Quotes from Friedrich Nietzsche

Man has been reared by his errors: first he never saw himself other than imperfectly, second he attributed to himself imaginary qualities, third he felt himself in a false order of rank with animal and nature, fourth he continually invented new tables of values and for a time took each of them to be eternal and unconditional...If one deducts the effect of these four errors, one has also deducted away humanity, humaneness, and 'human dignity'.

Verily, I have often laughed at the weaklings, who think themselves good because they have crippled paws!

Like a last signpost to the other path, Napoleon appeared, the most isolated and late-born man there has even been, and in him the problem of the noble ideal as such made flesh--one might well ponder what kind of problem it is; Napoleon this synthesis of the inhuman and the superhuman

Every characteristic absence of spirituality, every piece of common vulgarity, is due to an inability to resist a stimulus - you have to react, you follow every impulse.

Îmi cunosc soarta. Cândva se va lega de numele meu amintirea a ceva monstruos – a unei crize cum nu a mai existat pe p?mânt, a celei mai profunde ciocniri de conÅŸtiinÅ£e, a unei decizii conjurate împotriva a tot ceea ce se crezuse, se ceruse, se considerase sfânt pân? atunci. Eu nu sunt om, eu sunt dinamit?.

Lonely now and miserably self-distrustful, I took sides, not without resentment, against myself and for everything that hurt me and was hard to me.

Of all that is written, I love only what a person hath written with his blood. Write with blood, and thou wilt find that blood is spirit. It is no easy task to understand unfamiliar blood; I hate the reading idlers. He who knoweth the reader, doeth nothing more for the reader. Another century of readers—and spirit itself will stink.

Association with other people corrupts our character; especially when we have none.

If spouses did not live together, good marriages would be more frequent.

Dreams. ? We have no dreams at all or interesting ones. We should learn to be awake the same way ? not at all or in an interesting manner.

Once the soul looked contemptuously upon the body, and then that contempt was the supreme thing: - the soul wished the body lean, monstrous, and famished. Thus it thought to escape from the body and the earth. But that soul was itself lean, monstrous, and famished; and cruelty was the delight of this soul! So my brothers, tell me: What does your body say about your soul? Is not your soul poverty and filth and miserable self-complacency?

The man who is to be great is the one who can be the most solitary, the most hidden, the most deviant, the man beyond good and evil, lord of his virtues, a man lavishly endowed with will - this is precisely what greatness is to be called: it is able to be as much a totality as something multi-faceted, as wide as it is full

Dionysus had already been scared form the tragic stage, by a demonic power speaking through Euripides. Even Euripides was, in a sense, only a mask: the deity that spoke through him was neither Dionysus nor Apollo, but an altogether newborn demon, called Socrates .

How changed Zarathustra is! Zarathustra has become a child, an awakened one. What do you plan to do in the land of the sleepers? You have been floating in a sea of solitude, and the sea has borne you up. At long last, are you ready for dry land? Are you ready to drag yourself ashore?

We find other people's vanity contrary to our taste only when it is contrary to our vanity.

To die proudly when it is no longer possible to live proudly. Death of one's own free choice, death at the proper time, with a clear head and with joyfulness, consummated in the midst of children and witnesses: so that an actual leave-taking is possible while he who is leaving is still there

What makes life 'worth living'? - The awareness that there is something for which one is ready to risk one's life

Was that - life? I will say to death. Very well! Once more!

It is only great pain--that slow, sustained pain that takes its time, in which we are, as it were, burned with smoldering green firewood--that forces us philosophers to sink to our ultimate profundity and to do away with all the trust, everything good-natured, veil-imposing, mild and middling, on which we may have previously based our humanity. I doubt that such a pain makes us 'better'--but I know that it makes us deeper.

What the father has hidden comes out in the son, and often have I found the son to be a father's revealed secret.

Il cristianesimo dette da bere il veleno a Eros. Questi non ne morì, ma ben degenerò, in vizio.

Our treasure lies in the beehive of our knowledge. We are perpetually on the way thither, being by nature winged insects and honey gatherers of the mind.

When the Christian crusaders in the Orient came across that invincible order of Assassins – that order of free spirits par excellence whose lowest order received, through some channel or other, a hint about that symbol and spell reserved for the uppermost echelons alone, as their secret: nothing is true, everything is permitted. Now that was freedom of the spirit, with that, belief in truth itself was renounced.

That which is ready to fall, shall ye also push!