … Self-overcoming is demanded, not on account of any useful consequences it may have for the individual, but so that hegemony of custom and tradition shall be made evident.
  • § 9

• Whoever has overthrown an existing law of custom has hitherto always first been accounted a bad man: but when, as did happen, the law could not afterwards be reinstated and this fact was accepted, the predicate gradually changed: – history treats almost exclusively of these bad men who subsequently became good men!
  • 20

• He who is punished is never he who performed the deed. He is always the scapegoat.
  • 252

• He who lives as children live — who does not struggle for his bread and does not believe that his actions possess any ultimate significance — remains childlike.
  • 280

• It is not enough to prove something, one has also to seduce or elevate people to it. That is why the man of knowledge should learn how to speak his wisdom: and often in such a way that it sounds like folly!
  • 330

• For those who need consolation no means of consolation is so effective as the assertion that in their case no consolation is possible: it implies so great a degree of distinction that they at once hold up their heads again.
  • 380

• Woe to the thinker who is not the gardener but only the soil of the plants that grow in him!
  • 382

• One has attained to mastery when one neither goes wrong nor hesitates in the performance.
  • 537

The Gay Science (1882)

• I keep having the same experience and keep resisting it every time. I do not want to believe it although it is palpable: the great majority of people lack an intellectual conscience. Indeed, it has often seemed to me as if anyone calling for an intellectual conscience were as lonely in the most densely populated cities as if he were in a desert. Everybody looks at you with strange eyes and goes right on handling his scales, calling this good and that evil. Nobody even blushes when you intimate that their weights are underweight; nor do people feel outraged; they merely laugh at your doubts. I mean: the great majority of people does not consider it contemptible to believe this or that and to live accordingly, without first having given themselves an account of the final and most certain reasons pro and con, and without even troubling themselves about such reasons afterward: the most gifted men and the noblest women still belong to this “great majority.” But what is goodheartedness, refinement, or genius to me, when the person who has these virtues tolerates slack feelings in his faith and judgments and when he does not account the desire for certainty as his inmost craving and deepest distress–as that which separates the higher human beings from the lower.
  • Sec. 2

• We are, all of us, growing volcanoes that approach the hour of their eruption; but how near or distant that is, nobody knows — not even God.
  • Sec. 9

• Benefiting and hurting others are ways of exercising one’s power upon others; that is all one desires in such cases. One hurts those whom one wants to feel one’s power, for pain is a much more efficient means to that end than pleasure; pain always raises the question about its origin while pleasure is inclined to stop with itself without looking back. We benefit and show benevolence to those who are already dependent on us in some way (which means that they are used to thinking of us as causes); we want to increase their power because in that way we increase ours, or we want to show them how advantageous it is to be in our power; that way they will become more satisfied with their condition and more hostile to and willing to fight against the enemies of our power.
  • Sec. 13

• People who live in an age of corruption are witty and slanderous; they know that there are other kinds of murder than by dagger or assault; they also know that whatever is well said is believed…
  • Sec. 23

• The reasons and purposes for habits are always lies that are added only after some people begin to attack these habits and to ask for reasons and purposes. At this point the conservatives of all ages are thoroughly dishonest: they add lies.
  • Sec. 29

• Even the most beautiful scenery is no longer assured of our love after we have lived in it for three months, and some distant coast attracts our avarice: possessions are generally diminished by possession…

• A thinker sees his own actions as experiments and questions — as attempts to find out something. Success and failure are for him answers above all.
  • Sec. 41

• Pardon me, my friends, I have ventured to paint my happiness on the wall.
  • Sec. 56

• But let us not forget this either: it is enough to create new names and estimations and probabilities in order to create in the long run new “things.”
  • Sec. 58

• Without art we would be nothing but foreground and live entirely in the spell of that perspective which makes what is closest at hand and most vulgar appear as if it were vast, and reality itself.
  • Sec. 78

• Good prose is written only face to face with poetry.
  • Sec. 92

• Art furnishes us with eyes and hands and above all the good conscience to be able to turn ourselves into such a phenomenon.
  • Sec. 107

• Gott ist tot! aber so wie die Art der Menschen ist, wird es vielleicht noch Jahrtausende lang Höhlen geben, in denen man seinen Schatten zeigt. — Und wir — Wir müssen auch noch seinen Schatten besiegen.
  • 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.
  • Sec. 108
  • Quotes about quotes: see also God is dead.

• To what extent can truth endure incorporation? That is the question; that is the experiment.
  • Sec. 110

• Morality is herd instinct in the individual.
  • Sec. 116

• Gott ist tot! Gott bleibt tot! Und wir haben ihn getötet.
  • God is dead! God remains dead! And we have killed him. How shall we comfort ourselves, the murderers of all murderers? What was holiest and mightiest of all that the world has yet owned has bled to death under our knives: who will wipe this blood off us? What water is there for us to clean ourselves? What festivals of atonement, what sacred games shall we have to invent? Is not the greatness of this deed too great for us? Must we ourselves not become gods simply to appear worthy of it?
  • Sec. 125
  • Quotes about quote: see also God is dead.

• Mystical explanations are considered deep; the truth is, they are not even shallow.
  • Sec. 126; variant translation: Mystical explanations are thought to be deep; the truth is that they are not even shallow.

• Der christliche Entschluss, die Welt hässlich und schlecht zu finden, hat die Welt hässlich und schlecht gemacht.
  • The Christian resolution to find the world ugly and bad has made the world ugly and bad.
  • Sec. 130

• What is now decisive against Christianity is our taste, no longer our reasons.
  • Sec. 132

• To find everything profound — that is an inconvenient trait. It makes one strain one’s eyes all the time, and in the end one finds more than one might have wished.
  • Sec. 158

• We are always in our own company.
  • Sec. 166

• Thoughts are the shadows of our feelings — always darker, emptier, simpler.
  • Sec. 179

• The most perfidious way of harming a cause consists of defending it deliberately with faulty arguments.
  • Sec. 191

• We have no dreams at all or interesting ones. We should learn to be awake the same way — not at all or in an interesting manner.
  • Sec. 232

• New Domestic Animals. I want to have my lion and my eagle about me, that I may always have hints and premonitions concerning the amount of my strength or weakness. Must I look down on them today, and be afraid of them? And will the hour come once more when they will look up to me, and tremble?
  • Sec. 250

• Die Leugner des Zufalls. — ‘Kein Sieger glaubt an den Zufall.’
  • Those who deny chance. — ‘No victor believes in chance.’
    • Sec. 258

• Was sagt dein Gewissen? — ‘Du sollst der werden, der du bist.’
  • What does your conscience say? — “You shall become the person you are.”
  • Variant translation: Become who you are.
  • It is noted here, here and here that the phrase was first used by Pindar, and was merely re-used by Nietzsche.
  • Sec. 270

• What is the seal of liberation? — No longer being ashamed in front of oneself.
  • Sec. 275

• There is something laughable about the sight of authors who enjoy the rustling folds of long and involved sentences: they are trying to cover up their feet.
  • Sec. 282

• Glaubt es mir! – das Geheimnis, um die größte Fruchtbarkeit und den größten Genuß vom Dasein einzuernten, heißt: gefährlich leben!
  • For believe me! — the secret for harvesting from existence the greatest fruitfulness and the greatest enjoyment is: to live dangerously! Build your cities on the slopes of Vesuvius! Send your ships into uncharted seas! Live at war with your peers and yourselves! Be robbers and conquerors as long as you cannot be rulers and possessors, you seekers of knowledge! Soon the age will be past when you could be content to live hidden in forests like shy deer! At long last the search for knowledge will reach out for its due: — it will want to rule and possess, and you with it!
  • Sec. 283; Variant translation: For believe me: the secret for harvesting from existence the greatest fruitfulness and greatest enjoyment is — to live dangerously.

• Everything good, fine or great they do is first of all an argument against the skeptic inside them.
  • Sec. 284

• Perhaps man will rise ever higher as soon as he ceases to flow out into a god.
  • Sec. 285

• Eins ist not. — Seinem Charakter ‘Stil geben’.
  • One thing is needful — to ‘give style’ to one’s character.
  • Sec. 290

• We want to be poets of our life — first of all in the smallest most everyday matters.
  • Sec. 299

• Do you believe then that the sciences would have arisen and grown up if the sorcerers, alchemists, astrologers and witches had not been their forerunners; those who, with their promisings and foreshadowings, had first to create a thirst, a hunger, and a taste for hidden and forbidden powers?
  • Variant translation: 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 abscondite and forbidden powers?
  • Sec. 300

• Whatever has value in our world now does not have value in itself, according to its nature — nature is always value-less, but has been given value at some time, as a present — and it was we who gave and bestowed it.
  • Sec. 302

• It is true that there are men who, on the approach of severe pain, hear the very opposite call of command, and never appear more proud, more martial, or more happy than when the storm is brewing; indeed, pain itself provides them with their supreme moments! These are the heroic men, the great pain-bringers of mankind: those few and rare ones who need just the same apology as pain generally — and verily, it should not be denied them. They are forces of the greatest importance for preserving and advancing the species, be it only because they are opposed to smug ease, and do not conceal their disgust at this kind of happiness.
  • Sec. 318

• Who can attain to anything great if he does not feel in himself the force and will to inflict great pain? The ability to suffer is a small matter: in that line, weak women and even slaves often attain masterliness. But not to perish from internal distress and doubt when one inflicts great suffering and hears the cry of it — that is great, that belongs to greatness.
  • Sec. 325

• The heaviest burden: “What, if some day or night, a demon were to steal after you into your loneliest loneliness and say to you: ‘This life, as you now live it and have lived it, you will have to live once more and innumerable times more; and there will be nothing new in it, but every pain and every joy and every thought and sigh and everything unutterably small or great in your life must return to you, all in the same succession and sequence — even this spider and this moonlight between the trees and even this moment and I myself. The eternal hourglass of existence is turned over again and again—and you with it, speck of dust!’ Would you not throw yourself down and gnash your teeth and curse the demon who spoke thus? Or have you once experienced a tremendous moment when you would have answered him: ‘You are a god, and never have I heard anything more divine!’ If this thought were to gain possession of you, it would change you as you are, or perhaps crush you. The question in each and every thing, “do you want this once more and innumerable times more?” would lie upon your actions as the greatest weight. Or how well disposed would you have to become to yourself and to life to crave nothing more fervently than this ultimate eternal confirmation and seal?.
  • Sec. 341

• Could one count such dilettantes and old spinsters as that mawkish apostle of virginity, Mainländer, as a genuine German? In the last analysis he probably was a Jew (all Jews become mawkish when they moralize).
  • Sec. 357

• I would not know what the spirit of a philosopher might wish more to be than a good dancer.
  • Sec. 381

• We “conserve” nothing; neither do we want to return to any past periods; we are not by any means “liberal”; we do not work for “progress”; we do not need to plug up our ears against the sirens who in the market place sing of the future: their song about “equal rights,” “a free society,” “no more masters and no servants” has no allure for us.

• We simply do not consider it desirable that a realm of justice and concord should be established on earth (because it would certainly be the realm of the deepest leveling and chinoiserie); we are delighted with all who love, as we do, danger, war, and adventures, who refuse to compromise, to be captured, reconciled, and castrated; we count ourselves among conquerors; we think about the necessity for new orders, also for a new slavery — for every strengthening and enhancement of the human type also involves a new kind of enslavement.
  • The term chinoiserie indicates “unnecessary complication” and some translations point out that this passage invokes ideas in the concluding poem of Beyond Good and Evil: “nur wer sich wandelt bleibt mit mir verwandt” : Only those who keep changing remain akin to me.

• Is it not clear that with all this we are bound to feel ill at ease in an age that likes to claim the distinction of being the most humane, the mildest, and the most righteous age that the sun has ever seen? It is bad enough that precisely when we hear these beautiful words we have the ugliest suspicions. What we find in them is merely an expression — and a masquerade — of a profound weakening, of weariness, of old age, of declining energies. What can it matter to us what tinsel the sick may use to cover up their weakness? Let them parade it as their virtue; after all, there is no doubt that weakness makes one mild, oh so mild, so righteous, so inoffensive, so “humane”!
  • Sec. 377

• Preparatory Men. — I welcome all signs that a more virile, warlike age is about to begin, which will restore honor to courage above all! For this age shall prepare the way for one yet higher, and it shall gather the strength that this higher age will require some day — the age that will carry heroism into the search for knowledge and that will wage wars for the sake of ideas and their consequences.

