Friedrich Nietzsche Ss Quotations

Light for some time to come will have to be called darkness.

A little wisdom is indeed possible; but this blessed security have I found in all things, that they prefer--to DANCE on the feet of chance.

You know these things as thoughts, but your thoughts are not your experiences, they are an echo and after-effect of your experiences: as when your room trembles whe na carriage goes past. I however am sitting in the carriage, and often I am the carriage itself. Ina man who thinks like this, the dichotomy between thinking and feeling, intellect and passion, has really disappeared. He feels his thoughts. He can fall in love with an idea. An idea can make him ill.

Of what is great one must either be silent or speak with greatness. With greatness--that means cynically and with innocence.

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

I love those who do not know how to live, except by going under, for they are those who cross over.

My formula for happiness: a Yes, a No, a straight line, a goal.

Every attainment, every step forward in knowledge, follows from courage, from hardness against oneself, from cleanliness in relation to oneself.

I know of no better life purpose than to perish in attempting the great and the impossible.

The overman...Who has organized the chaos of his passions, given style to his character, and become creative. Aware of life's terrors, he affirms life without resentment.

love as a passion—it is our European specialty—must absolutely be of noble origin; as is well known, its invention is due to the Provencal poet-cavaliers, those brilliant, ingenious men of the "gai saber," to whom Europe owes so much, and almost owes itself.

Blessed are the sleepy ones: for they shall soon fall off.

The lonely one offers his hand too quickly to whomever he encounters.

God is dead. God remains dead. And we have killed him. How shall we comfort ourselves, the murderers of all murderers? What was holiest and mightiest of all that the world has yet owned has bled to death under our knives: who will wipe this blood off us? 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?

There is a rollicking kindness that looks like malice.

Genteel women suppose that those things do not really exist about which it is impossible to talk in polite company.

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

What can everyone do? Praise and blame. This is human virtue, this is human madness.

There are no limits to God's compassion with Paradises over their one universally felt want: he immediately created other animals besides. God's first blunder: Man didn't find the animals amusing, - he dominated them and didn't even want to be an 'animal.'

Whenever the strength of a belief strongly steps into the foreground, we must infer a certain weakness of demonstrability and the improbability of that belief.

The universe without music would be madness.

As a human being Plato mingles regal, exclusive, and self-contained features with melancholy compassion.

You implanted your highest goal into the heart of those passions: then they became your virtues and joys.

The greatest progress that the human race has made lies in learning how to make correct inferences.

Really unreflective people are now inwardly without Christianity, and the more moderate and reflective people of the intellectual middle class now possess only an adapted, that is to say marvelously simplified Christianity. A god who in his love arranges everything in a manner that in the end will be best for us; a god who gives to us and takes from us our virtue and our happiness, so that as a whole all is meet and fit and there is no reason for us to take life sadly, let alone exclaim against it; in short, resignation and modest demands elevated to godhead

There are expressions and bulls-eyes of the spirit, there are epigrams, a little handful of words, in which a whole culture, a whole society is suddenly crystallized.

As much as possible, and this as quickly as possible: that is what the great mental and emotional illness craves that is variously called "present" or "culture," but that is actually a symptom of consumption.

People who, out of an inborn moderation, leave every glass standing only half-emptied refuse to admit that everything in the world has its sediments and dregs.

The hour when you say, "What does my happiness matter? It is poverty and filth, and a wretched complacency. Yet my happiness should justify existence itself!

What really makes one indignant about suffering isn't the thing itself but the senselessness of it.

Like tourists huffing and puffing to reach the peak we forget the view on the way up.

Those who are slow to know suppose that slowness is the essence of knowledge.

We must repay goodness and wickedness: but why exactly to the person who has done us a good or a wicked turn?

A vocation makes us unthinking; that is its greatest blessing. For it is a bulwark behind which we are permitted to withdraw whencommonplace doubts and cares assail us.

One who is always deeply involved in what he is doing is above all embarrassment.

Active, successful natures act, not according to the maxim, "know thyself," but as if prompted by the commandment: will a self, and so become a self.

I know no other way to associate with great tasks than as play: as a sign of greatness, this is an essential presupposition.

Perhaps no one as yet has been truthful enough about what "truthfulness" is.

The weak and misbegotten shall perish: first principle of our brotherly love. And they shall be given every assistance.

Whom do you call bad?--Those who always want to induce shame.

Among the wealthy, generosity is often merely a kind of shyness.

We must take precautions against being prematurely honed sharp--since at the same time we are being prematurely honed thin.

That whatever a man says, promises, or resolves in passion he must stick to later on when he is cold and sober--this demand is among the heaviest burdens that weigh on humankind.

Do not be deceived! The busiest people harbor the greatest weariness, their restlessness is weakness--they no longer have the capacity for waiting and idleness.

This mother needs happy, reputable children, and that one needs unhappy ones: otherwise she cannot show her kindness as a mother.

Just as bones, tissues, intestines, and blood vessels are enclosed in a skin that makes it possible to bear the sight of a human being, so the agitations and passions of the soul are wrapped up in vanity: it is the soul's skin.

In compassionate men, severity is a virtue.

Illness is a clumsy attempt to arrive at health: we must come to nature's aid with intellect.

The first opinion that occurs to us when we are suddenly asked about something is usually not our own but only the current one pertaining to our class, position, or parentage; our own opinions seldom swim on the surface.

In a seriously intended intellectual emancipation a person's mute passions and cravings also hope to find their advantage.

