Friedrich Nietzsche may have had some problematic views.
Nietzsche Quotes About Life
1.
Well then, once more!
One should die proudly when it is no longer possible to live proudly.
The secret of realizing the greatest fruitfulness and the greatest enjoyment of existence is: to live dangerously!
Build your cities on the slopes of Vesuvius!
Send your ships out into uncharted seas!
Live in conflict with your equals and with yourselves!
Be robbers and ravagers as soon as you ca not be rulers and owners, you men of knowledge!
The time will soon past when you could be content to live concealed int he woods like timid deer!
Amor Fati Love Your Fate, which is in fact your life.
He who has a why to live for can bear almost any how.
I know of no better life purpose than to perish in attempting the great and the impossible.
Is life not a thousand times too short for us to bore ourselves?
One must give value to their existence by behaving as if ones very existence were a work of art.
One must pay dearly for immortality; one has to die several times while still alive.
Life is that which must overcome itself again and again.
There is one path in the world that none can walk but you.
Where does it lead?
Dont ask, walk!
Either one does not dream, or one does so interestingly.
One should learn to spend ones waking life in the same way: not at all, or interestingly.
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.
You desire to LIVE according to Nature?
Oh, you noble Stoics, what fraud of words!
Human life is inexplicable, and still without meaning: a fool may decide its fate.
Not every end is the goal.
We ought to face our destiny with courage.
Some men are born posthumously.
Nietzsche Quotes on the Nature of Existence and Suffering
23.
Existence really is an imperfect tense that never becomes a present.
To live is to suffer, to survive is to find some meaning in the suffering.
Hope, in reality, is the worst of all evils because it prolongs the torments of man.
And once you are awake, you shall remain awake eternally.
As long as you still experience the stars as something above you, you lack the eye of knowledge.
It is invisible hands that torment and bend us the worst
29.
The tree that would grow to heaven must send its roots to hell.
The mother of excess is not joy but joylessness.
Have you ever said Yes to a single joy?
O my friends, then you have said Yes too toallwoe.
All anew, all eternally, all entangled, ensnared, enamoredoh then youlovedthe world.
The destiny of man is designed for happy moments every life has them but not for happy ages.
The voice of beauty speaks softly; it creeps only into the most fully awakened souls.
And when he invented his hell, that was his heaven on earth.
It is intoxicating joy for the sufferer to look away from his suffering and to forget himself.
Everything in the world displeases me: but, above all, my displeasure in everything displeases me.
Swallow your poison, for you need it badly.
Without cruelty there is no festival.
I doubt that such pain makes us better; but I know it makes us more profound.
Your only problem, perhaps, is that you scream without letting yourself cry.
Haste is universal because everyone is in flight from himself.
Pity is the most agreeable feeling among those who have little pride and no prospects of great conquests.
Nietzsche Quotes About Love
47.
Love is a state in which a man sees things most decidedly as they are not.
There is always some madness in love, but there is also always some reason in madness.
That which is done out of love is always beyond good and evil.
Ultimately, it is the desire, not the desired, that we love.
Friendship closes its eyes.
Family love is messy, clinging, and of an annoying and repetitive pattern, like bad wallpaper.
Sensuality often hastens the Growth of Love so much that the roots remain weak and are easily torn up.
I fear you close by; I love you far away.
Where one can no longer love, there one should pass by.
The greatest cure for love is still that time honoured medicine love returned.
The spiritualization of sensuality is called love: it is a great triumph over Christianity.
Love of one is a piece of barbarism: for it is practiced at the expense of all others.
Love of God likewise.
I hate you most because you attract, but are not strong enough to pull me to you.
One must learn to love.
Even those who love themselves will have learned it in this way: for there is no other way.
Love, too, has to be learned.
Nietzsche Quotes on Oneself/Man
68.
Man is the cruelest animal.
What does your conscience say?
You should become the person you are.
What is the seal of liberation?
Not to be ashamed in front of oneself.
Talking much about oneself can also be a means to conceal oneself.
Whenever I climb I am followed by a dog called Ego.
But it is the same with man as with the tree.
One must be a sea, to receive a polluted stream without becoming impure.
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.
The earth has a skin and that skin has diseases; one of its diseases is called man.
Throw off your discontent about your nature.
Forgive yourself your own self.