• To this end we now need many preparatory courageous human beings who cannot very well leap out of nothing — any more than out of the sand and slime of present-day civilization and metropolitanism: human beings who know how to be silent, lonely, resolute, and content and constant in invisible activities; human beings who are bent on seeking in all things for what in them must be overcome; human beings distinguished as much by cheerfulness, patience, unpretentiousness, and contempt for all great vanities as by magnanimity in victory and forbearance regarding the small vanities of the vanquished; human beings whose judgment concerning all victors and the share of chance in every victory and fame is sharp and free; human beings with their own festivals, their own working days, and their own periods of mourning, accustomed to command with assurance but instantly ready to obey when that is called for, equally proud, equally serving their own cause in both cases; more endangered human beings, more fruitful human beings, happier beings!

On the Genealogy of Morality (1887)

• We are unknown to ourselves, we men of knowledge-and with good reason. We have never sought ourselves- how could it happen that we should ever find ourselves?
  • Preface, Section 1

• There still shines the most important nuance by virtue of which the noble felt themselves to be men of a higher rank. They designate themselves simply by their superiority in power (as “the powerful,” “the masters,” “the commanders”) or by the most clearly visible signs of this superiority, for example, as “the rich,” “the possessors” (this is the meaning of ‘Arya,’ and of corresponding words in Iranian and Slavic).
  • Essay 1, Section 5

• As is well known, the priests are the most evil enemies — but why? Because they are the most impotent. It is because of their impotence that in them hatred grows to monstrous and uncanny proportions, to the most spiritual and poisonous kind of hatred. The truly great haters in the world history have always been priests; likewise the most ingenious haters: other kinds of spirit hardly come into consideration when compared with the spirit of priestly vengefulness.
  • Essay 1, Section 7

• While every noble morality develops from a triumphant affirmation of itself, slave morality from the outset says No to what is “outside,” what is “different,” what is “not itself”; and this No is its creative deed.
  • Essay 1, Section 10

• To be incapable of taking one’s enemies, one’s accidents, even one’s misdeeds seriously for very long—that is the sign of strong, full natures in whom there is an excess of the power to form, to mold, to recuperate and to forget[…] Such a man shakes off with a single shrug many vermin that eat deep into others; here alone genuine ‘love of one’s enemies’ is possible—supposing it to be possible at all on earth. How much reverence has a noble man for his enemies!—and such reverence is a bridge to love.—For he desires his enemy for himself, as his mark of distinction; he can endure no other enemy than one in whom there is nothing to despise and very much to honor!
  • Essay 1, Section 11

• To ask strength not to express itself as strength, not to be a will to dominate, a will to subjugate, a will to become master, a thirst for enemies and obstacles and triumphant celebrations, is just as absurd as to ask weakness to express itself as strength.
  • Essay 1, Section 13

• Without cruelty there is no festival: thus the longest and most ancient part of human history teaches — and in punishment there is so much that is festive!
  • Essay 2, Section 6

• To see others suffer does one good, to make others suffer even more: this is a hard saying but an ancient, mighty, human, all-too-human principle which even the apes might subscribe; for it has been said that in devising bizarre cruelties they anticipate man and are, as it were his “prelude.”
  • Essay 2, Section 6

• Now, when suffering is always the first of the arguments marshalled against life, as its most questionable feature, it is salutary to remember the times when people made the opposite assessment, because they could not do without making people suffer and saw first-rate magic in it, a veritable seductive lure to life. Perhaps pain – I say this to comfort the squeamish – did not hurt as much then as it does now; at least, a doctor would be justified in assuming this, if he had treated a Negro (taken as a representative for primeval man) for serious internal inflammations which would drive the European with the stoutest constitution to distraction; – they do not do that to Negroes. (The curve of human capacity for pain actually does seem to sink dramatically and almost precipitously beyond the first ten thousand or ten million of the cultural elite; and for myself, I do not doubt that in comparison with one night of pain endured by a single, hysterical blue stocking, the total suffering of all the animals who have been interrogated by the knife in scientific research is as nothing.)
  • Essay 2, Section 7

• That every will must consider every other will its equal — would be a principle hostile to life, an agent of the dissolution and destruction of man, an attempt to assassinate the future of man, a sign of weariness, a secret path to nothingness.
  • Essay 2, Section 11

• It is possible to imagine a society flushed with such a sense of power that it could afford to let its offenders go unpunished.
  • Essay 2, Section 10

• Generally speaking, punishment makes men hard and cold; it concentrates; it sharpens the feeling of alienation; it strengthens the power of resistance.
  • Second Essay, Aphorism 14

• 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.”
  • Essay 2, Section 15

• All instincts that do not discharge themselves outwardly turn inward — this is what I call the internalization of man: thus it was that man first developed what was later called his “soul.”
  • Essay 2, Section 16

• The advent of the Christian God, as the maximum god attained so far, was therefore accompanied by the maximum feeling of guilty indebtedness on earth.
  • Essay 2, Section 20

• If a temple is to be erected, a temple must be destroyed.
  • Essay 2, Section 24

• Is this even possible today?-But some day, in a stronger age than this decaying, self-doubting present, he must yet come to us, the redeeming man of great love and contempt, the creative spirit whose compeHing strength will not let him rest in any aloofness or any beyond, whose isolation is misunderstood by the people as if it were flight from reality-while it is only his’ absorption, immersion, penetration into reality, so that, when he one day emerges again into the light, he may bring home the redemption of this reality: its redemption from the curse that the hitherto reigning ideal has laid upon it. This man of the future, who will redeem us not only from the hitherto reigning ideal but also from that which was bound to grow out of it, the great nausea, the will to nothingness, nihilism; this bell-stroke of noon and of the great decision that liberates the will again and restores its goal to the earth and his hope to man; this Antichrist and antinihilist; this victor over God and nothingness- he must come one day.

• • Essay 2, Aphorism 24

• Whoever is completely and wholly an artist is to all eternity separated from the “real,” the actual; on the other hand, one can understand how he may sometimes weary to the point of desperation of the eternal “unreality” and falsity of his innermost existence- and that then he may well attempt what ia most forbidden him, to lay hold of actuality, for once actually to be.
  • Third Essay, Section 4

• Es sind im asketischen Ideale so viele Brücken zur Unabhängigkeit angezeigt, dass ein Philosoph nicht ohne ein innerliches Frohlocken und Händeklatschen die Geschichte aller jener Entschlossnen zu hören vermag, welche eines Tages Nein sagten zu aller Unfreiheit und in irgend eine Wüste giengen.
  • 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.
    • Essay 3, Aphorism 7, W. Kaufmann, trans., Basic Writings of Nietzsche (1992), p. 543

• That which Heraclitus avoided, however, is still the same at that which we shun today: the noise and democratic chatter of the Ephesians, their politics, their latest news of the “Empire,” … their market business of “today”—for we philosophers need to be spared one thing above all: everything to do with “today.” We reverence what is still, cold, noble, distant, past, and in general everything in the face of which the soul does not have to defend itself and wrap itself up.
  • Essay 3, Aphorism 8, W. Kaufmann, trans., in Basic Writings of Nietzsche (1992), p. 546

• Every one who has ever built anywhere a “new heaven” first found the power thereto in his own hell.
  • Essay 3, Aphorism 10

• A married philosopher belongs in comedy, that is my proposition-and as for that exception, Socrates-the malicious Socrates, it would seem, married ironically, just to demonstrate this proposition.
  • Essay 3, Aphorism 7

• The sick are the greatest danger for the healthy; it is not from the strongest that harm comes to the strong, but from the weakest.
  • Essay 3, Aphorism 14

• A strong and well-constituted man digests his experiences (deeds and misdeeds all included) just as he digests his meats, even when he has some tough morsels to swallow.
  • Essay 3, Aphorism 16

• O, what nowadays does science not conceal! How much, at least, it is meant to conceal!
  • Essay 3, Aphorism 23

Twilight of the Idols (1888)

• Plato ist langweilig.
  • Plato is boring.
    • What I Owe to the Ancients, 2

• To live alone one must be an animal or a god – says Aristotle. There is yet a third case: one must be both – a philosopher.
  • Maxims and Arrows, 3

• Wie? ist der Mensch nur ein Fehlgriff Gottes? Oder Gott nur ein Fehlgriff des Menschen?
  • What is it: is man only a blunder of God, or God only a blunder of man?
  • Variant: Which? Is man one of God’s blunders or is God one of man’s blunders?
    • Maxims and Arrows, 7

• Was mich nicht umbringt, macht mich stärker.
  • What does not kill me, makes me stronger.
    • Maxims and Arrows, 8

• Hat man sein warum? des Lebens, so verträgt man sich fast mit jedem wie?
  • He who has a Why? in life can tolerate almost any How?
    • Maxims and Arrows, 12
  • Variant translations:
  • He who has a why to live for can bear almost any how.
    • As translated in Man’s Search For Meaning (1946) by Viktor Frankl

• Der Mensch strebt nicht nach Glück; nur der Engländer thut das
  • Man does not strive for happiness; only the Englishman does that
    • Maxims and Arrows, 12

• Women are considered profound. Why? Because we never fathom their depths. But women aren’t even shallow.
  • Maxims and Arrows, 27

• Ohne Musik wäre das Leben ein Irrtum.
  • Without music, life would be a mistake.
    • Maxims and Arrows, 33

• Das Christenthum ist eine Metaphysik des Henkers…
  • Christianity is a metaphysics of the hangman…
    • The Four Great Errors, Section 7

• Liberalismus: auf deutsch Heerden-Verthierung …
  • Liberalism: in other words, herd-animalization.
    • Skirmishes of an Untimely Man Sect. 38

• Freedom is the will to be responsible for ourselves. It is to preserve the distance which separates us from other men. To grow more indifferent to hardship, to severity, to privation, and even to life itself.
  • Sect. 38

• Two great European narcotics, alcohol and Christianity.
  • What the Germans lack, 2; also in The Antichrist, Sec. 60, and Gay Science, Sec. 147

• Man believes that the world itself is filled with beauty — he forgets that it is he who has created it. He alone has bestowed beauty upon the world — alas! only a very human, an all too human, beauty.
  • Expeditions of an Untimely Man, 19

• My conception of freedom. — The value of a thing sometimes does not lie in that which one attains by it, but in what one pays for it — what it costs us. I give an example. Liberal institutions cease to be liberal as soon as they are attained: later on, there are no worse and no more thorough injurers of freedom than liberal institutions. One knows, indeed, what their ways bring: they undermine the will to power; they level mountain and valley, and call that morality; they make men small, cowardly, and hedonistic [genüsslich] — every time it is the herd animal that triumphs with them. Liberalism: in other words, herd-animalization …
  • Variant translation: Liberal institutions straightway cease from being liberal the moment they are soundly established: once this is attained no more grievous and more thorough enemies of freedom exist than liberal institutions.
  • Expeditions of an Untimely Man, 38

• It is my ambition to say in ten sentences what everyone else says in a whole book — what everyone else does not say in a whole book.
  • Things the Germans Lack, 51

• The doctrine of equality! … But there is no more venomous poison in existence: for it appears to be preached by justice itself, when it is actually the end of justice … “Equality to the equal; inequality to the unequal” — that would be true justice speaking: and its corollary, “never make the unequal equal”.
  • Die Lehre von der Gleichheit! … Aber es giebt gar kein giftigeres Gift: denn sie scheint von der Gerechtigkeit selbst gepredigt, während sie das Ende der Gerechtigkeit ist… “Den Gleichen Gleiches, den Ungleichen Ungleiches – das wäre die wahre Rede der Gerechtigkeit: und, was daraus folgt, Ungleiches niemals gleich machen.”
  • Expeditions of an Untimely Man, §48 Progress in my sense (Streifzüge eines Unzeitgemässen §48 Fortschritt in meinem Sinne). Chapter title also translated as: Skirmishes of an Untimely Man, Kaufmann/Hollingdale translation, and Raids of an Untimely Man, Richard Polt translation

• When one gives up Christian belief one thereby deprives oneself of the right to Christian morality. For the latter is absolutely not self-evident: one must make this point clear again and again, in spite of English shallowpates.
  • Expeditions of an Untimely Man §5

• We have already gone beyond whatever we have words for. In all talk there is a grain of contempt.
  • Expeditions of an Untimely Man §26
  • Wofür wir Worte haben, darüber sind wir auch schon hinaus. In allem Reden liegt ein Gran Verachtung.
  • Variant translation: That for which we find words is something already dead in our hearts. There is always a kind of contempt in the act of speaking.’

