Quotes from Friedrich Nietzsche

For others do I wait...for higher ones, stronger ones, more triumphant ones, merrier ones, for such as are built squarely in body and soul: laughing lions must come.

Do I advise you to love thy neighbor? I suggest rather to escape from thy neighbor and to love those who are the farthest away from you. Higher than the love for thy neighbor is the love for the man who is distant and has still to come.

This eternal accusation against Christianity I shall write upon all walls, wherever walls are to be found--I have letters that even the blind will be able to see. . . . I call Christianity the one great curse, the one great intrinsic depravity, the one great instinct of revenge, for which no means are venomous enough, or secret, subterranean and small enough,--I call it the one immortal blemish upon the human race...

When virtue has slept, it will arise again all the fresher.

Everything straight lies,' murmured the dwarf disdainfully. 'All truth is crooked, time itself is a circle.

Life is hard to bear: but do not pretend to be so delicate!

The people told me, however, that the big ear was not only a man, but a great man, a genius. But I never believed in the people when they spake of great men - and I hold to my belief that it was a reversed cripple, who had too little of everything, and too much of one thing.

Every culture that has lost myth has lost, by the same token, its natural healthy creativity. Only a horizon ringed about with myths can unify a culture. The forces of imagination and the Apollonian dream are saved only by myth from indiscriminate rambling. The images of myth must be the daemonic guardians, ubiquitous but unnoticed, presiding over the growth of the child's mind and interpreting to the mature man his life and struggles.

Society tames the wolf into a dog. And man is the most domesticated animal of all.

And if you gaze long enough into an abyss, the abyss will gaze back into you.

we often refuse to accept an idea merely because the way in which it has been expressed is unsympathetic to us.

A virtue must be our invention; it must spring out of our personal need and defence.

Brave and creative men never consider pleasure and pain as ultimate values—they are epiphenomena: one must desire both if one is to achieve anything.

One is necessary, one is a piece of fate, one belongs to the whole, one is the whole – there exists nothing which could judge, measure, compare, condemn our being, for that would be to judge, measure, compare, condemn the whole…But nothing exists apart from the whole!

It was only Christianity, with resentment against life in its foundations, which made sexuality something impure: it threw filth on the beginning, on the prerequisite of our life

He who knows the reader, does nothing for the reader.

A degree of culture, and assuredly a very high one, is attained when man rises above superstitions and religious notions and fears, and, for instance, no longer believes in guardian angels or in original sin, and has also ceased to talk of the salvation of his soul.

The feelings of devotion, self-sacrifice for one's neighbor, the whole morality of self-denial must be questioned mercilessly and taken to court.... There is too much charm and sugar in these feelings of 'for others,' 'not for myself,' for us not to need to become doubly suspicious at this point and to ask: 'are these not perhaps-seductions?

Psychology has falsified love as surrender and altruism, while it is an appropriation or a bestowal following from a super-abundance of personality. Only the most complete persons can love. The depersonalized and objective are the worst lovers.

It is not their love for men, rather it is the impotence of their love that hinders Christians of today from burning us.

Light for some time to come will have to be called darkness.

Human existence basically is??a never to be completed imperfect tense.

He who fights with monsters should look to it that he himself does not become a monster. And when you gaze long into an abyss the abyss also gazes into you.

New struggles. -- After Buddha was dead, they still showed his shadow in a cave for centuries -- a colossal, horrible shadow. God is dead, but given the way people are, there may still be caves for millennia in which his shadow is displayed. -- And we -- we must still defeat his shadow as well!