I obviously do everything to be hard to understand myself.
If a man has character, he has also his typical experience, which always recurs.
Most people are far too occupied with themselves to be malicious.
You say I and you are proud of this word.
Giving style to ones character a great and rare art!
The vanity of others runs counter to our taste only when it runs counter to our vanity.
Consider the cattle, grazing as they pass you by.
My humanity is a constant self-overcoming.
Mans maturity: to have regained the seriousness that he had as a child at play.
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.
I am no man, I am dynamite.
It is not the strength, but the duration, of great sentiments that makes great men.
Nietzsche Quotes on Human Foibles
95.
If we train our conscience, it kisses us while it hurts.
He who despises himself esteems himself as a self-despiser.
Many are stubborn in pursuit of the path they have chosen.
Few in pursuit of the goal.
A bad conscience is easier to cope with than a bad reputation.
Character is determined more by the lack of certain experiences than by those one has had.
Something unappeased, unappeasable, is within me.
The higher man is distinguished from the lower by his fearlessness and his readiness to challenge misfortune.
But for all that, of course, he is the most interesting.
The pure soul is a pure lie.
There they laugh: they do not understand me; I am not the mouth for these ears.
Every profound spirit needs a mask.
Nietzsche Quotes on Friendships and Relationships
113.
Invisible threads are the strongest ties.
It is not a lack of love, but a lack of friendship that makes unhappy marriages.
Our faith in others betrays that we would rather have faith in ourselves.
Our longing for a friend is our betrayer.
And often with our love we want merely to overcome envy.
And often we attack and make ourselves enemies, to conceal that we are vulnerable.
Are you a slave?
Then you cannot be a friend.
Are you a tyrant?
Then you cannot have friends.
Go up close to your friend but do not go over to him!
We should respect the enemy that is in our friend.
The lonely one offers his hand too quickly to whomever he encounters.
There is a false saying: How can someone who cant save himself save others?
Supposing I have the key to your chains, why should your lock and my lock be the same?
Nietzsche Quotes on Solitude
122.
He who delights in solitude is either a wild beast or a god.
I go into solitude so as not to drink out of everybodys cistern.
In loneliness, the lonely one eats himself; in a crowd, the many eat him.
Nietzsche Quotes on Enemies
127.
A politician divides mankind into two classes: tools and enemies.
Under peaceful conditions a warlike man sets upon himself.
At times one remains faithful to a cause only because its opponents do not cease to be insipid.
Whoever lives for the sake of combating an enemy has an interest in the enemys staying alive.
It is impossible to suffer without making someone pay for it; every complaint already contains revenge.
Lonely one, you are going the way to yourself!
And your way goes past yourself, and past your seven devils!
Nietzsche Quotes on Women
138.
Woman was Gods second mistake.
In revenge and in love woman is more barbaric than man is.
The true man wants two things: danger and play.
For that reason he wants woman, as the most dangerous plaything.
They make the highs higher and the lows more frequent.
Stupidity in a woman is unfeminine.
Nietzsche Quotes About Individuality vs Herd Mentality
143.
And those who were seen dancing were thought to be insane by those who could not hear the music.
The higher we soar the smaller we appear to those who cannot fly.
And beware of the good and the just!
They like to crucify those who invent their own virtue for themselvesthey hate the lonely one.
Alas, I have begun my loneliest walk.
Freedom is the will to be responsible for ourselves.
He who obeys, does not listen to himself!
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.
I mistrust all systematizers and avoid them.
The will to a system is a lack of integrity.
He who cannot obey himself will be commanded.
That is the nature of living creatures.
No shepherd and one herd!
Everybody wants the same, everybody is the same: whoever feels different goes voluntarily into a madhouse.
Today as always, men fall into two groups: slaves and free men.
Disobedience- that is the nobility of slaves.
Nietzsche Quotes On Wisdom/Thought
159.
A thought, even a possibility, can shatter and transform us.
It is hard enough to remember my opinions, without also remembering my reasons for them!
Every deep thinker is more afraid of being understood than of being misunderstood.
All truly great thoughts are conceived while walking.
Great intellects are skeptical.
There is more wisdom in your body than in your deepest philosophy.
A thought comes when it will, not when I will.
Close beside my knowledge lies my black ignorance.
Do not talk about giftedness, inborn talents!