• These same institutions produce quite different effects while they are still being fought for; then they really promote freedom in a powerful way. On closer inspection it is war that produces these effects, the war for liberal institutions, which, as a war, permits illiberal instincts to continue. And war educates for freedom. For what is freedom? That one has the will to self-responsibility. That one maintains the distance which separates us. That one becomes more indifferent to difficulties, hardships, privation, even to life itself. That one is prepared to sacrifice human beings for one’s cause, not excluding oneself.

• Freedom means that the manly instincts which delight in war and victory dominate over other instincts, for example, over those of “pleasure.” The human being who has become free — and how much more the spirit who has become free — spits on the contemptible type of well-being dreamed of by shopkeepers, Christians, cows, females, Englishmen, and other democrats. The free man is a warrior. —

• How is freedom measured, in individuals as in nations? By the resistance which must be overcome, by the effort [Mühe] it costs to remain on top. The highest type of free men should be sought where the highest resistance is constantly overcome: five steps from tyranny, close to the threshold of the danger of servitude. This is true psychologically if by “tyrants” are meant inexorable and dreadful instincts that provoke the maximum of authority and discipline against themselves — most beautiful type: Julius Caesar — ; this is true politically too; one need only go through history. The nations which were worth something, became worth something, never became so under liberal institutions: it was great danger that made something of them that merits respect. Danger alone acquaints us with our own resources, our virtues, our armor and weapons, our spirit — and forces us to be strong …

• First principle: one must need to be strong — otherwise one will never become strong. — Those large hothouses [Treibhäuser] for the strong, for the strongest kind of human being that has ever been, the aristocratic commonwealths of the type of Rome or Venice, understood freedom exactly in the sense in which I understand the word freedom: as something one has and does not have, something one wants, something one conquers …

• Our institutions are no good any more: on that there is universal agreement. However, it is not their fault but ours. Once we have lost all the instincts out of which institutions grow, we lose institutions altogether because we are no longer good for them.

The Antichrist (1888)

• Einige werden posthum geboren.
  • Some are born posthumously.
    • Foreword

• What is good? All that heightens the feeling of power in man, the will to power, power itself. What is bad? All that is born of weakness. What is happiness? The feeling that power is growing, that resistance is overcome.
  • Sec. 2

• In Christianity neither morality nor religion come into contact with reality at any point.
  • Sec. 16

• Hope, in its stronger forms, is a great deal more powerful stimulans to life than any sort of realized joy can ever be. Man must be sustained in suffering by a hope so high that no conflict with actuality can dash it—so high, indeed, that no fulfilment can satisfy it: a hope reaching out beyond this world.
  • Sec. 23

• Love is a state in which a man sees things most decidedly as they are not.
  • Sec. 23

• …to the priestly class — decadence is no more than a means to an end. Men of this sort have a vital interest in making mankind sick, and in confusing the values of “good” and “bad,” “true” and “false” in a manner that is not only dangerous to life, but also slanders it.
  • Sec. 24

• The ‘Kingdom of Heaven’ is a condition of the heart — not something that comes ‘upon the earth’ or ‘after death’.
  • Sec. 34

• The ‘kingdom of God’ is not something one waits for; it has no yesterday or tomorrow, it does not come ‘in a thousand years’ — it is an experience within a heart; it is everywhere, it is nowhere…
  • Sec. 34

• The very word “Christianity” is a misunderstanding — in truth, there was only one Christian, and he died on the cross.
  • This has commonly been paraphrased: The last Christian died on the cross.
  • Sec. 39

• As an artistic triumph in psychological corruption … the Gospels, in fact, stand alone … Here we are among Jews: this is the first thing to be borne in mind if we are not to lose the thread of the matter. This positive genius for conjuring up a delusion of personal “holiness” unmatched anywhere else, either in books or by men; this elevation of fraud in word and attitude to the level of an art — all this is not an accident due to the chance talents of an individual, or to any violation of nature. The thing responsible is race.
  • Sec. 44

• The whole disaster was only made possible by the fact that there already existed in the world a similar megalomania, allied to this one in race, to wit, the Jewish.
  • Sec. 44

• What follows, then? That one had better put on gloves before reading the New Testament. The presence of so much filth makes it very advisable. One would as little choose early Christians for companions as Polish Jews: not that one need seek out an objection to them — neither has a pleasant smell.
  • Sec. 46

• “Do I still have to add that in the entire New Testament there is only one solitary figure one is obliged to respect? Pilate, the Roman governor. To take a Jewish affair seriously — he cannot persuade himself to do that. One Jew more or less — what does it matter ?… The noble scorn of a Roman before whom an impudent misuse of the word ‘truth’ was carried on has enriched the New Testament with the only expression which possesses value — which is its criticism, its annihilation even: ‘What is truth?…”
  • Sec. 46

• The God that Paul invented for himself, a God who “reduced to absurdity” “the wisdom of this world” (especially the two great enemies of superstition, philology and medicine), is in truth only an indication of Paul’s resolute determination to accomplish that very thing himself: to give one’s own will the name of God, Torah — that is essentially Jewish.
  • Sec. 47

• God created woman. And boredom did indeed cease from that moment — but many other things ceased as well! Woman was God’s second mistake.
  • Sec. 48

• Gegen die Langeweile kämpfen Götter selbst vergebens.
  • Against boredom even gods struggle in vain.
  • Sec. 48

• That faith makes blessed under certain circumstances, that blessedness does not make of a fixed idea a true idea, that faith moves no mountains but puts mountains where there are none: a quick walk through a madhouse enlightens one sufficiently about this.
  • Sec. 51; often paraphrased as: “A casual stroll through the lunatic asylum shows that faith does not prove anything”.

• »Glaube« heißt Nicht-wissen-wollen.
  • “Faith” means not wanting to know.
  • Sec. 52

• Whom do I hate most among the rabble of today? The socialist rabble, the chandala apostles, who undermine the instinct, the pleasure, the worker’s sense of satisfaction with his small existence–who make him envious, who teach him revenge. The source of wrong is never unequal rights but the claim of “equal” rights.
  • Sec. 57

• Nihilist und Christ: das reimt sich, das reimt sich nicht bloss.
  • Nihilist and Christian. They rhyme, and do not merely rhyme…
  • Sec. 58, as translated by R. J. Hollingdale. In German these words do rhyme; variant translation: Nihilist and Christian. They rhyme, and they do indeed do more than just rhyme.

• Christianity destroyed for us the whole harvest of ancient civilization, and later it also destroyed for us the whole harvest of Mohammedan civilization. The wonderful culture of the Moors in Spain, which was fundamentally nearer to us and appealed more to our senses and tastes than that of Rome and Greece, was trampled down ( — I do not say by what sort of feet — ) Why? Because it had to thank noble and manly instincts for its origin — because it said yes to life, even to the rare and refined luxuriousness of Moorish life! The crusaders later made war on something before which it would have been more fitting for them to have grovelled in the dust — a civilization beside which even that of our nineteenth century seems very poor and very “senile.” […] Intrinsically there should be no more choice between Islam and Christianity than there is between an Arab and a Jew. The decision is already reached; nobody remains at liberty to choose here. Either a man is a Chandala or he is not…. “War to the knife with Rome! Peace and friendship with Islam!”: this was the feeling, this was the act, of that great free spirit, that genius among German emperors, Frederick II.
  • Sec. 60

• I call Christianity the one great curse, the one great intrinsic depravity, the one great instinct for revenge for which no expedient is sufficiently poisonous, secret, subterranean, petty — I call it the one immortal blemish of mankind.

And time is reckoned from the dies nefastus with which this calamity began — from the first day of Christianity! Why not rather after its last day? From today? Revaluation of all values!

• • Sec. 62

Ecce Homo (1888)

Ecce Homo (Behold the Man) indicates the phrase Pontius Pilate used in presenting Jesus to the crowd after his scourging. Cross-references within Ecce Homo are by chapter and paragraph number, with the chapters referred to in abbreviated form as follows: F: Foreword, I: Why I Am So Wise, II: Why I Am So Clever, III: Why I Write Such Good Books, IV: Why I Am a Destiny.

• I am a disciple of the philosopher Dionysus, I would rather be a satyr than a saint.
  • From Preface

• Der Mensch der Erkenntniss muss nicht nur seine Feinde lieben, er muss auch seine Freunde hassen können.
  • The knight of knowledge must be able not only to love his enemies, but also to hate his friends.
    • Foreword, in the Oscar Levy authorized translation.
  • Variant translations:
  • The man of knowledge must be able not only to love his enemies but also to hate his friends.

• Man büßt es theuer, unsterblich zu sein: man stirbt dafür mehrere Male bei Lebzeiten.
  • One must pay dearly for immortality; one has to die several times while one is still alive.
  • 5

• And nothing on earth consumes a man more quickly than the passion of resentment.
  • “Why I Am So Wise”, 6

• I know my fate. One day my name will be associated with the memory of something tremendous — a crisis without equal on earth, the most profound collision of conscience, a decision that was conjured up against everything that had been believed, demanded, hallowed so far. I am no man, I am dynamite.
  • “Why I am a Destiny”, 1

• … was ihn nicht umbringt, macht ihn stärker
  • What does not kill him, makes him stronger.
  • “Why I Am So Wise”, 2
  • Cf. Twilight of the Idols (1888), “Maxims and Arrows”, aphorism 8: What does not destroy me, makes me stronger.

• I am a pure-blooded Polish nobleman, without a single drop of bad blood, certainly not German blood. When I look for my diametric opposite, an immeasurably shabby instinct, I always think of my mother and sister, — it would blaspheme my divinity to think I am related to this sort of canaille. The way my mother and sister treat me to this very day is a source of unspeakable horror; a real time bomb is at work here, which can tell with unerring certainty the exact moment I can be hurt — in my highest moments, … because at that point I do not have the strength to resist poison worms …
  • “Why I Am So Wise”, 3, as translated in The Anti-Christ, Ecce Homo, Twilight of the Idols, and Other Writings (2005) edited by Aaron Ridley and Judith Norman, p. 77

• All things considered, I could never have survived my youth without Wagnerian music. For I seemed condemned to the society of Germans. If a man wishes to rid himself of a feeling of unbearable oppression, he may have to take to hashish. Well, I had to take to Wagner…
  • “Why I am So Clever”, 6. Trans. Clifton P. Fadiman

• The world is poor for him who has never been sick enough for this ‘voluptuousness of hell’:
  • “Why I am Destiny”, 6. Trans. R. J. Hollingdale

• Daß man wird, was man ist, setzt voraus, daß man nicht im entferntesten ahnt, was man ist.
  • To become what one is, one must not have the faintest idea what one is.
  • “Why I am So Clever”, 9.
  • Variant translations:
  • Becoming what you are presupposes that you have not the slightest inkling what you are.

Dionysian-Dithyrambs (1888)

Dionysian-Dithyrambs (1888)

• Only fool! Only poet!
  Merely speaking colorfully,
  From fools’ masks shouting colorfully,
  Climbing about on deceptive word-bridges,
  On misleading rainbows,
  Between false heavens
  Rambling, lurking —
  Only fool! Only poet!

