Friedrich Nietzsche Quotes - Page 7

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

You go above and beyond them: but the higher you climb, the smaller you appear to the eye of envy. And he who flies is hated most of all.

Morality negates life.

In the end one loves one's desire and not what is desired.

Man is the cruelest animal," says Zarathustra. "When gazing at tragedies, bull-fights, crucifixations he hath hitherto felt happier than at any other time on Earth. And when he invented Hell...lo, Hell was his Heaven on Earth"; he could put up with suffering now, by contemplating the eternal punishment of his oppressors in the other world.

A moral system valid for all is basically immoral.

I ascended, I ascended, I dreamt, I thought,—but everything oppressed me. A sick one did I resemble, whom bad torture wearieth, and a worse dream reawakeneth out of his first sleep.—But there is something in me which I call courage: it hath hitherto slain for me every dejection. This courage at last bade me stand still and say: "Dwarf! Thou! Or I!"—For courage is the best slayer,—courage which attacketh: for in every attack there is sound of triumph.Man, however, is the most courageous animal: thereby hath he overcome every animal. With sound of triumph hath he overcome every pain; human pain, however, is the sorest pain.Courage slayeth also giddiness at abysses: and where doth man not stand at abysses! Is not seeing itself—seeing abysses?Courage is the best slayer: courage slayeth also fellow-suffering. Fellow-suffering, however, is the deepest abyss: as deeply as man looketh into life, so deeply also doth he look into suffering.Courage, however, is the best slayer, courage which attacketh: it slayeth even death itself; for it saith: "Was that life? Well! Once more!

The discerning one walketh amongst men as amongst animals.

One is healthy when one can laugh at the earnestness and zeal with which one has been hypnotized by any single detail of one's life.

Be not virtuous beyond your powers! And seek nothing from yourselves opposed to probability!...Shy, ashamed, awkward, like the tiger whose spring hath failed—thus, ye higher men, have I often seen you slink aside. A cast which ye made had failed...The higher its type, always the seldomer doth a thing succeed. Ye higher men here, have ye not all—been failures?Be of good cheer; what doth it matter? How much is still possible! Learn to laugh at yourselves, as ye ought to laugh!What wonder even that ye have failed and only half-succeeded, ye half-shattered ones! Doth not—man's future strive and struggle in you?Man's furthest, profoundest, star-highest issues, his prodigious powers—do not all these foam through one another in your vessel?What wonder that many a vessel shattereth! Learn to laugh at yourselves, as ye ought to laugh! Ye higher men, Oh, how much is still possible!

The great works are produced in such an ecstasy of love that they must always be unworthy of it, however great their worth otherwise.

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?

As yet hath his knowledge not learned to smile, and to be without jealously ; as yet hath his gushing passion not become calm in beauty.

Necessity is not an established fact but an interpretation.

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

Freedom is the will to be responsible for ourselves.

Every word is a prejudice.

It is invisible hands that torment and bend us the worst

The lie is a condition of life.

We have to cease to think, if we refuse to do it in the prison house of language; for we cannot reach further than the doubt which asks whether the limit we see is really a limit.

When man no longer regards himself as evil he ceases to be so!

And he who would not languish among men, must learn to drink out of all glasses; and he who would keep clean among men, must know how to wash himself even with dirty water.

The wreckage of stars - I built a world from this wreckage.

Remain true to the earth, my brethren, with the power of your virtue! Let your bestowing love and your knowledge be devoted to be the meaning of the earth! . . . Let it not fly away from the earthly and beat against eternal walls with its wings. . . . Lead, like me, the flown-away virtue back to the earth—yes, back to body and life: that it may give to the earth its meaning, a human meaning!

Here and there on earth there is probably a kind of continuation of love; in which this greedy desire of two people for each other gives way to a new desire and greed, a shared higher thirst for an ideal above them. But who knows such love? who has experienced it? Its true name is friendship

Women can form a friendship with a man very well but to preserve it a slight physical antipathy most probably helps.

Wherever I found a living creature there I found the will to power.

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

These solitary ones who are free in spirit know thatin one thing or another they must constantly put on an appearance that is different from the way they think; although they want nothing but truth and honesty, they are entangled in a web of misunderstandings. And despite their keen desire, they cannot prevent a fog of false opinions, of accommodation, of halfway concessions, of indulgent silence, of erroneous interpretation from settling on everything they do. And so a cloud of melancholy gathers around their brow, for such natures hate the necessity of appearances more than death, and their persistent bitterness about this makes them volatile and menacing. From time to time they take revenge for their violent selfconcealment, for their coerced constraint. They emerge from their caves with horrible expressions on their faces; at such times their words and deeds are explosions, and it is even possible for them to destroy themselves.

Science and art have that in common that everyday things seem to them new and attractive.

One not only wants to be understood when one writes, but also quite as certainly not to be understood. It is by no means an objection to a book when someone finds it unintelligible: perhaps this might just have been the intention of its author, perhaps he did not want to be understood by "anyone”. A distinguished intellect and taste, when it wants to communicate its thoughts, always selects its hearers; by selecting them, it at the same time closes its barriers against "the others". It is there that all the more refined laws of style have their origin: they at the same time keep off, they create distance, they prevent "access" (intelligibility, as we have said,) while they open the ears of those who are acoustically related to them.

I understand by 'freedom of spirit' something quite definite - the unconditional will to say No where it is dangerous to say No.

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

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

Convictions are prisons.

In architecture the pride of man his triumph over gravitation his will to power assume a visible form. Architecture is a sort of oratory of power by means of forms.

Almost everything we call "higher culture" is based on the spiritualization of cruelty.

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.

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

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.

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

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

Every means hitherto employed with the intention of making mankind moral has been thoroughly immoral.

He who fights with monsters might take care lest he thereby becomes a monster.

Truly, you understand the reverse art of alchemy, the depreciating of the most valuable things! Try, just for once, another recipe, in order not to realise as hitherto the opposite of what you mean to attain: deny those good things, withdraw from them the applause of the populace and discourage the spread of them, make them once more the concealed chastities of solitary souls, and say: morality is something forbidden! Perhaps you will thus attract to your cause the sort of men who are only of any account, I mean the heroic. But then there must be something formidable in it, and not as hitherto something disgusting!

Three metamorphoses of the spirit have I designated to you: how thespirit became a camel, the camel a lion, and the lion at last a child.

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.

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.

Let us face ourselves. We are Hyperboreans!

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.

It was a subtle refinement of God to learn Greek when he wished to write a book – and that he did not learn it better.

Two great European narcotics, alcohol and Christianity.

Objection, evasion, joyous distrust, and love of irony are signs of health; everything absolute belongs to pathology.

Either you reach a higher point today or you exercise your strength in order to be able to climb higher tomorrow.

Let your peace be a victory!

philosophy is not suited for the masses, what they need is holiness.

Convictions are more dangerous enemies of truth than lies.

Generally speaking, punishment makes men hard and cold; it concentrates; it sharpens the feeling of alienation; it strengthens the power of resistance

Those who know that they are profound strive for clarity. Those who would like to seem profound to the crowd strive for obscurity.

This world, the eternally imperfect, the eternal and imperfect image of a contradiction – an intoxicating joy to its imperfect creator – that is what I once thought the world.