Friedrich Nietzsche

The lie is a condition of life.

— Friedrich Nietzsche

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

— Friedrich Nietzsche

No man lies so boldly as the man who is indignant.

— Friedrich Nietzsche

Let us beware of saying that death is the opposite of life. The living being is only a species of the dead, and a very rare species.

— Friedrich Nietzsche

If you believed more in life you would fling yourself less to the moment.

— Friedrich Nietzsche

Love is a state in which a man sees things most decidedly as they are not.

— Friedrich Nietzsche

The spiritualization of sensuality is called love: it is a great triumph over Christianity.

— Friedrich Nietzsche

I love those who do not know how to live for today.

— Friedrich Nietzsche

Madness is something rare in individuals -- but in groups, parties, peoples, ages it is the rule.

— Friedrich Nietzsche

The best friend is likely to acquire the best wife, because a good marriage is based on the talent for friendship.

— Friedrich Nietzsche

It is obvious that all sense has gone out of modern marriage: which is, however, no objection to marriage but to modernity.

— Friedrich Nietzsche

Mathematics would certainly have not come into existence if one had known from the beginning that there was in nature no exactly straight line, no actual circle, no absolute magnitude.

— Friedrich Nietzsche

The advantage of a bad memory is that one enjoys several times the same good things for the first time.

— Friedrich Nietzsche

The true man wants two things: danger and play. For that reason he wants woman, as the most dangerous plaything.

— Friedrich Nietzsche

For the woman, the man is a means: the end is always the child.

— Friedrich Nietzsche

Arrogance on the part of the meritorious is even more offensive to us than the arrogance of those without merit: for merit itself is offensive.

— Friedrich Nietzsche

What then in the last resort are the truths of mankind? They are the irrefutable errors of mankind.

— Friedrich Nietzsche

Morality is the herd-instinct in the individual.

— Friedrich Nietzsche

Only sick music makes money today.

— Friedrich Nietzsche

Without music, life would be a mistake.

— Friedrich Nietzsche

Without music, life would be an error. The German imagines even God singing songs

— Friedrich Nietzsche

Let us beware of saying there are laws in nature. There are only necessities: there is no one to command, no one to obey, no one to transgress. When you realize there are no goals or objectives, then you realize, too, that there is no chance: for only in a world of objectives does the word chance have any meaning.

— Friedrich Nietzsche

Necessity is not an established fact, but rather an interpretation.

— Friedrich Nietzsche

Not when truth is dirty, but when it is shallow, does the enlightened man dislike to wade into its waters.

— Friedrich Nietzsche

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.

— Friedrich Nietzsche

We would not let ourselves be burned to death for our opinions: we are not sure enough of them for that. But perhaps for the right to have our opinions and to change them.

— Friedrich Nietzsche

Even today a crude sort of persecution is all that is required to create an honorable name for any sect, no matter how indifferent in itself.

— Friedrich Nietzsche

Everyone who has ever built anywhere a new heaven first found the power thereto in his own hell.

— Friedrich Nietzsche

Man... cannot learn to forget, but hangs on the past: however far or fast he runs, that chain runs with him.

— Friedrich Nietzsche

Because men really respect only that which was founded of old and has developed slowly, he who wants to live on after his death must take care not only of his posterity but even more of his past.

— Friedrich Nietzsche

The philosopher believes that the value of his philosophy lies in the whole, in the building: posterity discovers it in the bricks with which he built and which are then often used again for better building: in the fact, that is to say, that building can be destroyed and nonetheless possess value as material.

— Friedrich Nietzsche

Actual philosophers... are commanders and law-givers: they say thus it shall be!, it is they who determine the Wherefore and Whither of mankind, and they possess for this task the preliminary work of all the philosophical laborers, of all those who have subdued the past -- they reach for the future with creative hand, and everything that is or has been becomes for them a means, an instrument, a hammer. Their knowing is creating, their creating is a law giving, their will to truth is -- will to power. Are their such philosophers today? Have there been such philosophers? Must there not be such philosophers?

— Friedrich Nietzsche

Plato was a bore.

— Friedrich Nietzsche

Every philosophy is the philosophy of some stage of life.

— Friedrich Nietzsche

We must be physicists in order to be creative since so far codes of values and ideals have been constructed in ignorance of physics or even in contradiction to physics.