• The desert grows: woe to him in whom deserts hide …

• Do not forget, man, consumed by lust:
  you—are the stone, the desert, are death …

• You sacrifice yourself, your wealth torments you,
  You give away yourself,
  You don’t take care of yourself, you don’t love yourself;
  Great agony always compels you,
  The agony of an overflowing barn, an overabundant heart;
  But no one thanks you any longer …

• Dionysus:
  Be clever, Ariadne! …
  You have little ears; you have my ears:
  Put a clever word in them! —
  Must one not first hate oneself, in order to love oneself? …
  I am your labyrinth …

The Will to Power (1888)

• There is nothing to life that has value, except the degree of power—assuming that life itself is the will to power.
  • Book 1, sec. 55 (10 June 1887)

• In my opinion, Henrik Ibsen has become very German. With all his robust idealism and “Will to Truth,” he never dared to ring himself free from moral-illusionism which says “freedom,” and will not admit, even to itself, what freedom is: the second stage in the metamorphosis of the “Will to Power” in him who lacks it. In the first stage, one demands justice at the hands of those who have power. In the second, one speaks of “freedom,” that is to say, one wishes to “shake oneself free” from those who have power. In the third stage, one speaks of “equal rights”—that is to say, so long as one is not a predominant personality one wishes to prevent one’s competitors from growing in power.
  • Friedrich Nietzsche The Will to Power Vol 1 S. 86 p. 71 1914

• This is the antinomy: Insofar as we believe in morality we pass sentence on existence.
  • Sec. 6 (Notebook W II 2. Autumn 1887, KGW VIII, 2.237, KSA 12.571 [citations are to Nietzsche’s manuscripts by archival code, and the page numbers in which the entire section can be found transcribed therefrom, in the hardcover and softcover historical-critical editions]).

• Natürlicher ist unsere Stellung in politicis: wir sehen Probleme der Macht, des Quantums Macht gegen ein anderes Quantum. Wir glauben nicht an ein Recht, das nicht auf der Macht ruht, sich durchzusetzen: wir empfinden alle Rechte als Eroberungen.
  • More natural is our position in politics: We see problems of power, of one quantum of power against another. We do not believe in any right that is not supported by the power of enforcement: we feel all rights to be conquests.
    • Sec. 120 (Spring-Fall 1887)

• Moralities and religions are the principal means by which one can make whatever one wishes out of man, provided one possesses a superfluity of creative forces and can assert one’s will over long periods of time — in the form of legislation and customs.
  • Sec. 144 (Notebook N VII 1. April – June 1885, KGW VII, 3.198, KSA 11.478)

• A man as he ought to be: that sounds to us as insipid as “a tree as it ought to be.”
  • Sec. 332 (Notebook W II 3. November 1887 – March 1888, KGW VIII, 2.304, KSA 13.62)

• No more fiction for us: we calculate; but that we may calculate, we had to make fiction first.
  • Sec. 624, as translated by Tobias Dantzig in Number, the Language of Science. Fourth edition, New York: Doubleday 1954, p 141. See discussion of this entry for details.

• The stronger becomes master of the weaker, in so far as the latter cannot assert its degree of independence — here there is no mercy, no forbearance, even less a respect for “laws.”
  • Sec. 630 (Notebook W I 4. June – July 1885, KGW VII, 3.283, KSA 11.559)

• The individual itself as a struggle between parts (for food, space, etc.): its evolution tied to the victory or predominance of individual parts, to an atrophy, a “becoming an organ” of other parts. … The aristocracy in the body, the majority of the rulers (struggle between cells and tissues). … Slavery and division of labor: the higher type possible only through the subjugation of the lower, so that it becomes a function.
  • Sec. 660 : The Body as a Political Structure

• Morality is: the mediocre are worth more than the exceptions … I abhore Christianity with a deadly hatred.
  • Sec. 685 (Notebook W II 5. Spring 1888, KGW VIII, 3.95-7, KSA 13.303-5)

• The states in which we infuse a transfiguration and a fullness into things and poetize about them until they reflect back our fullness and joy in life…three elements principally: sexuality, intoxication and cruelty — all belonging to the oldest festal joys.
  • Sec. 801 (Notebook W II 1. Fall 1887, KGW VIII, 2.57-8, KSA 12.393-4)

• 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.
  • Sec. 804 (Notebook W II 2. Fall 1887, KGW VIII, 2.220-1, KSA 12.554-5)

• A declaration of war on the masses by higher men is needed! … Everything that makes soft and effeminate, that serves the end of the people or the feminine, works in favor of universal suffrage, i.e. the domination of the inferior men. But we should take reprisal and bring this whole affair to light and the bar of judgment.
  • Sec. 864 (Notebook W II 5. Spring 1888, KGW VIII, 3.157-62, KSA 13.365-70)

• 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.
  • Sec. 872 (Notebook W I 1. Spring 1884, KGW VII, 2.97-8, KSA 11.101-2)

• The homogenizing of European man … requires a justification: it lies in serving a higher sovereign species that stands upon the former which can raise itself to its task only by doing this. Not merely a master race whose sole task is to rule, but a race with its own sphere of life, with an excess of strength … strong enough to have no need of the tyranny of the virtue-imperative.
  • Sec. 898 (Notebook W II 1. Fall 1887, KGW VIII, 2.88-90, KSA 12.424-6)

• To those human beings who are of any concern to me I wish suffering, desolation, sickness, ill-treatment, indignities — I wish that they should not remain unfamiliar with profound self-contempt, the torture of self-mistrust, the wretchedness of the vanquished: I have no pity for them, because I wish them the only thing that can prove today whether one is worth anything or not — that one endures.
  • Sec 910 (Autumn 1887, KSA 12.513)

• There is only nobility of birth, only nobility of blood. When one speaks of “aristocrats of the spirit,” reasons are usually not lacking for concealing something. As is well known, it is a favorite term among ambitious Jews. For spirit alone does not make noble. Rather, there must be something to ennoble the spirit. What then is required? Blood.
  • Sec. 942 (Notebook W I 5. August – September 1885, KGW VII, 3.412, KSA 11.678)

• The possibility has been established for the production of…a master race, the future “masters of the earth”…made to endure for millennia — a higher kind of men who…employ democratic Europe as their most pliant and supple instrument for getting hold of the destinies of the earth.
  • Sec. 960 (Notebook W I 8. Fall 1885 – Fall 1886, KGW VIII, 1.85-6, KSA 12.87-8)

Philosophy in the Tragic Age of the Greeks (posthumous)

as translated by Marianne Cowan (1962)

• I tell the story of these philosophers in simplified form: I merely wish to bring out in each system that point which represents a piece of the personality, and which history must preserve as a part of what is irrefutable and indisputable.

• My task is to throw a light on that which we must always love and revere, of which no subsequent knowledge can rob us: man in his greatness.

• The only thing of interest in a refuted system is the personal element. It alone is what is forever irrefutable.
  • p. 25

• Whoever wishes to justify [Philosophy] must show … to what ends a healthy culture uses and has used philosophy.
  • p. 27

• Where could we find an instance of cultural pathology which philosophy restored to health? If philosophy ever manifested itself as helpful, redeeming, or prophylactic, it was in a healthy culture. The sick, it made even sicker.
  • p. 27

• The very reason [the Greeks] got so far is that they knew how to pick up the spear and throw it onward from the point where others had left it. Their skill in the art of fruitful learning was admirable. We ought to be learning from our neighbors precisely as the Greeks learned from theirs, not for the sake of learned pedantry but rather using everything we learn as a foothold which will take us up as high, and higher, than our neighbor.
  • p. 30

• The quest for philosophical beginnings is idle, for everywhere in all beginnings we find only the crude, the unformed, the empty and the ugly. What matters in all things is the higher levels.
  • p. 30

• … the republic of creative minds: each giant calling to his brother through the desolate intervals of time. And undisturbed by the wanton noises of the dwarfs that creep past beneath them, their high spirit-converse continues.
  • p. 32

• Philosophy leaps ahead on tiny toeholds; hope and intuition lend wings to its feet. Calculating reason lumbers heavily behind, looking for better footholds, for reason too wants to reach that alluring goal which its divine comrade has long since reached.
  • p. 40

• 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.
  • p. 43

• The concept of greatness is changeable, in the realm of morality as well as in that of esthetics. And so philosophy starts by legislating greatness.
  • p. 43

• “Grant me, ye gods, but one certainty,” runs Parmenides’ prayer, “and if it be but a log’s breadth on which to lie. on which to ride upon the sea of uncertainty. Take away everything that comes-to-be, everything lush, colorful, blossoming, illusory, everything that charms and is alive. Take all these for yourselves and grant me but the one and only, poor empty certainty.”
  • p. 81

Bartlett’s Familiar Quotations, 10th ed. (1919)

Quotes reported in Bartlett’s Familiar Quotations, 10th ed. (1919).

Maxims

• The good generally displeases us when it is beyond our ken.

• Everyone who enjoys thinks that the principal thing to the tree is the fruit, but in point of fact the principal thing to it is the seed.—Herein lies the difference between them that create and them that enjoy.

• He that prefers the beautiful to the useful in life will, undoubtedly, like children who prefer sweetmeats to bread, destroy his digestion and acquire a very fretful outlook on the world.

• On the heights it is warmer than people in the valleys suppose, especially in winter. The thinker recognizes the full import of this simile.

• The value of many men and books rests solely on their faculty for compelling all to speak out the most hidden and intimate things.

• 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.

• I teach you the Overman. Man is something which shall be surpassed.
  • Thus Spake Zarathustra.

Disputed

• Rather than cope with the unbearable loneliness of their condition men will continue to seek their shattered God, and for His sake they will love the very serpents that dwell among His ruins.
  • As quoted by J. P. Stern in an interview conducted by Bryan Magee in The Great Philosophers : A History of Western Philosophy (1987)

“The individual has always had to struggle to keep from being overwhelmed by the tribe. If you try it, you will be lonely often, and sometimes frightened. But no price is too high to pay for the privilege of owning yourself.” This quote is misattributed to Nietzsche but I took my time to look in all of his books and did not find it. However I found that it belongs to ―Rudyard Kipling. I found this evidence here: http://izquotes.com/author/rudyard-kipling

• “You know these things as thoughts, but your thoughts are not your experiences, they are an echo and after-effect of your experiences: as when your room trembles when a carriage goes past. I however am sitting in the carriage, and often I am the carriage itself.”

• Attributed across social media to TSZ. Is actually quoted in TSZ, Penguin Classics, Reg Hollingdale translation, in the introduction pg 12. Attributed to ‘posthumously produced notes’ [Nachlass?] Hollingdale continues.’ In a man who thinks like this, the dichotomy between thinking and feeling, intellect and passion, has really disappeared. He feels his thoughts. He can fall in love with an idea. An idea can make him ill.’

• Man should be trained for war and woman for the recreation of the warrior.
  • As quoted by Joseph Goebbels as reported by Susan Brownmiller, Against Our Will, Men Women and Rape, (1975) note 3, at 48. the original statement was attributed to Nietzsche.; as quoted in [https://books.google.com/books?id=ThfzGvSvQ2UC&pg=PA7&source=gbs_toc_r&cad=4#v=onepage&q&f=false

War Crimes Against Women: Prosecution in International War Crimes Tribunals], Kelly Dawn Askin, (1997), p.49.

 

Misattributed

• A moral system valid for all is basically immoral.
  • Generally attributed to Nietzsche, this is a quotation from Curtis Cate’s Friedrich Nietzsche: A Biography (2003) and is the author’s interpretation of Nietzsche’s Aphorism 221 (Beyond Good and Evil)

• Meaning and morality of one’s life come from within oneself. Healthy, strong individuals seek self-expansion by experimenting and by living dangerously. Life consists of an infinite number of possibilities, and the healthy person explores as many of them as possible. Religions that teach pity, self-contempt, humility, self-restraint and guilt are incorrect. The good life is ever-changing, challenging, devoid of regret, intense, creative, and risky.
  • Attributed to Nietzsche on quotes sites and on social media, the original quotation is from An Introduction to the History of Psychology by B. R. Hergenhahn (2008, page 226) and is the author’s summary of Nietzsche’s ideas: “The meaning and morality of one’s life come from within oneself. Healthy, strong individuals seek self-expansion by experimenting, by living dangerously. Life consists of an almost infinite number of possibilities, and the healthy person (the superman) explores as many of them as possible. Religions or philosophies that teach pity, humility, submissiveness, self-contempt, self-restraint, guilt, or a sense of community are simply incorrect. […] For Nietzsche, the good life is ever-changing, challenging, devoid of regret, intense, creative, and risky.”
• Those who dance appear insane to those who cannot hear the music.

