Quotes from Friedrich Nietzsche

I fear you close by; I love you far away.

The overman...Who has organized the chaos of his passions, given style to his character, and become creative. Aware of life's terrors, he affirms life without resentment.

What then is truth? A movable host of metaphors, metonymies, and anthropomorphisms: in short, a sum of human relations which have been poetically and rhetorically intensified, transferred, and embellished, and which, after long usage, seem to a people to be fixed, canonical, and binding. Truths are illusions which we have forgotten are illusions — they are metaphors that have become worn out and have been drained of sensuous force.

I would only believe in a god who could dance.

Pardon me, my friends, I have ventured to paint my happiness on the wall.

A moral system valid for all is basically immoral.

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'?

Only great pain, the long, slow pain that takes its time... compels us to descend to our ultimate depths... I doubt that such pain makes us better; but I know it makes us more profound... In the end, lest what is most important remain unsaid: from such abysses, from such severe sickness, one returns newborn, having shed one's skin... with merrier senses, with a second dangerous innocence in joy, more childlike and yet a hundred times subtler than one has ever been before.

One has to take a somewhat bold and dangerous line with this existence: especially as, whatever happens, we are bound to lose it.

Morality is the herd-instinct in the individual.

A bad conscience is easier to cope with than a bad reputation.

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

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

I hate you most because you attract, but are not strong enough to pull me to you.

Your only problem, perhaps, is that you scream without letting yourself cry.

One is fruitful only at the cost of being rich in contradictions.

Physiologists should think before putting down the instinct of self-preservation as the cardinal instinct of an organic being. A living thing seeks above all to discharge its strength--life itself is will to power; self-preservation is only one of the indirect and most frequent results.

Untroubled, scornful, outrageous - that is how wisdom wants us to be: she is a woman and never loves anyone but a warrior.

Was that life? Well then, once more!

There is a false saying: "How can someone who can't save himself save others?" Supposing I have the key to your chains, why should your lock and my lock be the same?

This is the hardest of all: to close the open hand out of love, and keep modest as a giver.

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

No artist tolerates reality.

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.