Friedrich Nietzsche Man Quotations

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

My humanity is a constant self-overcoming.

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---

There is no pre-established harmony between the furtherance of truth and the well-being of mankind.

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

The command 'become hard! ', the deep conviction that all creators are hard, is the really distinctive sign of a Dionysian nature.

The noble man honours in himself the powerful one, him also who has power over himself, who knows how to speak and how to keep silence, who takes pleasure in subjecting himself to severity and hardness, and has reverence for all that is severe and hard.

There is no more dreary or more repulsive creature than the man who has evaded his genius.

It's not the intensity of the man, but the duration of his intensity that makes the man great.

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!

Wherever Germany extends her sway, she ruins culture.

[Heraclitus' language] dispenses with lightness and artificial decoration, foremost out of disgust for humanity and out of [his own] defiant feeling.

Yet tell me, my brothers: if a goal for humanity is still lacking, is there not still lacking--humanity itself?

It takes just such painful and terrible things to occur for the great emancipation to take place.

The really historical performance would talk to ghosts.

Great things demand that we either remain silent about them or speak in a great manner: in a great manner, that is-cynically and with innocence.

Whoever possesses abundant joy must be a good man: but he is probably not the cleverest man, although he achieves exactly what it is that the cleverest man strives with all his cleverness to achieve.

Pharisaism is not a degeneration in a good man: a large portion of it is rather the condition of all being-good.

The machine is impersonal, it takes the pride away from a piece of work, the individual merits and defects that go along with allwork that is not done by a machine--which is to say, its little bit of humanity.

It is only great pain--that slow, sustained pain that takes its time, in which we are, as it were, burned with smoldering green firewood--that forces us philosophers to sink to our ultimate profundity and to do away with all the trust, everything good-natured, veil-imposing, mild and middling, on which we may have previously based our humanity. I doubt that such a pain makes us 'better'--but I know that it makes us deeper.

Such men alone are my readers, my proper readers, my preordained readers. Of what account are the rest? The rest are simply... humanity. One must be superior to humanity in power, in loftiness of soul- in contempt.

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! In contrast to this, picture "the enemy" as the man of ressentiment conceives him--and here precisely is his deed, his creation: he has conceived "the evil enemy," "the Evil One," and this in fact is his basic concept, from which he then evolves, as an afterthought and pendant, a "good one"--himself!

What does a philosopher demand of himself, first and last? To overcome his time in himself, to become "timeless.

It is inhuman to bless where one is cursed.

The humanity of famous intellectuals lies in being wrong with gracious courtesy when dealing with those who are not famous.

In our own presence, we all pretend to be simpler than we are: thus we take a break from our fellow human beings.

Do I advise you to love the neighbor? I suggest rather to escape from the neighbor and to love those who are the farthest away from you. Higher than the love for the neighbor is the love for the man who is distant and has still to come.

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?

How much disgruntled heaviness, lameness, dampness, how much beer is there in the German intelligence.

Whoever has overthrown an existing law of custom has 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!

This demand follows from an insight that I was the first to articulate: that there are no moral facts.

Human, all too human.

Christianity remains to this day the greatest misfortune of humanity.

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

Morality is the best of all devices for leading mankind by the nose.

In every age the wisest have passed the identical judgment on life: it is worthless...

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

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

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

To be natural means to dare to be as immoral as Nature is.

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

Mastery has been achieved when one neither makes a mistake nor hesitates in the performance.

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

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

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 am not a human being, I am dynamite.

As far as Germany extends it ruins culture.

The Germans are incapable of any conception of greatness: proof Schumann.

Liberalism is the transformation of mankind into cattle.

Christianity is a metaphysics of the hangman.

All mankind is divided, as it was at all times and is still, into slaves and freemen.

If that glad message of your Bible were written in your faces, you would not need to demand belief in the authority of that book in such stiff-necked fashion.

The man loves danger and sport. That is why he loves woman, the most dangerous of all sports.

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!

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

Not their love of humanity, but the impotence of their love, prevents the Christians of today - burning us.

The usual false conclusions of mankind are these: a thing exists, therefore it has a right to exist.

The better the state is established, the fainter is humanity. To make the individual uncomfortable, that is my task.

Good manners disappear in proportion as the influence of a Court and an exclusive aristocracy lessens; this decrease can be plainly observed from decade to decade by those who have an eye for public behavior, which grows visibly.

It is nothing but fanaticism and beautiful soulism to expect very much (or even, much only) from humanity when it has forgotten how to wage war.

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