Quotes about Nietzsche

• Absolute nothingness is an ultimate ground of a purely apophatic mysticism, and it is even more primal in Mahayana Buddhism, just as it has been resurrected in the deepest expressions of a uniquely modern imagination. Nietzsche is the only Western thinker who has fully thought an absolute nothingness, although that nothingness is a deep even if elusive ground of Hegelian thinking, and of all of the fullest expressions of modern dialectical thinking and vision.
  • Thomas J. J. Altizer, Godhead and the Nothing (2003), Preface

• Only Nietzsche and Blake know a wholly fallen Godhead, a Godhead which is an absolutely alien Nihil, but the full reversal of that Nihil is apocalypse itself, an apocalypse which is an absolute joy, and Blake and Nietzsche are those very writers who have most evoked that joy.
  • Thomas J. J. Altizer, in Godhead and the Nothing (2003), Preface

• Here we stand before a question which, from the perspective of the Christian proclamation, stands over every individualistic and every collectivistic humanism, old or new. It excludes neither individualism nor collectivism. It bears on the individual and also on society, but always on the concrete individual as distinct from other individuals, and always on the society founded on free reciprocal responsibility. It defends discipline in the face of Nietzsche and freedom in the face of Marx.
  • Karl Barth, “The Christian Proclamation Here and Now” (1949)

• It is another matter, and one that objectively considered is to the praise of Nietzsche, that he thus hurled himself against the strongest and not the weakest point in the opposing front. With his discovery of the Crucified and His host he discovered the Gospel itself in a form which was missed even by the majority of its champions, let alone its opponents, in the 19th century. And by having to attack it in this form, he has done us the good office of bringing before us the fact that we have to keep to this form as unconditionally as he rejected it, in self-evident antithesis not only to him, but to the whole tradition on behalf of which he made this final hopeless sally.
  • Karl Barth, Church Dogmatics, Ⅲ, 2.(1960), 45. Man in his Determination as the Covenant-partner of God

• An extreme, unconditional human yearning was expressed for the first time by Nietzsche independently of moral goals or of serving God. … Ardor that doesn’t address a dramatically articulated moral obligation is a paradox. … If we stop looking at states of ardor as simply preliminary to other and subsequent conditions grasped as beneficial, the state I propose seems a pure play of lightning, merely an empty consummation. Lacking any relation to material benefits such as power or the growth of the state (or of God or a Church or a party), this consuming can’t even be comprehended. … I’ll have to face the same difficulties as Nietzsche—putting God and the good behind him, though all ablaze with the ardor possessed by those who lay down their lives for God or the good.
  • Georges Bataille, On Nietzsche (1945), pp. xx-xxii

• It is Nietzsche’s merit that he was aware that to philosophize is radically problematic in the cultural, historicist dispensation. He recognized the terrible intellectual and moral risks involved. At the center of his every thought was the question “How is it possible to do what I am doing?” He tried to apply to his own thought the teachings of cultural relativism. This practically nobody else does. For example, Freud says that men are motivated by desire for sex and power, but he did not apply those motives to explain his own science or his own scientific activity. But if he can be a true scientist, i.e., motivated by love of the truth, so can other men, and his description of their motives is thus mortally flawed. Or if he is motivated by sex or power, he is not a scientist, and his science is only one means among many possible to attain those ends. This contradiction runs throughout the natural and social sciences. They give an account of things that cannot possibly explain the conduct of their practitioners.
  • Allan Bloom, The Closing of the American Mind (New York: 1988), pp. 203-204

• Kierkegaard’s criticism of actual Christianity is an inner one; he does not confront Christianity, as, for example, Nietzsche does, with an alleged higher value, and test it by that and reject it.
  • Martin Buber, criticizing Nietzsche’s concept of “Will to Power,” Between Man and Man (1965), p. 61

• Greatness by nature includes a power, but not a will to power. … The great man, whether we comprehend him in the most intense activity of his work or in the restful equipoise of his forces, is powerful, involuntarily and composedly powerful, but he is not avid for power. What he is avid for is the realization of what he has in mind, the incarnation of the spirit.
  • Martin Buber, criticizing Nietzsche’s concept of “Will to Power,” Between Man and Man (1965), p. 150

• It is Nietzsche’s merit to have critically placed the problem of the relationship between life and truth and to have denounced the confusion between truth and what sustains, justifies, and legitimizes. However, the Nietzschean chant to life, the cry for the intensification of life to the detriment of “truth” etc., are simply Nietzsche’s choice, not a part of his scientific (specifically, psychological) results. … The way of truth, if it is really undertaken — and not only “proclaimed” in the apologetic discourse of the philosopher as a “seeker of truth” — must necessarily — so is the goal of my argument — lead to the non-being. … If Nietzsche frightens you, then take your moral ideas to their last consequences, which will lead one to embrace a negative ethic, that is, an ethic in which truth will have absolute primacy over life.
  • Julio Cabrera, Project of Negative Ethics (1989), Chapter 1

• If Nietzsche had not ended in imbecility, Nietzscheism would end in imbecility. Thinking in isolation and with pride ends in being an idiot. Every man who will not have softening of the heart must at last have softening of the brain.
  • G. K. Chesterton, Orthodoxy (1908), Chapter III – The Suicide of thought

• If you’ve read Thus Spake Zarathustra [Nietzsche] you get an idea of the evolution of man and the five planetary initiations which all the Masters have passed through and become supermen. They have become Gods.
  • Benjamin Creme in Questions & Answers Share International March 2018

• Since Nietzsche frequently intends to shock his readers, they may be in a position to learn from him—providing they admit that what is shocking may also be true, and that one has not refuted a thinker by recognizing the shocking consequences of his thought.
  • Werner Dannhauser, Nietzsche’s View of Socrates (Ithaca: 1974), p. 21

• Socrates was the plebeian dissector of an aristocratic society; Nietzsche is the aristocratic dissector of a plebeian society.
  • Werner Dannhauser, Nietzsche’s View of Socrates (Ithaca: 1974), p. 37

• Nietzsche was a man with a noble vision of man’s future. His own delicacy, integrity, and courage shine through his writing. He was also free of the crude racism which was to be an important element of fascism, and he had only contempt for political anti-Semitism. But the fact remains that in various ways Nietzsche influenced fascism. Fascism may have abused the words of Nietzsche, but his words are singularly easy to abuse.
  • Werner J. Dannhauser, “Nietzsche”, in Leo Strauss and Joseph Cropsey, eds. History of political philosophy 3rd ed. (1987)

• The spirit of scientific investigation never ceased to impress [Nietzsche] as uniquely favorable not only for achieving knowledge but also for furnishing an atmosphere of dryness and clarity within which a man of genuinely intellectual conscience might function.
  • Arthur C. Danto, Nietzsche as Philosopher (New York: 1965), p. 70

• Nothing has changed in the past few years to make Hayek’s, Schumpeter’s, and Mellon’s arguments stronger intellectually against the critiques of Keynes and Friedman than they were 60 years ago. On substance, their current victory is inexplicable. But their triumph, epitomized by the Tea Party movement and its hostility to government action, can be explained by our fourth horseman: Friedrich Nietzsche in his role as psychologist of human ressentiment. Nietzsche talked about the losers — or rather, about those who thought they were the losers. He looked at those who saw themselves as weak and poor — rather than strong and rich — and saw trouble.
  • J. Bradford DeLong, “The Four Horsemen of the Teapocalypse”, Foreign Policy (November 28, 2010)

• Friedrich Nietzsche saw—through the mists of his contempt for all things English—an even more cosmic message in Darwin: God is dead. If Nietzsche is the father of existentialism, then perhaps Darwin deserves the title of grandfather.
  • Daniel Dennett, Darwin’s Dangerous Idea (1995), Chap. 3 : Universal Acid

• In the wake of Darwin’s publication of Origin of Species, Friedrich Nietzsche rediscovered what Hume had already toyed with: the idea that an eternal recurrence of blind, meaningless variation—chaotic, pointless shuffling of matter and law—would inevitably spew up worlds whose evolution through time would yield the apparently meaningful stories of our lives. This idea of eternal recurrence became a cornerstone of his nihilism, and thus part of the foundation of what became existentialism.
  • Daniel Dennett, Darwin’s Dangerous Idea (1995), Chap. 7 : Priming Darwin’s Pump

• Friedrich Nietzsche published his Genealogy of Morals in 1887. He was the second great sociobiologist, and, unlike Hobbes, he was inspired (or provoked) by Darwinism.
  • Daniel Dennett, Darwin’s Dangerous Idea (1995), Chap. 16 : On the Origin of Morality

• In the best of cases, the philosopher is not simply one who ascends from the cave and perceives the sun. Rather, he is one who out of the depths of his own creativity becomes a new sun for mankind.
  • Bruce Detwiler, Nietzsche and the Politics of Aristocratic Radicalism, p. 29

• Only a professor of paradox could rank the obscure and dogmatic fragments of Heraclitus above the mellowed wisdom and the developed art of Plato. With all his philology, Nietzsche never quite penetrated to the spirit of the Greeks; never learned the lesson that moderation and self-knowledge (as taught by the Delphic inscriptions and the greater· philosophers) must bank, without extinguishing, the fires of passion and desire; that Apollo must limit Dionysus. Some have described Nietzsche as a pagan; but he was not that: neither Greek pagan like Pericles nor German pagan like Goethe; he lacked the balance and restraint that made these men strong. “I shall give back to men the serenity which is the condition of all culture,” he writes, but alas, how can one give what one has not? …Nietzsche here fell short of that historical sense which he lauded as so necessary to philosophy; or he would have seen the doctrine of meekness and humbleness of heart as a necessary antidote to the violent and warlike virtues of the barbarians who nearly destroyed, in the first millennium of the Christian era, that very culture to which Nietzsche always returns for nourishment and refuge. Surely this wild emphasis on power and movement is the echo of a feverish and chaotic age? This supposedly universal “will to power” hardly expresses the quiescence of the Hindu, the calm of the Chinese, or the satisfied routine of the medieval peasant. Power is the idol of some of us; but most of us long rather for security and peace…Foiled in his search for love, he turned upon woman with a bitterness unworthy of a philosopher, and unnatural in a man; missing parentage and losing friendship, he never knew that the finest moments of life come through mutuality and comradeship, rather than from domination and war. He did not live long enough, or widely enough, to mature his half-truths into wisdom. Perhaps if he had lived longer he would have turned his strident chaos into a harmonious philosophy. Truer of him than of the Jesus to whom he applied them, were his own words: “He died too early; he himself would have revoked his doctrine had he Teached” a riper age; “noble enough to revoke he was!” But death had other plans…He spoke with bitterness, but with invaluable sincerity; and his thought went through the clouds and cobwebs of the modern mind like cleansing lightning and a-rushing wind. The air of European philosophy is clearer and fresher now because Nietzsche wrote.
  • Will Durant, The Story of Philosophy

• In Nietzsche’s view, the death of God must also spell the death of Man—that is to say, the end of a certain lordly, overweening humanism—if absolute power is not simply to be transplanted from the one to the other. Otherwise humanism will always be secretly theological. It will be a continuation of God by other means.
  • Terry Eagleton, Reason, Faith, and Revolution: Reflections on the God Debate (2009), Chapter 1. The Scum of the Earth

• Nietzsche sought a new sort of aristocracy of super- or above-men, which would be the ultimate goal of civilized existence. The sources of this Nietzschean idea were several. Darwin’s theory of evolution suggested to Nietzsche the notion of humanity as an evolving species, although Nietzsche emphatically rejected the concept of the superman or above-man as the outcome of a biological process; in a sense, the superman or above-man is a spiritualized form of Darwinism.
  • Alan Ebenstein, Hayek’s Journey: The Mind of Friedrich Hayek (2003), Ch. 2. German and Viennese Intellectual Thought

• Nietzsche was the first to release the desire to know from the sovereignty of knowledge itself: to re-establish the distance and exteriority that Aristotle cancelled.
  • Michel Foucault, Lectures on the Will to Know (1970), p. 5

• The only valid tribute to thought such as Nietzsche’s is precisely to use it, to deform it, to make it groan and protest. And if commentators then say that I am being faithful or unfaithful to Nietzsche, that is of absolutely no interest.
  • Michel Foucault, “Prison Talk”, From Magazine Litteraire 101, June 1975, published in Power/Knowledge (1980), edited by Colin Gordon

• The degree of introspection achieved by Nietzsche had never been achieved by anyone, nor is it ever likely to be achieved again.
  • Sigmund Freud, in remarks (28 October 1908), as reported in Freud, Adler, and Jung (1980) by Walter Arnold Kaufmann, p. 265
  • Variant: Freud several times said of Nietzsche that he had a more penetrating knowledge of himself than any other man who ever lived or was likely to live.
    • As reported in Freud, Adler, and Jung (1980) by Walter Arnold Kaufmann, p. 266 (part of this statement has sometimes been taken as a direct quote of Freud, rather than a summation of what he said).

