Quotes from Friedrich Nietzsche

It was a subtle refinement of God to learn Greek when he wished to write a book – and that he did not learn it better.

Generally speaking, punishment makes men hard and cold; it concentrates; it sharpens the feeling of alienation; it strengthens the power of resistance

The value of a thing sometimes lies not in what one attains with it, but in what one pays for it - what it costs us.

God is a thought who makes crooked all that is straight.

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

Books and drafts mean something quite different for different thinkers. One collects in a book the lights he was able to steal and carry home swiftly out of the rays of some insight that suddenly dawned on him, while another thinker offers us nothing but shadows - images in black and grey of what had built up in his soul the day before.

And life confided the secret to me: behold, it said, l am that which must always overcome itself.

There are days when I am haunted by a feeling that is blacker than the blackest melancholy. I have a contempt for humanity. I despise the people I have been fated to call my contemporaries. I feel suffocated by their filthy breath.

Here the spirit becomes a lion who would conquer his freedom and be master… Who is the great dragon whom the spirit will no longer call lord and go? 'Thou shalt' is the name of the great dragon. But the spirit of the lion says, 'I will.

As an artist, a man has no home in Europe save in Paris.

Saying yes to life, even in its strangest and hardest problems.

The existence of forgetting has never been proved: we only know that some things do not come to our mind when we want them to.

It is not doubt but certainty that drives you mad...

I do not refute ideals, I merely put on gloves when I deal with them...

Energy wasted on negative ends.

You say you're a pessimist, but I happen to know that you're in the habit of practicing your flute for two hours every evening.

there is no being behind doing, effecting, becoming; the doer is merely a fiction added to the deed—the deed is everything.

Man... cannot learn to forget, but hangs on the past: however far or fast he runs, that chain runs with him.

What else is love but understanding and rejoicing in the fact that another person lives acts and experiences otherwise than we do?

None of the people have any real interest in a science, who only begin to be enthusiastic about it when they themselves have made discoveries in it.

Even the most courageous among us only rarely has the courage to face what he already knows.

Every word is a prejudice.

Courage, however, is the best slayer—courage which attacks: which slays even death itself, for it says, 'Was that life? Well then! Once more!

Joyous distrust is a sign of health. Everything absolute belongs to pathology.