Explore Quotes by Friedrich Nietzsche

Love brings to light a lover's noble and hidden qualities-his rare and exceptional traits: it is thus liable to be deceptive of his normal qualities.

They're so cold, these scholars! May lightning strike their food so that their mouths learn how to eat fire!

I love the great despisers because they are the great adorers.

Digressions, objections, delight in mockery, carefree mistrust are signs of health.

He who possesseth little is so much the less possessed. Blessed be moderate poverty!

In the mountains of truth, you never climb in vain.

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?

Growth in wisdom can be measured precisely by decline in bile.

I can tell by my own reaction to it that this book is harmful." But let him only wait and perhaps one day he will admit to himself that this same book has done him a great service by bringing out the hidden sickness of his heart and making it visible.— Altered opinions do not alter a man’s character (or do so very little); but they do illuminate individual aspects of the constellation of his personality which with a different constellation of opinions had hitherto remained dark and unrecognizable.

The more abstract the truth you wish to teach, the more must you allure the senses to it.

What does your conscience say? — 'You should become the person you are'.

Because we have for millenia made moral, aesthetic, religious demands on the world, looked upon it with blind desire, passion or fear, and abandoned ourselves to the bad habits of illogical thinking, this world has gradually become so marvelously variegated, frightful, meaningful, soulful, it has acquired color - but we have been the colorists: it is the human intellect that has made appearances appear and transported its erroneous basic conceptions into things.

How good music and bad reasons sound when one marches against an enemy.

Today as always, men fall into two groups: slaves and free men. Whoever does not have two-thirds of his day for himself, is a slave, whatever he may be: a statesman, a businessman, an official, or a scholar.

A nation is a detour of nature to arrive at five or six great men- yes, and then to get around them.

Sometimes people don't want to hear the truth because they don't want their illusions destroyed.

As soon as a religion comes to dominate it has as its opponents all those who would have been its first disciples.

I consist of body and soul - in the worlds of a child. And why shouldn't we speak like children? But the enlightened, the knowledgealbe would say: I am body through and through, nothing more; and the soul is just a word for something on the body.

And those who were seen dancing were thought to be insane by those who could not hear the music.

The worst readers are those who behave like plundering troops: they take away a few things they can use, dirty and confound the remainder, and revile the whole.

The end of a melody is not its goal; but nonetheless, if the melody had not reached its end it would not have reached its goal either. A parable.