Quotes from Friedrich Nietzsche

For fanaticism is the only form of willpower that even the weak and insecure can be brought to attain.

How much blood and horror is at the bottom of all 'good things'!

Life no argument. - We have arranged for ourselves a world in which we can live - by positing bodies, lines, planes, causes and effects, motion and rest, form and content; without these articles of faith nobody now could endure life. But that does not prove them. Life is no argument. The conditions of life might include error.

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

For the true poet the metaphor is not a rhetorical figure but a representative image that really hovers before him in place of a concept. For him, the character is not a whole laboriously assembled from individual traits, but a person, insistently living before his eyes, distinguished from the otherwise identical vision of the painter by his continuous life and action.

Close the Bible and open the Manu Smriti. It has an affirmation of life, a triumphing agreeable sensation in life and that to draw up a lawbook such as Manu means to permit oneself to get the upper hand, to become perfection, to be ambitious of the highest art of living.

Another Christian concept, no less crazy, has passed even more deeply into the tissue of modernity: the concept of the 'equality of souls before God.' This concept furnishes the prototype of all theories of equal rights...

Ye shall only have foes to be hated; but not foes to be despised: ye must be proud of your foes.

Knowledge kills action, for action requires a state of being in which we are covered with the veil of illusion.

Morality negates life.

The familiarity of superiors embitters one, because it may not be returned.

Every kind of contempt for sex, every impurification of it by means of the concept impure, is the crime par excellence against life--is the real sin against the holy spirit of life

Writers whose thoughts are expressed with clarity and precision are assumed by readers to be superficial. Where the meaning is obscured, then readers give more attention and consider the fruit of their labour more valuable

Tethered heart, free spirit.--If one tethers one's heart severely and imprisons it, one can give one's spirit many liberties.

Why are we not satisfied when life mirrors itself peacefully in a deep lake? …How seldom do we now meet a person who can keep living so peacefully and cheerfully with himself even amidst the turmoil, saying to himself like Goethe: 'The best is the deep quiet in which I live and grow against the world, and harvest what they cannot take from me by fire or sword.

Slow is the experience of all deep fountains: long have they to wait until they know what has fallen into their depths.

It is much more agreeable to offend and later ask forgiveness than to be offended and grant forgiveness. The one who does the former demonstrates his power and then his goodness. The other, if he does not want to be thought inhuman, must forgive; because of this coercion, pleasure in the other's humiliation is slight.

The great epochs of life come when we gain the courage to re-christen our evil as what is best in us

It is not enough that you understand in what ignorance man and beast live; you must also have and acquire the will to ignorance. You need to grasp that without this kind of ignorance life itself would be impossible, that it is a condition under which alone the living thing can preserve itself and prosper: a great, firm dome of ignorance must encompass you.

A. Was I ill? Have I got well? Who was my doctor? Can you tell? Oh, my memory is rotten! B. Only now you're truly well. Those are well who have forgotten.

Your bad love of yourselves makes solitude a prison to you.

Is the world really beautified by the fact that man thinks it beautiful? He has humanized it, that is all.

Three metamorphoses of the spirit have I designated to you: how the spirit became a camel, the camel a lion, and the lion at last a child.

We have forsaken the land and gone to sea! We have destroyed the bridge behind us – more so, we have demolished the land behind us! Now, little ship, look out! Beside you is the ocean; it is true, it does not always roar, and at times it lies there like silk and gold and dreams of goodness. But there will be hours when you realize that it is infinite and that there is nothing more awesome than infinity.