Friedrich Nietzsche Feelings Quotations

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

What is good? All that heightens the feeling of power, the will to power, power itself in man.

Pity is the most agreeable feeling among those who have little pride and no prospects of great conquests.

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

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

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

The refinement of morality increases together with the refinement of fear. Today the fear of disagreeable feelings in other people is almost the strongest of our own disagreeable feelings.

When anyone apologizes to us he has to do it very expertly: otherwise we might easily come to see ourselves as the guilty party and experience unpleasant feelings.

We feign pity when we want to demonstrate our ascendancy over feelings of hostility: but usually in vain. Whenever we notice this,there is an accompanying surge in those hostile sensations.

When somebody dies we usually need reasons for consolation, not so much to alleviate our pain as to excuse ourselves for so readily feeling consoled.

We should not talk about our friends: otherwise we will talk away the feeling of friendship.

Scholarship has the same relationship to wisdom as righteousness has to holiness: it is cold and dry, it is loveless and knows nodeep feelings of inadequacy or longing.

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 advent of the Christian God, as the maximum god attained so far, was therefore accompanied by the maximum feeling of guilty indebtedness on earth.

The so called unconscious inferences can be traced back to the all-preserving memory, which presents us with parallel experiences and hence already knows the consequences of an action. It is not anticipation of the effects; rather, it is the feeling: identical causes, identical effects . . .

With the unknown, one is confronted with danger, discomfort, and care; the first instinct is to abolish these painful states. First principle: any explanation is better than none. . . . The causal instinct is thus conditional upon, and excited by, the feeling of fear. The "why?" shall, if at all possible, not give the cause for its own sake so much as for a particular kind of cause -- a cause that is comforting, liberating, and relieving.

What is good? All that enhances the feeling of power, the Will to Power, and the power itself in man. What is bad? All that proceeds from weakness. What is happiness? The feeling that power is increasing--that resistance has been overcome. Not contentment, but more power; not peace at any price, but war; not virtue, but competence. The first principle of our humanism: The weak and the failures shall perish. They ought even to be helped to perish.

It is thus only this personal feeling of misery that we get rid of by acts of pity.

Rendering oneself unarmed when one had been the best-armed, out of a height of feeling-that is the means to real peace, which must always rest on a peace of mind.

All in all, punishment hardens and renders people more insensible; it concentrates; it increases the feeling of estrangement; it strengthens the power of resistance.

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

Wit is the epitaph of an emotion.

Artists may here have a more subtle scent: they know only too well that it is precisely when they cease to act 'voluntarily' and do everything of necessity that their feeling of freedom, subtlety, fullness of power, creative placing, disposing, shaping reaches its height - in short, that necessity and 'freedom of will' are then one in them.

It quite often happens that the old man is subject to the delusion of a great moral renewal and rebirth, and from this experience he passes judgments on the work and course of his life, as if he had only now become clear-sighted; and yet the inspiration behind this feeling of well-being and these confident judgements is not wisdom, but weariness .

Those who show pity and are always ready to help during times of trouble are seldom the same ones who rejoice in our joy: when others are happy they have nothing to do, they become superfluous and lose their feeling of superiority, and so they easily show their displeasure.

Well-meaning, helpful, good-natured attitudes of mind have not come to be honored on account of their usefulness, but because they are states of richer souls that are capable of bestowing and have their value in the feeling of the plenitude of life.

He who rejoices even at the stake triumphs not over pain but over the absence of pain where he had anticipated feeling it. A parable.

Not the intensity but the duration of high feelings makes high men.

Pity is the most pleasant feeling in those who have not much pride, and have no prospect of great conquests: the easy prey - and that is what every sufferer is - is for them an enchanting thing.

However unchristian it may seem, I do not even bear any ill feeling towards myself.