• Nietzsche seems sometimes to replace the “transcendence” which stands at the center of traditional accounts—the existence of a transcendent God, or, failing that, a transcendental viewpoint—with that of a continually transcending activity. … There is no single, final perspective, but given any one perspective, we can always go beyond it.
  • Raymond Geuss, Outside Ethics (Princeton: 2005), pp. 8-9

• Although Nietzsche would not perhaps always have been pleased to see it presented in this way, his basic project, as he recognises, is a variant of Christianity, a religion which he interprets, in turn, as a slightly debased form of Platonism (‘Platonism for the common folk’).
  • Raymond Geuss, Changing the Subject : Philosophy from Socrates to Adorno (2017), Chap. 8 : Nietzsche

• Nietzsche was not a social theorist, but a poet, a rebel, and innovator. His aristocracy was neither of birth nor of purse; it was of the spirit. In that respect Nietzsche was an anarchist, and all true anarchists were aristocrats.
  • Emma Goldman, Living My Life, p. 194

• If in Nietzsche’s thinking the prior tradition of Western thought is gathered and completed in a decisive respect, then the confrontation with Nietzsche becomes one with all Western thought hitherto.
  • Martin Heidegger, Nietzsche, D. F. Krell, trans. (New York: 1991), p. 4

• Nietzsche … does not shy from conscious exaggeration and one-sided formulations of his thought, believing that in this way he can most clearly set in relief what in his vision and in his inquiry is different from the run-of-the-mill.
  • Martin Heidegger, Nietzsche, D. F. Krell, trans. (New York: 1991), p. 50

• One indication of the importance of Nietzsche is the pantheon of major twentieth century intellectuals whom he influenced. He was an influence on Jean-Paul Sartre and Hermann Hesse, major writers, both of whom won Nobel Prizes. He was an influence on thinkers as diverse in their outlooks as Ayn Rand and Michel Foucault. Rand’s politics are classically liberal — while Foucault’s are far Left, including a stint as a member of the French Communist Party. There is the striking fact that Nietzsche was an atheist, but he was an influence on Martin Buber, one of the most widely-read theologians of the twentieth century. And Nietzsche said harsh things about the Jews … but he was nonetheless admired by Chaim Weizmann, a leader of the Zionist movement and first president of Israel.
  • Stephen Hicks, Nietzsche and the Nazis (2006, 2010), Ockham’s Razor, ISBN: 9492262049, pp. 51-52

• Rohde became more and more firmly bound to the bourgeois world, its institutions and accepted opinions. … The contrast between the two natures makes Rohde and Nietzsche exemplary representatives of two distinctive worlds. In their youth they both live in the realm of boundless possibilities and feel an affinity through the exuberance of their noble aspirations. Subsequently they go in opposite directions. Nietzsche remains young, leaving concrete reality as his task assumes existential import. Rohde grows old, bourgeois, stable, and skeptical. Hence courage is a fundamental trait in Nietzsche, plaintive self-irony in Rohde. … Rohde retained the interests but not the attitudes of his youth; he looked to the world of the Greeks for the object of his contemplation rather than the norm of obligation.
  • Karl Jaspers, Nietzsche, C. Walraff and F. Schmitz, trans. (Baltimore: 1997), pp. 61-62

• If you try to put yourself into the mood of someone who is always alone, as Nietzsche was, you realize that your own consciousness then begins to stare into your own face. You are always your own speaker and your own listener; you are always looking into your own light, into your own eyes. And then you can well personify consciousness as your daily partner.
  • C. G. Jung, Nietzsche’s Zarathustra (1988), p. 16

• The realization that our mental functioning is largely irrational was arrived at by several thinkers at the same time, including Friedrich Nietzsche, … Freud, who was much influenced by both Darwin and Nietzsche … was its most profound and articulate exponent.
  • Eric Kandel, The Age of Insight (2012)

• The philosopher John Searle once told me that reading Nietzsche was like drinking cognac — a sip was good, but you didn’t want to drink the whole bottle.
  • Gary Kamiya, “Falling Out With Superman”, The New York Times, January 23, 2000

• A system must necessarily be based on premises that by its very nature it cannot question. This was one of Nietzsche’s objections, although he did not put the point this way himself. The systematic thinker starts with a number of primary assumptions from which he draws a net of inferences and thus deduces his system; but he cannot, from within the system, establish the truth of his premises. He takes them for granted, and even if they should seem “self-evident” to him, they may not seem so to others. They are in that sense arbitrary and reducible to the subjective make-up of the thinker.
  • Walter Kaufmann, Nietzsche, p. 79

• Nietzsche [in The Gay Science § 143] denounced monotheism for preaching the existence of one Normalgott as a single norm which suggests somehow that there is also a Normalmensch: a norm to which all men must conform and a bar to the development of individuality. It was the advantage of polytheism, Nietzsche contends, that it allowed for a “multiplicity of norms.”
  • Walter Kaufmann, Nietzsche, p. 308

• Nietzsche was the first major German philosopher who was not strongly influenced by Kant. Like Hegel and many other German philosophers, he was steeped in Goethe, but he was free of the fateful compulsion to reconcile Goethe with Kant.
  • Walter Kaufmann, Nietzsche, Heidegger, and Buber (1980)

• Nietzsche may have been seriously wrong in his understanding of modernity: he may have mistaken one part of the story—the rise of secularism—for the whole tale; but few men have struggled as honestly with the problem of nihilism as he.
  • Roger Kimball, “The Perversions of M. Foucault”, The New Criterion, March 1993

• All in all, Nietzsche was an opponent of socialism, an opponent of nationalism, and an opponent of racial thinking. Apart from these bents of mind, he might have made an outstanding Nazi.
  • Ernst Krieck, Nazi theoretician (1882-1947), as quoted by Max Whyte, “The Uses and Abuses of Nietzsche in the Third Reich: Alfred Baeumler’s ‘Heroic Realism.’” Journal of Contemporary History Vol 43, no. 2 (2008), p. 188

• If every second of our lives recurs an infinite number of times, we are nailed to eternity as Jesus Christ was nailed to the cross. It is a terrifying prospect. In the world of eternal return the weight of unbearable responsibility lies heavy on every move we make. That is why Nietzsche called the idea of eternal return the heaviest of burdens.
  • Milan Kundera The Unbearable Lightness of Being, M. Heim, trans. (New York: 1984)

• Nietzsche’s arrival in modern philosophy signaled an unprecedented necessity: “probity”, “intellectual conscience”, Enlightenment radicalized by a new bravery that scorns any comforts like God.
  • Laurence Lampert, Leo Strauss and Nietzsche (1997), p. 5

• Strauss’ whole study indicates that noble nature as Nietzsche presents it—no, embodies it—replaces divine nature as Plato presents it.
  • Laurence Lampert, Leo Strauss and Nietzsche (1997), p. 15

• The morality of Nietzsche is a mere innovation. The first is an advance because no one who did not admit the validity of the old maxim could see reason for accepting the new one, and anyone who accepted the old would at once recognize the new as an extension of the same principle. If he rejected it, he would have to reject it as a superfluity, something that went too far, not as something simply heterogeneous from his own ideas of value. But the Nietzschean ethic can be accepted only if we are ready to scrap traditional morals as a mere error and then to put ourselves in a position where we can find no ground for any value judgments at all.
  • C. S. Lewis, in The Abolition of Man (1943) Chapter 2. The Way

• By the middle of the [Eighteenth] century what Nietzsche was later to call a transvaluation of all values was in full blast. Nothing sacred was spared—not even the classical spirit that had been the chief attainment of the Renaissance—and of the ideas and attitudes that were attacked not many survived. It was no longer necessary to give even lip service to the old preposterous certainties, whether theological or political, aesthetic or philosophical. In France, Voltaire, Rousseau and Diderot were making a bonfire of all the ancient Christian superstitions; in England Gibbon was preparing to revive the long dormant art of history and Adam Smith was laying the foundations of the new science of economics; in Germany Kant was pondering an ethical scheme that that would give the Great Commandment a rational basis.
  • H. L. Mencken, Treatise on the Gods (1930), Ch. 5

• There are critics who see in all this proof that Nietzsche showed signs of insanity from early manhood, but as a matter of fact it was his abnormally accurate vision and not a vision gone awry, that made him stand so aloof from his fellows. In the vast majority of those about him he saw the coarse metal of sham and pretense beneath the showy gilding of learning. … It was inevitable that he should perceive the difference between his own fanatical striving for the truth and the easy dependence upon precedent and formula which lay beneath their booming bombast.
  • H. L. Mencken, The Philosophy of Friedrich Nietzsche (1908), p. 27-28

• To be sure, one comes no closer to the truth if, in reaction to these and similar doctrines, one calls the state, with Nietzsche, the coldest of all cold monsters.
  • Ludwig von Mises, Liberalism

• In the coarsest sense, to say that Nietzsche’s style is important is to say that his writing is unusual and idiosyncratic. This in turn is just to say that his works do not exhibit the features we have been accustomed to expect of philosophical treatises. And, forgetting that philosophical treatises themselves have been written in the most various styles imaginable, this has often been taken to show that Nietzsche’s works are not, in some sense, philosophical.
  • Alexander Nehamas, Nietzsche: Life as Literature, Ch. 1, The Most Multifarious Art of Style

• The one reaction Nietzsche cannot tolerate is indifference, and this is what his use of hyperbole is designed to eliminate.
  • Alexander Nehamas, Nietzsche: Life as Literature (1985), p. 28

• Loyalty to life, according to Nietzsche, begins in the resolve to seek life’s principle with itself and not in something outside it—not, for example, in a God or supernature that, by being conceived as all that life is not—infinite, eternal, changeless, perfect goodness, perfect plenitude—stands as antithetical to life.
  • David Norton, Personal Destinies: A Philosophy of Ethical Individualism (1976), p. 80

• Along with ignoring the French Revolution, one of the most telling features of the new books on atheism [cf. new atheism ] is their consistent refusal to engage Nietzsche, who, if read correctly, ought to make atheists squirm far more than he has ever caused discomfit to believers. ¶ First, he turned the critical methods of the Enlightenment against their inventors and showed that Enlightened faith in progress was just as illusory as belief in an afterlife. Second, he demanded that a critical philosophy stop pretending to be a substitute religion (he shrewdly called Hegelian idealism “insidious theology”). Third, he insisted on the indissoluble bond between Christian doctrine and Christian morality and poured contempt on novelists like George Eliot for supposing otherwise […] ¶ Perhaps this why Nietzsche said in Ecce Homo, “the most serious Christians have always been well disposed toward me.” For they at least, unlike Dawkins, Harris, Daniel Dennett and Christopher Hitchens, can see that after Nietzsche a moral critique of the Christian God has become impossible, for it denies the very presupposition that makes its own critique possible. Like Abraham asking if the Lord God of justice could not himself do justice, protest atheism must accept the very norms that Nietzsche showed are essential to the meaning of belief. In Nietzsche alone one reads what the world really looks like si Deus non sit [if God does not exist].
  • Edward T. Oakes, “Atheism and Violence”, First Things, 29 Jan 2008, URL accessed 16 April 2012

• It will be seen by the discriminating that Nietzsche in… bidding his renaissant aristocrats to ignore morality in favour of their own individual needs was, in reality, allotting them a difficult task, and one that from the moral point of view is often commended. Yet the distinction must be insisted upon that an individually determined adjustment of means to ends is contrary to the very spirit of popular morality, however externally it may appear to be high morality. For the aristocrat in determining his own mode of life specifically repudiates any universal value in it. He not only does not accept the common mode of life, but he has no desire to make his own mode common. That, in fact, is the distinction between the aristocrat and the demagogue turned tyrant. The mark of the plebeian raised to power is that he desires his values to become universal. He desires all men to say, do, think and feel as he says, does, thinks and feels. But the true aristocrat desires that all men shall be like himself free, self-ruling, self-choosing. But this reticence and self-denial are also difficult to maintain in the face of popular sophistry. Nietzsche, however, makes it clear that war against popular sophistry is the normal condition of the aristocrat. To develop individual power there is needed a long purpose and a great resistance; and what resistance can be greater than that offered by the multitude? Hence, in one sense, the multitude with their gods are indispensable to the creation of the powerful man. As a sort of battlefield and place of exercise, the populace serve the needs of the aristocrat.
  • Alfred Richard Orage, Nietzsche in Outline & Aphorism (1910)

