Quotes from Friedrich Nietzsche

Without music, life would be a mistake.... I would only believe in a God who knew how to dance.

What if a demon were to creep after you one night, in your loneliest loneliness, and say, 'This life which you live must be lived by you once again and innumerable times more; and every pain and joy and thought and sigh must come again to you, all in the same sequence. The eternal hourglass will again and again be turned and you with it, dust of the dust!' Would you throw yourself down and gnash your teeth and curse that demon? Or would you answer, 'Never have I heard anything more divine'?

Regarding life, the wisest men of all ages have judged alike: it is worthless.

Is life not a thousand times too short for us to bore ourselves?

There are people who want to make men's lives more difficult for no other reason than the chance it provides them afterwards to offer their prescription for alleviating life; their Christianity, for instance.

Judgments, value judgments concerning life, for or against, can in the last resort never be true: they possess value only as symptoms, they come into consideration only as symptoms - in themselves such judgments are stupidities.

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.

The lie is a condition of life.

We love life, not because we are used to living but because we are used to loving.

Art is the proper task of life.

He who fights with monsters might take care lest he thereby become a monster. Is not life a hundred times too short for us to bore ourselves?

Without music, life would be a mistake.

He who has a why to live can bear almost any how.

He who cannot give anything away cannot feel anything either.

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.

Bad cooks - and the utter lack of reason in the kitchen - have delayed human development longest and impaired it most.

I cook every chance in my pot. And only when it is cooked through do I welcome it as my food.

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

That which does not kill me makes me stronger.

The Christian faith from the beginning, is sacrifice the sacrifice of all freedom, all pride, all self-confidence of spirit, it is at the same time subjection, self-derision, and self-mutilation.

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

Democratic institutions form a system of quarantine for tyrannical desires.

Every high degree of power always involves a corresponding degree of freedom from good and evil.

Willing sets you free: that is the true doctrine of will and freedom--thus Zarathustra instructs you.