Quotes from Friedrich Nietzsche

My formula for human greatness is amor fati: that one wants nothing to be different, not in the future, not in the past, not for all eternity. Not only to endure what is necessary, still less to conceal it — all idealism is falseness in the face of necessity — , but to love it...

As soon as a religion comes to dominate it has as its opponents all those who would have been its first disciples.

And if a friend does you wrong, then say: I forgive you what you have done to me; that you have done it to YOURSELF, however--how could I forgive that!

When one has not had a good father, one must create one.

In reality, hope is the worst of all evils, because it prolongs man's torments.

Happiness is the feeling that power increases - that resistance is being overcome.

The desire for a strong faith is not the proof of a strong faith, rather the opposite. If one has it one may permit oneself the beautiful luxury of skepticism: one is secure enough, fixed enough for it.

You tell me: 'Life is hard to bear.' But if it were otherwise why should you have your pride in the morning and your resignation in the evening? Life is hard to bear: but do not pretend to be so tender! We are all of us pretty fine asses and asseses of burden!

So long as men praise you, you can only be sure that you are not yet on your own true path but on someone else's.

Christianity was from the beginning, essentially and fundamentally, life's nausea and disgust with life, merely concealed behind, masked by, dressed up as, faith in another or better life.

if we possess a why of life we can put up with almost any how.

Man is the cruelest animal, says Zarathustra. When gazing at tragedies, bull-fights, crucifixations he hath hitherto felt happier than at any other time on Earth. And when he invented Hell...lo, Hell was his Heaven on Earth; he could put up with suffering now, by contemplating the eternal punishment of his oppressors in the other world.

Socialism itself can hope to exist only for brief periods here and there, and then only through the exercise of the extremest terrorism. For this reason it is secretly preparing itself for rule through fear and is driving the word "justice" into the heads of the half-educated masses like a nail so as to rob them of their reason… and to create in them a good conscience for the evil game they are to play.

there they laugh: they do not understand me; I am not the mouth for these ears.

But thus I counsel you, my friends: Mistrust all in whom the impulse to punish is powerful. They are people of a low sort and stock; the hangmen and the bloodhound look out of their faces. Mistrust all who talk much of their justice! Verily, their souls lack more than honey. And when they call themselves the good and the just, do not forget that they would be pharisees, if only they had—power.

The secret of reaping the greatest fruitfulness and the greatest enjoyment from life is to live dangerously.

It is not conflict of opinions that has made history so violent but conflict of belief in opinions, that is to say conflict of convictions.

Because we have for millenia made moral, aesthetic, religious demands on the world, looked upon it with blind desire, passion or fear, and abandoned ourselves to the bad habits of illogical thinking, this world has gradually become so marvelously variegated, frightful, meaningful, soulful, it has acquired color - but we have been the colorists: it is the human intellect that has made appearances appear and transported its erroneous basic conceptions into things.

That for which we find words is something already dead in our hearts

Love of one is a piece of barbarism: for it is practised at the expense of all others. Love of God likewise.

My humanity is a constant self-overcoming.

Oh great star! What would your happiness be if you did not have us to shine for?

The more abstract the truth you wish to teach, the more you need to seduce the senses to it.

Whatever is done for love always occurs beyond good and evil.