• Admittedly there were cliques before Wagner. But there was nothing quite like the Wagnerians (unless later the Freudians): a pressure group, a party, a church with rituals. But I shall say no more about this, since Nietzsche has said it all much better.
  • Karl Popper, Unended Quest

• Hume and Nietzsche are bird so the same feather.
  • Nicholas Rescher, Rationality

• Nietzsche, the child of a Lutheran pastor, radicalized this argument, painting all of Christianity—indeed all of Western religion, going back to Judaism—as a slave morality, the psychic revolt of the lower orders against their betters. Before there was religion or even morality, there was the sense and sensibility of the master class. The master looked upon his body—its strength and beauty, its demonstrated excellence and reserves of power—and saw and said that it was good. … The modern residue of that slave revolt, Nietzsche makes clear, is found not in Christianity, or even in religion, but in the nineteenth-century movements for democracy and socialism …
  • Corey Robin, “Garbage and Gravita”, The Nation (June 7, 2010)

• In brief, as is suggested by Plato’s three voyages to Sicily, his revolutionary politics is not only a purging of decadence but also a powerful portrait of his temptation to rule, regardless of how dangerous that temptation may be. Some of my readers may regard this interpretation as an anachronistic imposition of a Nietzschean theme onto Plato. I reply that it shows how deeply Nietzsche learned from Plato. But one thing that Nietzsche did not learn is that every attempt to enact the truth in human affairs without compromise leads to the reversal of that truth. The result of having learned this lesson is to retreat backward into one degree or another of decadence.
  • Stanley Rosen, Plato’s Republic: A Study (2005), Introduction

• Speaking of Spinoza he [Nietzsche] says: “How much of personal timidity and vulnerability does this masquerade of a sickly recluse betray!” Exactly the same may be said of him, with the less reluctance since he has not hesitated to say it of Spinoza. It is obvious that in his day-dreams he is a warrior, not a professor; all the men he admires were military. His opinion of women, like every man’s, is an objectification of his own emotion towards them, which is obviously one of fear. “[Thou goest to woman?] Forget not thy whip”—but nine women out of ten would get the whip away from him, and he knew it, so he kept away from women, and soothed his wounded vanity with unkind remarks.
  • Bertrand Russell, A History of Western Philosophy (1945), Book Three, Part II, Chapter XXV, “Nietzsche,” p. 767

• It does not occur to Nietzsche as possible that a man should genuinely feel universal love, obviously because he himself feels almost universal hatred and fear, which he would fain disguise as lordly indifference. His “noble” man—who is himself in day-dreams—is a being wholly devoid of sympathy, ruthless, cunning, cruel, concerned only with his own power. King Lear, on the verge of madness, says: “I will do such things—What they are yet I know not—but they shall be The terror of the earth.” This is Nietzsche’s philosophy in a nutshell.
  • Russell, ibid. p. 767

• I dislike Nietzsche because he likes the contemplation of pain, because he erects conceit into a duty, because the men whom he most admires are conquerors, whose glory is cleverness in causing men to die.
  • Russell, ibid. p. 773

• Nietzsche was personally more philosophical than his philosophy. His talk about power, harshness, and superb immorality was the hobby of a harmless young scholar and constitutional invalid. He did not crave in the least either wealth or empire. What he loved was solitude, nature, music, books. But his imagination, like his judgment, was captious; it could not dwell on reality, but reacted furiously against it. Accordingly, when he speaks of the will to be powerful, power is merely an eloquent word on his lips. It symbolises the escape from mediocrity. What power would be when attained and exercised remains entirely beyond his horizon. What meets us everywhere is the sense of impotence and a passionate rebellion against it.
  • George Santayana, Egotism In German Philosophy (1915), Chapter XII

• Central to the Smithian approach is our willingness to see critically what we observe around us. The sense of comfort that is often associated with being content with the world as it is can seriously hamper the pursuit of justice. This understanding goes strongly against a line of thought that was powerfully presented by Friedrich Nietzshe. ‘The Christian resolve to find the world ugly and bad has made the world ugly and bad’, said Nietzshe. I think I can, with some effort, understand what Nietzsche meant, but it is hard for me, even with a lot of effort, to see that Nietzshe’s hypothesis helps us to understand the causation or resilience of the nastiness of the world in which we live. Nor, I must insist (this I do as a thoroughly unreligious person), does it offer any obvious insight into the lives and achievements of Martin Luther King, or Mother Theresa, or Desmond Tutu, who have tried to reduce injustice in the world and have done so with non-negligible success.
  • Amartya Sen, “Values and justice”, Journal of Economic Methodology, Vol. 19, No. 2, June 2012, 101–108

• I am interested, that is, in historical and philosophical questions about politics, and I have worked in particular on questions about freedom, representation, democracy and the state. But I also accept and indeed profoundly believe in the Nietzschean view that no such concepts can have definitions: they only have histories. But if they only have histories, then the only way to understand them is historically ― and that is what animates my work, the belief that if we are going to understand any of the concepts we use to organise our social, moral, and political world, we shall have to study them historically. If only because, as Nietzsche says in a wonderful phrase, the concepts we have inherited ― and the interpretations we place upon those concepts ― are just frozen conflicts, the outcomes of ideological debate. We just get the views of the winners, so that historians always have to engage in an act of retrieval, trying to recover wider and missing structures of debate.
  • Quentin Skinner, in “Concepts only have histories”, an interview with Jacques Lévy and Emmanuelle Tricoire in Summer 2004, reviewed and updated in Fall 2007

• Owing to its radical anti-egalitarianism Nietzsche’s vision of a possible future is in a sense more profoundly political than Marx’ vision. Like the typical Continental European conservative Nietzsche saw in communism only the completion of democratic egalitarianism and of the liberalistic demand for freedom which is not a “freedom for” but only a “freedom from.” But in contradistinction to those conservatives he held that conservatism as such is doomed, since all merely defensive positions, all merely backward looking endeavors are doomed. The future seemed to be with democracy and nationalism. Both were regarded by Nietzsche as incompatible with what he held to be the task of the twentieth century.
  • Leo Strauss, “Philosophy as Rigorous Science and Political Philosophy”, Interpretation: A Journal of Political Philosophy 2, no. 1 (1971)

• Nietzsche, prompted by “some enigmatic desire,” has tried for a long time to penetrate pessimism to its depth and in particular to free it from the delusion of morality which in a way contradicts its world-denying tendency. He thus has grasped a more world-denying way of thinking than any other pessimist. Yet a man who has taken this road has perhaps without intending to do this opened his eyes to the opposite ideal—to the ideal belonging to the religion of the future. It goes without saying that what in some other men was “perhaps” the case was a fact in Nietzsche’s thought and life. The adoration of the nothing proves to be the indispensable transition from every kind of world-denial to the most unbounded Yes: the eternal Yes-saying to everything that was and is.
  • Leo Strauss, “Note on the Plan of Nietzsche’s Beyond Good and Evil“, Interpretation: A Journal of Political Philosophy 3, nos. 2 and 3 (1973)

• Nietzsche’s criticism can be reduced to one proposition: modern man has been trying to preserve biblical morality while abandoning biblical faith. That is impossible.
  • Leo Strauss, “Progress or Return? The Contemporary Crisis in Western Civilization”, Modern Judaism 1 (1981)

• It is certainly not an overstatement to say that no one has ever spoken so greatly and so nobly of what a philosopher is as Nietzsche.
  • Leo Strauss, “Existentialism”, lecture delivered in 1956, published in Interpretation, Spring 1995, Vol. 22, No. 3

• Friedrich Nietzsche, the famous atheist and ardent enemy of religion and Christianity, knew more about the power the idea of God than many faithful Christians.
  • Paul Tillich, The Shaking of the Foundations (1948), Chapter 6. The Escape From God

• Nietzsche is the most impressive and effective representative of what could be called a “philosophy of life.” Life in this term is the process in which the power of being actualizes itself. But in actualizing itself it overcomes that in life which, although belonging to life, negates life.
  • Paul Tillich, The Courage to Be (1952), Chapter 1. Being and Courage

• Nietzsche knew of the ambiguity in all life. He knew of the creative and destructive elements which are always present in every life process. If you want to find out about his idea of God, do not look first to his statement that “God is dead.” Read instead the last fragments of The Will to Power, which is a collection of fragments. It is not a book in itself. The last fragment describes the divine demonic character of life in formulations which show the ambiguity, the greatness, and the destructiveness of life. He asks us to affirm this life in its great ambiguity. Out of this he then has another kind of God, a God in which the demonic underground, the Dionysian underground, is clearly visible. The victory of the element of rationality or of meaning is not as clear as in other philosophers like Kant or Hegel, Hume or Locke, but there is an opening up of vitality, and its half-creative, half-destructive power.
  • Paul Tillich, A History of Christian Thought, p. 494

• This divergence and perversion of the essential question is most striking in what goes today by the name of philosophy. There would seem to be only one question for philosophy to resolve: What must I do? Despite being combined with an enormous amount of unnecessary confusion, answers to the question have at any rate been given within the philosophical tradition on the Christian nations. For example, in Kant´s Critique of Practical Reason, or in Spinoza, Schopenhauer and specially Rousseau. But in more recent times, since Hegel´s assertion that all that exists is reasonable, the question of what one must do has been pushed to the background and philosophy has directed its whole attention to the investigation of things as they are, and to fitting them into a prearranged theory. This was the first step backwards. The second step, degrading human thought yet further, was the acceptance of the struggle for existence as a basic law, simply because that struggle can be observed among animals and plants. According to this theory the destruction of the weakest is a law which should not be opposed. And finally, the third step was taken when the childish originality of Nietzsche´s half-crazed thought, presenting nothing complete or coherent, but only various drafts of immoral and completely unsubstantiated ideas, was accepted by the leading figures as the final word in philosophical science. In reply to the question: what must we do? the answer is now put straightforwardly as: live as you like, without paying attention to the lives of others. If anyone doubted that the Christian world of today has reached a frightful state of torpor and brutalization (not forgeting the recent crimes committed in the Boers and in China, which were defended by the clergy and acclaimed as heroic feats by all the world powers), the extraordinary success of Nietzsche’s works is enough to provide irrefutable proof of this. Some disjointed writings, striving after effect in a most sordid manner, appear, written by a daring, but limited and abnormal German, suffering from power mania. Neither in talent nor in their basic argument to these writings justify public attention. In the days of Kant, Leibniz, or Hume, or even fifty years ago, such writings would not only have received no attention, but they would not even have appeared. But today all the so called educated people are praising the ravings of Mr. N, arguing about him, elucidating him, and countless copies of his works are printed in all languages.
  • Leo Tolstoy, What is Religion : Of What Does its Essence Consist? (1902), Ch. 11

• The whole world knows that virtue consists in the subjugation of one’s passions, or in self-renunciation. It is not just the Christian world, against whom Nietzsche howls, that knows this, but it is an eternal supreme law towards which all humanity has developed, including Brahmanism, Buddhism, Confucianism, and the ancient Persian religion. And suddenly a man appears who declares that he is convinced that self-renunciation, meekness, submissiveness and love are all vices that destroy humanity (he has in mind Christianity, ignoring all the other religions). One can understand why such a declaration baffled people at first. But after giving it a little thought and failing to find any proof of the strange propositions, any rational person ought to throw the books aside and wonder if there is any kind of rubbish that would not find a publisher today. But this has not happened with Nietzsche´s books. The majority of pseudo-enlightened people seriously look into the theory of the übermensch, and acknowledge its author to be a great philosopher, a descendant of Descartes, Leibniz and Kant. And all this has come about because the majority of pseudo-enlightened men of today object to any reminder of virtue, or to its chief premise: self-renunciation and love—virtues that restrain and condemn the animal side of their life. They gladly welcome a doctrine, however incoherently and disjointedly expressed, of egotism and cruelty, sanctioning the idea of personal happiness and superiority over the lives of others, by which they live.
  • Leo Tolstoy, What is Religion : Of What Does its Essence Consist? (1902), Ch. 11