One can name great men of all kinds who were very little gifted.
The doer alone learneth.
Your educators can only be your liberators.
A thinker sees his own actions as experiments and questionsas attempts to find out something.
Success and failure are for him answers above all.
One repays a teacher badly if one always remains nothing but a pupil.
He who cannot put his thoughts on ice should not enter into the heat of dispute.
I have learned to walk: since then I have run.
I have learned to fly: since then I do not have to be pushed for move.
Nietzsche Quotes On Truth vs Belief/Conviction
181.
What is the truth, but a lie agreed upon.
You should seek your enemy, you should wage your war a war for your opinions.
And when your opinion is defeated your honesty should still cry triumph over that!
Sometimes people dont want to hear the truth because they dont want their illusions destroyed.
The man of knowledge must be able not only to love his enemies but also to hate his friends.
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.
There are no facts, only interpretations.
What, then, is truth?
A casual stroll through the lunatic asylum shows that faith does not prove anything.
193.I have never pondered over questions that are not questions.
Convictions are more dangerous foes of truth than lies.
There are no eternal facts, as there are no absolute truths.
The irrationality of a thing is no argument against its existence, rather a condition of it.
Knowledge kills action; action requires the veils of illusion.
(Translation: The ass arrives, beautiful and most brave.)
Truths are illlusions which we have forgotten are illusions.
All truth is simple … is that not doubly a lie?
No one dies of fatal truths nowadays: there are too many antidotes.
The text has disappeared under the interpretation.
How much truth can a spirit bear, how much truth can a spirit dare?
And we should call every truth false which was not accompanied by at least one laugh.
Silence is worse; all truths that are kept silent become poisonous.
All credibility, all good conscience, all evidence of truth come only from the senses.
Here the ways of men divide.
Sometimes it is harder to accede to a thing than it is to see its truth.
You have your way.
I have my way.
As for the right way, the correct way, and the only way, it does not exist.
It is nobler to declare oneself wrong than to insist on being right especially when one is right.
Nietzsche Quotes on Truth and Lying
221.
The lie is a condition of life.
The visionary lies to himself, the liar only to others.
The most perfidious way of harming a cause consists of defending it deliberately with faulty arguments.
Everything the State says is a lie, and everything it has it has stolen.
Nietzsche Quotes on the Powerful
226.
Human history would be nothing but a record of stupidity save for the cunning contributions of the weak.
They muddy the water, to make it seem deep.
Distrust all in whom the impulse to punish is powerful.
All things are subject to interpretation.
Whichever interpretation prevails at a given time is a function of power and not truth.
All that heightens the feeling of power, the will to power, power itself.
All that is born of weakness.
The feeling that power is growing, that resistance is overcome.
Watch them clamber, these swift monkeys!
They clamber over one another and thus drag one another into the mud and the depth.
Often, mud sits on the throne and often the throne also on mud.
Mad they all appear to me, clambering monkeys and over-ardent.
Foul smells their idol, the cold monster: foul, they smell to me altogether, these idolators.
All great things must first wear terrifying and monstrous masks for inscribe themselves on the hearts of humanity.
State is the name of the coldest of all cold monsters.
Nietzsche Quotes on Art
235.
We have art in order not to die of the truth.
Art is the proper task of life.
As an artist, a man has no home in Europe save in Paris.
Art is essentially the affirmation, the blessing, and the deification of existence.
The essence of all beautiful art, all great art, is gratitude.
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.
The real world is much smaller than the imaginary.
I love him who seeks to create over and beyond himself and thus perishes.
Creatingthat is the great salvation from suffering, and lifes alleviation.
But for the creator to appear, suffering itself is needed, and much transformation.
No artist tolerates reality.
Nietzsche Quotes on Writing
253.
Ultimately no one can hear in thingsbooks includedmore than he already knows.
If you have no access to something from experience, you will have no ear for it.
Books and drafts mean something quite different for different thinkers.
We talk so abstractly about poetry because all of us are usually bad poets.
A good writer possesses not only his own spirit but also the spirit of his friends.
It is my ambition to say in ten sentences what others say in a whole book.
The author must keep his mouth shut when his work starts to speak.
I am one thing, my writings are another.
Poets are shameless with their experiences: they exploit them.
