Quotes from Friedrich Nietzsche

The struggle of maturity is to recover the seriousness of a child at play.

Art is not merely an imitation of the reality of nature, but in truth a metaphysical supplement to the reality of nature, placed alongside thereof for its conquest.

Fanatics are picturesque, mankind would rather see gestures than listen to reasons.

And when he invented his hell, that was his heaven on earth.

I am a disciple of the philosopher Dionysus, and I would prefer to be even a satyr than a saint.

Men of profound sadness betray themselves when they are happy: they have a mode of seizing upon happiness as though they would choke and strangle it, out of jealousy--ah, they know only too well that it will flee from them!

Read from a distant star, the majuscule script of our earthly existence would perhaps lead to the conclusion that the earth was the distinctively ascetic planet, a nook of disgruntled, arrogant creatures filled with a profound disgust with themselves, at the earth, at all life, who inflict as much pain on themselves as they possibly can out of pleasure in inflicting pain which is probably their only pleasure.

Dostoevsky,the only psychologist from whom I've anything to learn.

the lie is a condition of life.

The images of myth must be the daemonic guardians, omnipresent and unnoticed, which protect the growth of the young mind, and guide man's interpretation of his life and struggles.

I tell you: one must still have chaos in oneself to give birth to a dancing star. I tell you: you still have chaos in yourselves.

In some remote corner of the universe, poured out and glittering in innumerable solar systems, there once was a star on which clever animals invented knowledge. That was the haughtiest and most mendacious minute of world history- yet only a minute. After nature had drawn a few breaths the star grew cold, and the clever animals had to die.

The word Christianity is already a misunderstanding; in reality there has been only one Christian, and he died on the cross.

Existence really is an imperfect tense that never becomes a present.

One thing a man must have: either a naturally light disposition or a disposition lightened by art and knowledge.

The melancholy of everything completed!

Sometimes it is harder to accede to a thing than it is to see its truth.

For nothing is more democratic than logic; it is no respecter of persons and makes no distinction between crooked and straight noses.

Reality is a flux, an endless becoming that is beyond words and language - all language is metaphor, useful to us but ultimately detached from reality.

Their [philosophers] thinking is, in fact, far less a discovery than a re-recognizing, a remembering, a return and a home-coming to a far-off, ancient common-household of the soul, out of which those ideas formerly grew: philosophizing is so far a kind of atavism of the highest order.

It is invisible hands that torment and bend us the worst

Healthy introspection, without undermining oneself; it is a rare gift to venture into the unexplored depths of the self, without delusions or fictions, but with an uncorrupted gaze.

You have evolved from worm to man, but much within you is still worm. Once you were apes, yet even now man is more of an ape than any of the apes.

Every philosophy is a foreground philosophy — that is a hermit's judgment: There is something arbitrary in his stopping here to look back and look around, in his not digging deeper here but laying his spade aside; there is also something suspicious about it. Every philosophy also conceals a philosophy; every opinion is also a hideout, every word also a mask.