• Nietzsche does not favor reckless, anarchic action. The model of the artist, and more specifically the musician, is important. Rhythm is of the essence; timing of notes, of actions, allows for a style that is cohesive, even if not uniform. The music that emerges comes out over time, it becomes and develops slowly into a whole that is effective if timed well. Again Nietzsche sees that artists, especially musicians and poets, have such a talent. And to the extent that a writer writes poetically, he also shares in this talent.
  • Diego A. von Vacano, The Art of Power: Machiavelli, Nietzsche and the Making of Aesthetic Political Theory (2007, Lanham, Maryland: Lexington Books, pp. 99-100)

• After Nietzsche’s devastating criticism of those “last men” who “invented happiness,” there is probably no need for me to remind you of the naïve optimism with which we once celebrated science, or the technology for the mastery of life based on it, as the path to happiness. Who believes this, apart from a few overgrown children occupying university chairs or editorial offices?
  • Max Weber, “Science as a Vocation”

• In 1870 Nietzsche knew that nihilism stood at the door; now it is with us. Despair for mankind is nearly universal. What hope is there? The current protest of youth is basically a rebellion against a nihilistic society, but what comes next?
  • Lancelot Law Whyte, The Universe of Experience: A Worldview Beyond Science and Religion (1974)

• There continue to be complex debates about what Nietzsche understood truth to be. Quite certainly, he did not think, in pragmatist spirit, that beliefs are true if they serve our interests or welfare: we have just seen some of his repeated denials of this idea. The more recently fashionable view is that he was the first of the deniers, thinking that there is no such thing as truth, or that truth is what anyone thinks it is, or that it is a boring category that we can do without. This is also wrong, and more deeply so. Nietzsche did not think that the ideal of truthfulness went into retirement when its metaphysical origins were discovered, and he did not suppose, either, that truthfulness could be detached from a concern for the truth. Truthfulness as an ideal retains its power, and so far from his seeing truth as dispensable or malleable, his main question is how it can be made bearable.
  • Bernard Williams, Truth and Truthfulness (2002)

• Nietzsche … did not settle for a demure civic conversation in the style of Richard Rorty’s ironist, or saunter off with the smug nod that registers a deconstructive job neatly done. He was aware that his own criticisms and exposures owed both their motivation and their effect to the spirit of truthfulness. His aim was to see how far the values of truth could be revalued, how they might be understood in a perspective quite different from the Platonic and Christian metaphysics which had provided their principal source in the West up to now.
  • Bernard Williams, Truth and Truthfulness (2002)

• Anyone who can understand that the Buddhist idea of Nirvana is not merely negative, and that the Buddha himself who (like the Superman) ‘looks down on suffering humanity like a hillsman on the planes’ is not an atheistic monster, will instantly see how this misses the point. Nietzsche was not an atheist, any more than the Buddha was. Anyone who reads the Night Song and the Dance Song in Zarathustra will recognize that they spring out of the same emotion as the Vedic or Gathic hymns or the Psalms of David. The idea of the Superman is a response to the need for salvation in precisely the same way that Buddhism was a response to the ‘three signs’.
  • Colin Wilson in The Outsider, p. 135

• Nietzsche’s great concept of Yea-saying gave him a notion of purpose that is seen as positive. Nietzsche, in short, was a religious mystic.
  • Colin Wilson in The Outsider, p. 275
• Nietzsche was used to being alone. He regarded it as being part of destiny of the man of genius. His hero, Schopenhauer, convinced him of it when he was barely twenty, and although he came later to reject Schopenhauer, he never rebelled against his destiny of aloneness.
  • Colin Wilson in The Outsider, Chapter Five The Pain Threshold
• Nietzsche was not an atheist, any more than the Buddha was.
  • Colin Wilson in The Outsider, Chapter Five The Pain Threshold

• The rather more dubious side of Nietzsche’s ‘evolutionism’ is his glorification of the warrior — particularly when, as an exemplification of the warrior-hero, he chooses an archetypal ‘spoilt brat’ like cesare Borgia. Nietzsche’s own physical weakness and consequent inability to escape the atmosphere of the study leads him to take a rather unrealistic view of the man of action
  • Colin Wilson in Rudolf Steiner: The Man and His Vision, p. 87

• There are problems I never tackle, which do not lie in my path or belong to my world. Problems of the intellectual world of the West which Beethoven (& perhaps Goethe to a certain extent) tackled & wrestled with but which no philosopher has ever confronted (perhaps Nietzsche passed close to them). And perhaps they are lost to western philosophy, that is there will be no one there who experiences and so can describe the development of this culture as an epic. Or more precisely it just is no longer an epic, or is one only for someone who observes it from outside & perhaps Beethoven did this with prevision (as Spengler hints in one place).
  • Ludwig Wittgenstein, Culture and Value (1980), p. 11

• Both Nietzsche and Marx did their greatest work seeking to explain the mystery. The term both used was “decadence.”
  But if there was decadence, what was decaying? Religious faith and moral codes that had been in place since time was, said Nietzsche, who in 1882 made the most famous statement in modern philosophy — “God is dead” — and three startlingly accurate predictions for the twentieth century. He even estimated when they would begin to come true: about 1915. (1) The faith men formerly invested in God they would now invest in barbaric “brotherhoods with the aim of the robbery and exploitation of the non-brothers.” Their names turned out, in due course, to be the German Nazis and the Russian Communists. (2) There would be “wars such as have never been waged on earth.” Their names turned out to be World War I and World War II. (3) There no longer would be Truth but, rather, “truth” in quotation marks, depending upon which concoction of eternal verities the modem barbarian found most useful at any given moment. The result would be universal skepticism, cynicism, irony, and contempt. The First World War began in 1914 and ended in 1918. On cue, as if Nietzsche were still alive to direct the drama, an entirely new figure, with an entirely new name, arose in Europe: that embodiment of skepticism, cynicism, irony, and contempt, the Intellectual.
  • Tom Wolfe, “In the Land of the Rococo Marxists,” Harpers Monthly (June 2000)

• Unless I am dashing off a snippy reply to a stalker (for instance), my correspondence tends to strive for the spirit of Nietzsche’s gangasrotogati.
  • David Woodard, Five Years (2011)

• Nietzsche does not simply criticize or reject the impulses of modern morality that make judgments of blame, seek to attach guilt, and invoke a need to pay for the wrongful deed through the counter-hurt of punishment. He says that this morality created human interiority, an ability to hold events in memory over time, and ultimately the strength of a sovereign subject with a sense of responsibility. To be stuck in a spirit of ressentiment, however, leads to nihilism. In the end it is unrealistic and mean-spirited to seek equivalence for every harm that must come from the flesh next to someone’s heart.
  • Iris Marion Young, Responsibility for Justice

• In his book Modern Times, the historian Paul Johnson referred to Hitler, Stalin, and Mussolini as the three devils of the twentieth century. Interestingly, Nietzshean dogma influenced each of them.
  • Ravi Zacharias (2004). The Real Face of Atheism. p. 25. ISBN 9780801065118.

Alexander Star, “The Overman” (2012)

Alexander Star, in “What Friedrich Nietzsche Did to America” by Alexander Star, in The New York Times (13 January 2012) a review of American Nietzsche : A History of an Icon and His Ideas (2012) by Jennifer Ratner-Rosenhagen; the review was later presented as “The Overman” in Sunday Book Review (15 January 2012)

• In 1889, when Friedrich Nietzsche suffered the mental collapse that ended his career, he was virtually unknown. Yet by the time of his death in 1900 at the age of 55, he had become the philosophical celebrity of his age. From Russia to America, admirers echoed his estimation of himself as a titanic figure who could alter the course of history: “I am by far the most terrible human being that has existed so far; this does not preclude the possibility that I shall be the most beneficial.” His origins were humble for the role. … Suffering from violent migraines, Nietzsche resigned his academic post when he was 34 and began the life of a little-heeded nomad-­intellectual in European resorts. With escalating intensity, he issued innovative works of philosophy that challenged every element of European civilization. He celebrated the artistic heroism of Beethoven and Goethe; denigrated the “slave morality” of Christianity, which transfigured weakness into virtue and vital strength into sin; and called on the strong in spirit to bring about a “transvaluation of all values.” The “higher man” — or as Nietzsche sometimes called him, the “overman” or “Übermensch” — did not succumb to envy or long for the afterlife; rather he willed that his life on earth repeat itself over and over exactly as it was. In later works, Nietzsche wrote with continued brilliance and growing megalomania of his disdain for the common “herd,” the dangers of nihilism and the possibility that the will to power is the “Ur-fact of all history.” He spent his last stricken decade in the care of his mother and then his sister, a fervent anti-Semite who would put him in good standing with the German nationalists he despised.
  As Nietzsche faltered, his writings began to spread. Small circles of European radicals, literary aristocrats and misfits styled themselves apprentice Übermenschen, ready to fashion the new values the age demanded. The German aesthete Count Harry Kessler plotted to build a Nietzsche memorial in Weimar with a stadium, a temple and a statue; it would, he hoped, effect “the transposition of the personality of Nietzsche into a grand architectural formula” expressing “the unity of lightness, of joy and of power.” But if Nietzsche inspired rapture and devotion, he also puzzled and dismayed. A sickly recluse with impeccable manners, he praised cruelty and strength. He decried Christianity as “a crime against life” even as he claimed that it made man interesting for the first time, and he proposed that everything we know is merely a partial “perspective knowing” even as he composed some of the most categorical remarks ever made: “God is dead”; “It is only as an aesthetic phenomenon that existence and the world are eternally justified”; “There are no facts, only interpretations.”

• While Nietzsche’s early readers took him as an antidote to Americanism, that did not mean they saw him as a representative German. Believing that his ancestors were Polish aristocrats known as Niezky, some attributed his thinking to “Slavic emotionalism.” All that changed in 1914, with the start of what a British newspaper called the “Euro-Nietzschean war.” The philosopher of personal liberation was transformed into a proto-storm trooper who believed might makes right and welcomed the sinister rise of the Teutonic “blond beast.” … If Nietzsche’s image reached its nadir during the Second World War, when Hitler presented Mussolini with a bound edition of his works and the historian Crane Brinton wrote a book asserting he would have been “a good Nazi,” a resurrection was soon to come. The German émigré and Princeton professor Walter Kaufmann almost single-handedly revived his standing with his many translations and forceful reminder that Nietzsche hated anti-Semites and German nationalists as well as woolly-headed romantics. Kaufmann’s Nietzsche was a late flower of the Enlightenment, a tough-minded rationalist with the courage to face the Darwinian revelation that there is no purpose to nature or to our existence. The true task of the overman was to overcome himself, not others, and to do so by sculpturing his impulses and thoughts and inheritances into a willed unity that could be called “style.”

• One can show that Emerson anticipated many of Nietzsche’s most famous utterances. There is a direct line from Emerson’s “oversoul” to the “overman.” Several decades before Nietzsche wrote, “What does not kill me makes me stronger,” Emerson wrote, “In general, every evil to which we do not succumb, is a benefactor.” More profoundly, Emerson foreshadowed Nietzsche’s concern with the ubiquity of flux and power, and the value of overcoming the past. “Life only avails,” Emerson once wrote, “not the having lived. Power ceases in the instant of repose; it resides in the moment of transitions from a past to a new state.”

• In every generation Nietzsche finds admirers who blur his message with that of Aleister Crowley, the Nietzsche-reading occultist who wrote, “Do what thou wilt shall be the whole of the law.”
  If Nietzsche was terrible, was he also beneficial? In a 1985 book “Nietzsche: Life as Literature,” the Princeton philosopher Alexander Nehamas argued that Nietzsche’s perspectivism does not imply that all beliefs are equally valid but that “one’s beliefs are not, and need not be, true for everyone.” On this reading, to fully accept a set of beliefs is to accept the values and way of life that are bound up with it, and since there is no single way of life that is right for everyone, there may be no set of beliefs that is fit for everyone. At its best, American individualism is not about the aggrandizement of the self or the acquiescent assumption that everybody simply has a right to think what they want. Rather, it stresses that our convictions are our own, and should be held as seriously as any other possessions. Or, as Nietzsche imagined philosophers would one day say, “ ‘My judgment is my judgment’: no one else is easily entitled to it.”