Everything good is instinct--and, as a result, easy, necessary, free.

The good displeases us when we are not up to it.

Whoever no longer finds greatness in God no longer finds it anywhere--he must either deny it or create it.

One who dresses in rags that have been washed clean dresses cleanly to be sure, but raggedly nonetheless.

He who possesses greatness is cruel towards his secondary virtues and considerations.

In order to be somebody you have to hold even your shadow in high regard.

Precisely this is godliness--that there are gods, but no God.

It is only when we have ceased to be the followers of our followers that we comprehend how meaningless followers are.

There will be but few people who, when at a loss for topics of conversation, will not reveal the more secret affairs of their friends.

The grand style follows suit with all great passion. It disdains to please, it forgets to persuade. It commands. It wills.

When you stare into an abyss for a long time, the abyss also stares into you.

Cows sometimes wear an expression resembling wonderment arrested on its way to becoming a question. In the eye of superior intelligence, on the other hand, lies the nil admirari spread out like the monotony of a cloudless sky.

The child as a monument to the passion of two people; the will to oneness in two.

The higher its type, the more rarely a thing succeeds.

Having a talent is not enough: one must also have your permission to have it--right, my friends?

Sometimes it just takes stronger eyeglasses to cure those who are in love--and someone with the ability to imagine a face or a figure twenty years older might perhaps pass through life quite undisturbed.

It takes physical courage to indulge in wickedness. The "good" are too cowardly to do it.

Desire is happiness: satisfaction as happiness is merely the ultimate moment of desire. To be wish and wish alone is happiness, and a new wish over and over again.

Women want to serve, and this is where their happiness lies: but the free spirit does not want to be served, and this is where hishappiness lies.

Only in war are you holy, and when you are robbers and cruel.

Do not talk about giftedness, inborn talents! One can assume great men of all kinds who were very little gifted. They acquired greatness, became “geniuses” (as we put it), through qualities the lack of which no one who knew what they were would boast of: they all possessed that seriousness of the efficient workman which first learns to construct the parts properly before it ventures to fashion a great whole; they allowed themselves time for it, because they took more pleasure in making the little, secondary things well than in the effect of a dazzling whole.

...one can speak with the utmost clearness, and yet not be heard by anyone.

Truly, whoever possesses little is that much less possessed: praised be a little poverty!

More and more it seems to me that the philosopher, being of necessity a man of tomorrow and the day after tomorrow, has always found himself, and had to find himself, in contradiction to his today: his enemy was ever the ideal of today. So far all these extraordinary furtherers of men whom one calls philosophers, though they themselves have rarely felt like friends of wisdom but rather like disagreeable fools and dangerous question marks, have found their task, their hard, unwanted, inescapable task, but eventually also the greatness of their task, in being the bad conscience of their time.

I have somehow something like "influence" ... In the Anti-Semitic Correspondence ... my name is mentioned in almost every issue. Zarathustra ... has charmed the anti-Semites; there is a special anti-Semitic interpretation of it that made me laugh very much.

Faced with a world of "modern ideas" which would like to banish everyone into a corner and a "specialty," a philosopher, if there could be a philosopher these days, would be compelled to establish the greatness of mankind, the idea of "greatness," on the basis of his own particular extensive range and multiplicity, his own totality in the midst of diversity.

Righteousness exalteth a nation.

Not joy is the mother of dissipation, but joylessness.

That roguish and cheerful vice, politeness.

In this moment, I am euphoric. Not because of any phony god's blessing. But because, I am enlightened by my intelligence.

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

Many a one cannot loosen his own fetters, but is nevertheless his friend's emancipator.

Idleness is the beginning of all psychology. What? Could it be that psychology is ? a vice?

All human life is sunk deep in untruth; the individual cannot pull it out of this well without growing profoundly annoyed with his entire past, without finding his present motives (like honor) senseless, and without opposing scorn and disdain to the passions that urge one on to the future and to the happiness in it.

I am Zarathustra the Godless: where shall I find my equal? All those who give themselves their own will and renounce all submission, they are my equals.

But not to perish from internal distress and doubt when one inflicts great suffering and hears the cry of suffering : that is great, that belongs to greatness.

One may sometimes tell a lie, but the grimace that accompanies it tells the truth.

You want to make him interested in you? Then pretend to be embarrassed in his presence-

In everything one thing is impossible: rationality.

Idleness is the parent of psychology.

I presume that you are compassionate: to be without pity means to be sick in body and spirit. But one should have spirit in abundance, so as to be permitted to be compassionate! For your pity is detrimental to you and to everyone.

We are franker towards others than towards ourselves.

And if your friend does evil to you, say to him, ''I forgive you for what you did to me, but how can I forgive you for what you did to yourself?

The sick woman especially: no one surpasses her in refinements for ruling, oppressing, tyrannising.

Verily, I do not like them, the merciful who feel blessed in their pity: they are lacking too much in shame. If I must pity, at least I do not want it known; and if I do pity, it is preferably from a distance.

Speaking generally, punishment hardens and numbs, it produces concentration, it sharpens the consciousness of alienation, it strengthens the power of resistance.

To the mean all becomes mean.

Gradually it has become clear to me what every great philosophy so far has been: namely, the personal confession of its author and a kind of involuntary and unconscious memoir.

By means of music the very passions, enjoy themselves.

Whereas the man of action binds his life to reason and its concepts so that he will not be swept away and lost, the scientific investigator builds his hut right next to the tower of science so that he will be able to work on it and to find shelter for himself beneath those bulwarks which presently exist.