Explore Quotes by Friedrich Nietzsche

It was a subtle refinement of God to learn Greek when he wished to write a book – and that he did not learn it better.

Those moralists, on the other hand, who, following in the footsteps of Socrates, offer the individual a morality of self-control and temperance as a means to his own advantage, as his personal key to happiness, are the exceptions.

Watch them clamber, these swift monkeys! They clamber over one another and thus drag one another into the mud and the depth. They all want to get to the throne: that is their madness — as if happiness sat on the throne. Often, mud sits on the throne — and often the throne also on mud. Mad they all appear to me, clambering monkeys and overardent. Foul smells their idol, the cold monster: foul, they smell to me altogether, these idolators.

In truth,there was only one christian and he died on the cross.

The same relation exists between merchant and pirate, who for a long period are one and the same person: where the one function appears to them inadvisable, they exercise the other.

i have never pondered over questions that are not questions.

We should consider every day lost on which we have not danced at least once.

What is the seal of liberation? Not to be ashamed in front of oneself.

If a man has character, he has also his typical experience, which always recurs.

The familiarity of superiors embitters one, because it may not be returned.

It is certainly not the least charm of a theory that it is refutable; it is precisely thereby that it attracts the more subtle minds. It seems that the hundred-times-refuted theory of the "free will" owes its persistence to this charm alone; some one is always appearing who feels himself strong enough to refute it.

It is hard enough to remember my opinions, without also remembering my reasons for them!

The snake which cannot cast its skin has to die. As well the minds which are prevented from changing their opinions; they cease to be mind.

Remorse.-- Never yield to remorse, but at once tell yourself: remorse would simply mean adding to the first act of stupidity a second.

I fear that, with our current veneration for the natural and the real, we have arrived at the opposite pole to all idealism, and have landed in the region of the waxworks.

Only sick music makes money today.

That grand drama in a hundred acts, which is reserved for the next two centuries of Europe-the most terrible, most questionable and perhaps also the most hopeful of all dramas.

I am alone again and I want to be so; alone with the pure sky and open sea.

At the bottom of all these noble races the beast of prey, the splendid blond beast, prowling about avidly in search of spoil and victory.

When a man is ill his very goodness is sickly.

All truth is crooked, time itself is a circle