Quotes from Friedrich Nietzsche

What saved me then? Nothing but pregnancy. And each time after I had given birth to my work my life hung suspended by a thin thread.

The woman and the genius do not work. Up to now, woman has been mankind's supreme luxury. In all those moments when we do our best, we do not work. Work is merely a means to these moments.

And so do you suppose it must be a piece-work because it has been given to you (and could only be given to you) in pieces?

Admiration for a quality or an art can be so strong that it deters us from striving to possess it.

The irrationality of a thing is no argument against its existence, rather a condition of it.

One often contradicts an opinion when what is uncongenial is really the tone in which it was conveyed.

Once the decision has been made, close your ear even to the best counter argument: sign of a strong character. Thus an occasional will to stupidity.

We have art so that we shall not die of reality.

If you know the why, you can live any how.

The essence of all beautiful art, all great art, is gratitude.

As an artist one has no home in Europe except in Paris.

Art is essentially the affirmation, the blessing, and the deification of existence.

We have art in order not to die of the truth.

All that the world most needs today, is combined in the most seductive manner in his art, — the three great stimulants of exhausted people: brutality, artificiality and innocence (idiocy).

Art raises its head where creeds relax.

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

And so while dreams are the individual man's play with reality, the sculptor's art is (in a broader sense) the play with dreams.

If there is to be art, if there is to be any aesthetic doing and seeing, one physiological condition is indispensable: frenzy.

That is an artist as I would have an artist be, modest in his needs: he really wants only two things, his bread and his art--panemet Circen.

Art furnishes us with eyes and hands and above all the good conscience to be able to turn ourselves into such a phenomenon.

Sleep is no mean art.

Art depends upon the inexactitude of sight.

It is the powerful who know how to honour, it is their art, their domain for invention.

You must have chaos within you to give birth to a dancing star.