Of all that is written, I love only what a person hath written with his blood.
Write with blood, and thou wilt find that blood is spirit.
How lovely it is that there are words and sounds.
Are not words and sounds rainbows and illusive bridges between things which are eternally apart?
Nietzsche Quotes on Music
268.
Without music, life would be a mistake.
In music the passions enjoy themselves.
Nietzsche Quotes on Dancing
270.
I would believe only in a God that knows how to dance.
We should consider every day lost in which we have not danced at least once.
Nietzsche Quotes on Memory
272.
Blessed are the forgetful, for they get the better even of their blunders.
Memory says, I did that.
Pride replies, I could not have done that.
Eventually, memory yields.
Many a man fails as an original thinker simply because his memory is too good.
Without forgetting it is quite impossible to live at all.
Nietzsche Quotes on Emotion
278.
Cynicism is the only form in which base souls approach honesty.
Nothing on earth consumes a man more quickly than the passion of resentment.
I notice that Autumn is more the season of the soul than of nature.
Not he is great who can alter matter, but he who can alter my state of mind.
He who climbs upon the highest mountains laughs at all tragedies, real or imaginary.
Resentment, born of weakness, harms no one more than the weak person himself.
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.
Against boredom even gods struggle in vain.
Nietzsche Quotes on Change and Challenges
290.
I change too quickly: my today refutes my yesterday.
When I ascend I often jump over steps, and no step forgives me that.
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.
Whoever cant hit the nail on the head should, just, not hit at all.
Nietzsche Quotes on God, Christianity, and Faith
294.
Is man merely a mistake of Gods?
Or God merely a mistake of man?
After coming into contact with a religious man I always feel I must wash my hands.
A subject for a great poet would be Gods boredom after the seventh day of creation.
In Christianity neither morality nor religion come into contact with reality at any point.
I cannot believe in a God who wants to be praised all the time.
Christianity has done its utmost to shut the circle and declared even doubt to be sin.
What is wanted are blindness and intoxication and an eternal song over the waves in which reason has drowned.
Faith: not wanting to know what is true.
I might believe in the Redeemer if his followers looked more redeemed.
One must not let oneself be misled: they say Judge not!
but they send to Hell everything that stands in their way.
Two great European narcotics, alcohol and Christianity.
There is not enough religion in the world to destroy the worlds religions.
God is a thought who makes crooked all that is straight.
The desire for a strong faith is not the proof of a strong faith, rather the opposite.
Remain faithful to the earth, my brothers, with the power of your virtue.
Let your gift-giving love and your knowledge serve the meaning of the earth.
Thus I beg and beseech you.
Do not let them fly away from earthly things and beat with their wings against eternal walls.
Alas, there has always been so much virtue that has flown away.
In letting God sit in judgment they judge themselves; in glorifying God they glorify themselves.
In heaven, all the interesting people are missing.
The Christian resolution to find the world ugly and bad has made the world ugly and bad.
Can one believe that such things are still believed?
Christianity remains to this day the greatest misfortune of humanity.
Nietzsche God is Dead Quote
325.
And we have killed him.
How shall we comfort ourselves, the murderers of all murderers?
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?
Nietzsche Quotes on Morality
326.
A moral system valid for all is basically immoral.
It is a self-deception of philosophers and moralists to imagine that they escape decadence by opposing it.
Morality is the herd-instinct in the individual.
There is no such thing as moral phenomena, but only a moral interpretation of phenomena.
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.
Morality is neither rational nor absolute nor natural.
Nietzsche Quotes on the Abyss and Darkness
333.
Whoever fights monsters should see to it that in the process he does not become a monster.
If you gaze long enough into an abyss, the abyss also gazes into you.
You say, its 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?
How can those who live in the light of the day possibly comprehend the depths of the night?
There are no beautiful surfaces without a terrible depth.
When we are tired, we are attacked by ideas we conquered long ago.
Thoughts are the shadows of our feelings always darker, emptier and simpler.
If you are not a bird, then beware of coming to rest above an abyss.
Is it better to out-monster the monster or to be quietly devoured?
Be careful, lest in casting out your demon you exorcise the best thing in you.
Nietzsche Quotes on Death
345.
The final reward of the dead to die no more.
But the second best thing for you is to die soon.
Those you cannot teach to fly, teach to fall faster.