— Friedrich Nietzsche

The newspaper reader says: this party will ruin itself if it makes errors like this. My higher politics says: a party which makes errors like this is already finished -- it is no longer secure in its instincts.

— Friedrich Nietzsche

Not necessity, not desire --no, the love of power is the demon of men. Let them have everything --health, food, a place to live, entertainment --they are and remain unhappy and low-spirited: for the demon waits and waits and will be satisfied.

— Friedrich Nietzsche

Has a woman who knew she was well-dressed ever caught a cold?

— Friedrich Nietzsche

So long as you are praised think only that you are not yet on your own path but on that of another.

— Friedrich Nietzsche

Undeserved praise causes more pangs of conscience later than undeserved blame, but probably only for this reason, that our power of judgment are more completely exposed by being over praised than by being unjustly underestimated.

— Friedrich Nietzsche

Nothing has been purchased more dearly than the little bit of reason and sense of freedom which now constitutes our pride.

— Friedrich Nietzsche

Idleness is the parent of psychology.

— Friedrich Nietzsche

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

— Friedrich Nietzsche

Distrust everyone in whom the impulse to punish is powerful!

— Friedrich Nietzsche

To forget one's purpose is the commonest form of stupidity.

— Friedrich Nietzsche

He who has a strong enough why can bear almost any how.

— Friedrich Nietzsche

After coming into contact with a religious man I always feel I must wash my hands.

— Friedrich Nietzsche

You gave him an opportunity of showing greatness of character and he did not seize it. He will never forgive you for that.

— Friedrich Nietzsche

Oh, how much is today hidden by science! Oh, how much it is expected to hide!

— Friedrich Nietzsche

He who cannot obey himself will be commanded. That is the nature of living creatures.

— Friedrich Nietzsche

He who despises himself nevertheless esteems himself as a self-despiser.

— Friedrich Nietzsche

Reason is the cause of our falsification of the evidence of the senses. In so far as the senses show becoming, passing away, change, they do not lie.

— Friedrich Nietzsche

The great man fights the elements in his time that hinder his own greatness, in other words his own freedom and sincerity.

— Friedrich Nietzsche

Great intellects are skeptical.

— Friedrich Nietzsche

Most of the time in married life is taken up by talk.

— Friedrich Nietzsche

Once spirit was God, then it became man, and now it is even becoming mob.

— Friedrich Nietzsche

The most spiritual human beings, assuming they are the most courageous, also experience by far the most painful tragedies: but it is precisely for this reason that they honor life, because it brings against them its most formidable weapons.

— Friedrich Nietzsche

The man loves danger and sport. That is why he loves woman, the most dangerous of all sports.

— Friedrich Nietzsche

The best weapon against an enemy is another enemy.

— Friedrich Nietzsche

That which does not kill us makes us stronger.

— Friedrich Nietzsche

As regards the celebrated struggle for life, it seems to me for the present to have been rather asserted than proved. It does occur, but as the exception; the general aspect of life is not hunger and distress, but rather wealth, luxury, even absurd prodigality -- where there is a struggle it is a struggle for power.

— Friedrich Nietzsche

To give style to one's character -- a great and rare art! He exercises it who surveys all that his nature presents in strength and weakness and then moulds it to an artistic plan until everything appears as art and reason, and even the weaknesses delight the eye.

— Friedrich Nietzsche

Success has always been a great liar.

— Friedrich Nietzsche

What really raises one's indignation against suffering is not suffering intrinsically, but the senselessness of suffering.

— Friedrich Nietzsche

It is always consoling to think of suicide: in that way one gets through many a bad night.

— Friedrich Nietzsche

When one does away with oneself one does the most estimable thing possible: one thereby almost deserves to live.

— Friedrich Nietzsche

All of life is a dispute over taste and tasting.

— Friedrich Nietzsche

The press, the machine, the railway, the telegraph are premises whose thousand-year conclusion no one has yet dared to draw.

— Friedrich Nietzsche

When we talk in company we lose our unique tone of voice, and this leads us to make statements which is no way correspond to our real thoughts.

— Friedrich Nietzsche

Many a man fails as an original thinker simply because his memory it too good.

— Friedrich Nietzsche

Thoughts are the shadows of our sensations -- always darker, emptier, simpler than these.

— Friedrich Nietzsche

When one has much to put into them, a day has a hundred pockets.

— Friedrich Nietzsche

The more abstract the truth you want to teach, the more thoroughly you must seduce the senses to accept it.

