Friedrich Nietzsche Art Quotations

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

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

An artist has no home in Europe except in Paris.

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

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

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

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

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.'

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.

It may be that until now there has been no more potent means for beautifying man himself than piety: it can turn man into so much art, surface, play of colors, graciousness that his sight no longer makes one suffer.---

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

It is the powerful who know how to honour, it is their art, their domain for invention.

If there is to be art, if there is to be any aesthetic doing and seeing, one physiological condition is indispensable: frenzy.

Socrates condemned art because he preferred philosophy and only after much internal struggle did Plato accept this judgment.

I can still stand on life's narrowest footing: but who would I be were I to show you this art. Would you like to see a ropedancer?

A woman does not want the truth; what is truth to women? From the beginning, nothing has been more alien, repugnant, and hostile to woman than the truth - her great art is the lie, her highest concern is mere appearance and beauty.

Art furnishes us with eyes and hands and above all the good conscience to be able to turn ourselves into such a phenomenon.

Very early in my life I took the question of the relation of art to truth seriously: even now I stand in holy dread in the face of this discordance. My first book was devoted to it. The Birth of Tragedy believes in art on the background of another belief

Sleep is no mean art.

Interest in Education will acquire great strength only from the moment when belief in a God and His care is renounced, just as the art of healing could only flourish when the belief in miracle cures ceased.

There is one thing one has to have either a soul that is cheerful by nature, or a soul made cheerful by work, love, art, and knowledge....

All that the world needs most today, is combined in the most deductive manner in his art; the three great stimulants of exhausted people: brutality, artificiality, and innocence (idiocy).

... art approaches as a saving sorceress, expert at healing. She alone knows how to turn these nauseous thoughts about the horror or absurdity of existence into notions with which one can live.

Art is the proper task of life.

We possess art lest we perish of the truth.

Art raises its head where creeds relax.

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

The truth is ugly: we have art so as not to perish from the truth.

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

Giving style” to one’s character - a great and rare art! It is exercised by those who see all the strengths and weaknesses of their own natures and then comprehend them in an artistic plan until everything appears as art and reason and even weakness delights the eye.

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.

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.

When one is young, one venerates and despises without that art of nuances which constitutes the best gain of life, and it is only fair that one has to pay dearly for having assaulted men and things in this manner with Yes and No. Everything is arranged so that the worst of tastes, the taste for the unconditional, should be cruelly fooled and abused until a man learns to put a little art into his feelings and rather to risk trying even what is artificial — as the real artists of life do.

The transition from Religion to Scientific contemplation is a violent, dangerous leap, which is not to be recommended. In order to make this transition, art is far rather to be employed to relieve the mind overburdened with emotions. Out of the illogical comes much good. It is so firmly rooted in the passions, in language, in art, in religion, and generally in everything which gives value to life. It is only the naive people who can believe that the nature of man can be changed into a purely logical one. We have yet to learn that others can suffer, and this can never be completely learned.

In art the end does not sanctify the means: but sacred means employed here can sanctify the end.

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

Art is the great stimulus to life.

Discontent is the seed of ethics.

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

"Ego," sayest thou, and art proud of that word. But the greater thing - in which thou art unwilling to believe - is thy body with its big sagacity; it saith not "ego," but doeth it.

Art depends upon the inexactitude of sight.

That is an artist as I would have an artist be, modest in his needs: he really wants only two things, his bread and his art--panemet Circen.

It is with artworks as it is with wine: it is much better when we do not need either one, when we stick with water, and when out of our own inner fire, the inner sweetness of our own soul, we turn the water over and over again into wine ourselves.

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

Man is no longer an artist, he has become a work of art.

And so while dreams are the individual man's play with reality, the sculptor's art is (in a broader sense) the play with dreams.

In this state one enriches everything out of one's own fullness: whatever one sees, whatever wills is seen swelled, taut, strong, overloaded with strength. A man in this state transforms things until they mirror his power—until they are reflections of his perfection. This having to transform into perfection is—art.

There is perhaps nothing so admirable in Christianity and Buddhism as their art of teaching even the lowest to elevate themselves by piety to a seemingly higher order of things, and thereby to retain their satisfaction with the actual world in which they find it difficult enough to live - this very difficulty being necessary.

Error has made man so deep, sensitive, and inventive that he has put forth such blossoms as religions and arts. Pure knowledge could not have been capable of it.

The form of a work of art, which gives speech to their thoughts and is, therefore, their mode of talking, is always somewhat uncertain, like all kinds of speech.

For one thing is needful: that a human being should attain satisfaction with himself, whether it be by means of this or that poetry or art; only then is a human being at all tolerable to behold. Whoever is dissatisfied with himself is constantly ready for revenge, and we others will be his victims, if only by having to endure his ugly sight.

One thing a man must have: either a naturally light disposition or a disposition lightened by art and knowledge.