Quotes from Friedrich Nietzsche

Man's maturity: to have regained the seriousness that he had as a child at play.

What was silent in the father speaks in the son, and often I found in the son the unveiled secret of the father.

The higher man is distinguished from the lower by his fearlessness and his readiness to challenge misfortune.

I notice that Autumn is more the season of the soul than of nature.

I say unto you: one must still have chaos in oneself to be able to give birth to a dancing star. I say unto you: you still have chaos in yourselves. *** Where is the lightning to lick you with its tongue. Where is the frenzy with which you should be inoculated. Behold. I give you the Ubermensch. He is this lightning. He is this frenzy.

What is happening to me happens to all fruits that grow ripe. It is the honey in my veins that makes my blood thicker, and my soul quieter.

The Great Man... is colder, harder, less hesitating, and without fear of 'opinion'; he lacks the virtues that accompany respect and 'respectability,' and altogether everything that is the 'virtue of the herd.' If he cannot lead, he goes alone... He knows he is incommunicable: he finds it tasteless to be familiar... When not speaking to himself, he wears a mask. There is a solitude within him that is inaccessible to praise or blame.

I love those who do not know how to live, except by going under, for they are those who cross over.

Woman was God's second mistake.

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

One should die proudly when it is no longer possible to live proudly.

Words are but symbols for the relations of things to one another and to us; nowhere do they touch upon absolute truth.... Through words and concepts we shall never reach beyond the wall off relations, to some sort of fabulous primal ground of things.

No one can build you the bridge on which you, and only you, must cross the river of life. There may be countless trails and bridges and demigods who would gladly carry you across; but only at the price of pawning and forgoing yourself. There is one path in the world that none can walk but you. Where does it lead? Don't ask, walk!

When we have to change our mind about a person, we hold the inconvenience he causes us very much against him.

At a certain place in Beethoven's Ninth Symphony, for example, he might feel that he is floating above the earth in a starry dome, with the dream of immortality in his heart; all the stars seem to glimmer around him, and the earth seems to sink ever deeper downwards.

To see others suffer does one good, to make others suffer even more: this is a hard saying but an ancient, mighty, human, all-too-human principle [....] Without cruelty there is no festival.

Whoever thought that he had understood something of me had merely construed something out of me, after his own image.

There are terrible people who, instead of solving a problem, bungle it and make it more difficult for all who come after. Whoever can't hit the nail on the head should, please, not hit at all.

Against boredom even gods struggle in vain.

The noble soul reveres itself

But I need solitude--which is to say, recovery, return to myself, the breath of a free, light, playful air.

Here the ways of men divide. If you wish to strive for peace of soul and happiness, then believe; if you wish to be a disciple of truth, then inquire.

No one dies of fatal truths nowadays: there are too many antidotes.

We labour at our daily work more ardently and thoughtlessly than is necessary to sustain our life because it is even more necessary not to have leisure to stop and think. Haste is universal because everyone is in flight from himself.