— Friedrich Nietzsche

Mystical explanations are considered deep. The truth is that they are not even superficial.

— Friedrich Nietzsche

Reckoned physiologically, everything ugly weakens and afflicts man. It recalls decay, danger, impotence; he actually suffers a loss of energy in its presence. The effect of the ugly can be measured with a dynamometer. Whenever man feels in any way depressed, he senses the proximity of something ugly. His feeling of power, his will to power, his courage, his pride -- they decline with the ugly, they increase with the beautiful.

— Friedrich Nietzsche

At bottom every man knows well enough that he is a unique being, only once on this earth; and by no extraordinary chance will such a marvelously picturesque piece of diversity in unity as he is, ever be put together a second time.

— Friedrich Nietzsche

All sciences are now under the obligation to prepare the ground for the future task of the philosopher, which is to solve the problem of value, to determine the true hierarchy of values.

— Friedrich Nietzsche

What is the vanity of the vainest man compared with the vanity which the most modest possesses when, in the midst of nature and the world, he feels himself to be man!

— Friedrich Nietzsche

We do not place especial value on the possession of a virtue until we notice its total absence in our opponent.

— Friedrich Nietzsche

I know my fate. One day there will be associated with my name the recollection of something frightful -- of a crisis like no other before on earth, of the profoundest collision of conscience, of a decision evoked against everything that until then had been believed in, demanded, sanctified. I am not a man I am dynamite.

— Friedrich Nietzsche

All truly great thoughts are conceived by walking.

— Friedrich Nietzsche

War has always been the grand sagacity of every spirit which has grown too inward and too profound; its curative power lies even in the wounds one receives.

— Friedrich Nietzsche

There is more wisdom in your body than in your deepest philosophy.

— Friedrich Nietzsche

Does wisdom perhaps appear on the earth as a raven which is inspired by the smell of carrion?

— Friedrich Nietzsche

The growth of wisdom may be gauged exactly by the diminution of ill temper.

— Friedrich Nietzsche

Wit is the epitaph of an emotion.

— Friedrich Nietzsche

Women are considered deep -- why? Because one can never discover any bottom to them. Women are not even shallow.

— Friedrich Nietzsche

If a woman possesses manly virtues one should run away from her; and if she does not possess them she runs away from herself.

— Friedrich Nietzsche

Of all that is written, I love only what a person has written with his own blood.

— Friedrich Nietzsche

One must have a good memory to keep the promises one has made

— Friedrich Nietzsche

Star friendship.— We were friends and have become estranged. But this was right, and we do not want to conceal and obscure it from ourselves as if we had reason to feel ashamed. We are two ships each of which has its goal and course; our paths may cross and we may celebrate a feast together, as we did—and then the good ships rested so quietly in one harbor and one sunshine that it may have looked as if they had reached their goal and as if they had one goal. But then the almighty force of our tasks drove us apart again into different seas and sunny zones, and perhaps we shall never see one another again,—perhaps we shall meet again but fail to recognize each other: our exposure to different seas and suns has changed us! That we have to become estranged is the law above us: by the same token we should also become more venerable for each other! And thus the memory of our former friendship should become more sacred! There is probably a tremendous but invisible stellar orbit in which our very different ways and goals may be included as small parts of this path,—let us rise up to this thought! But our life is too short and our power of vision too small for us to be more than friends in the sense of this sublime possibility.— Let us then believe in our star friendship even if we should be compelled to be earth enemies.

— Friedrich Nietzsche

Faith means not wanting to know what is true.

— Friedrich Nietzsche

One has to pay dearly for immortality; one has to die several times while one is still alive.

— Friedrich Nietzsche

I'm not upset that you lied to me, I'm upset that from now on I can't believe you!

— Friedrich Nietzsche

We often refuse to accept an idea merely because the tone of voice in which it has been expressed is unsympathetic to us.

— Friedrich Nietzsche

You have your way. I have my way. As for the right way, the correct way, and the only way, it does not exist.

— Friedrich Nietzsche

All good people are weak,they are good because they are not strong enough to be evil

— Friedrich Nietzsche

God,too decompose.God is dead. God remains dead. And we have killed him.

— Friedrich Nietzsche

Verily, I have often laughed at the weaklings who thought themselves good because they had no claws.

— Friedrich Nietzsche

What ? Is man merely a mistake of God's ? Or God merely a mistake of man's ?

— Friedrich Nietzsche