Quotes from Friedrich Nietzsche

There are various eyes. Even the Sphinx has eyes: and as a result there are various truths, and as a result there is no truth.

Not doubt, CERTAINTY is what drives one insane

Around the hero everything becomes a tragedy; around the demigod everything becomes a satyr-play; and around God everything becomes — what? perhaps a 'world'?

God has given us music so that firstly we are lead towards higher things. Music combines all characteristics in it. It can elevate, it can tease, it can cheer us up, yes, it can even break the most brazen temperament with its tender and yearning sounds. However, its main aim is to direct our thinking towards higher things, to elevate and even deeply disturb us…

If we have our own why in life, we shall get along with almost any how. Man does not strive for pleasure; only the Englishman does.

Not every end is the goal. The end of a melody is not its goal; and yet: as long as the melody has not reached its end, it also hasn't reached its goal. A parable.

The worst things, however, are the petty thoughts. Verily, better to have done evilly than to have thought pettily!

In woman's love there is injustice and blindness to all she does not love. And even in woman's conscious love, there is still always attack and lightning and night, along with the light.

I want, once and for all, not to know many things. Wisdom requires moderation in knowledge as in other things.

The great epochs of our life are at the points when we gain courage to rebaptize our badness as the best in us.

It is difficult and painful for the ear to listen to anything new; we hear strange music badly.

138. We do the same when awake as when dreaming: we only invent and imagine him with whom we have intercourse—and forget it immediately.

Only cast your pure eyes into the well of my delight, friends! You will not dim its sparkle! It shall laugh back at you with its purity.

What is the greatest thing you can experience? It is the hour of your greatest contempt. The hour in which even your happiness becomes loathsome to you, and so also your reason and virtue.

Intoxicating joy it is for the sufferer to look away from his suffering and forget himself. Intoxicating joy and self-forgetting, the world once seemed to me.

The crowd of influences streaming on the young soul is so great, the clods of barbarism and violence flung at him so strange and overwhelming, that an assumed stupidity is his only refuge.

Alas, the time of the most despicable man is coming, he that is no longer able to despise himself. Behold, I show you the last man. 'What is love? What is creation? What is longing? What is a star?'—thus asks the last man, and he blinks. The earth has become smaller, and on it hops the man who makes everything small...'We have invented happiness'—say the last men, and they blink.

Whoever looks into himself as into vast space and carries galaxies in himself, also knows how irregular all galaxies are; they lead into the chaos and labyrinth of existence.

And only where there are graves are there resurrections.

Our faith in others betrays that we would rather have faith in ourselves.

But by my love and hope I beseech you: do not throw away the hero in your soul! Keep sacred your highest hope!

The Christian church is an encyclopaedia of prehistoric cults and conceptions of the most diverse orgiin and that is why it is so capable of proselytising: it always could and it can still go wherever it pleases and it always found and it always finds something similar to itself to which it can adapt itself and gradually impose upon it a Christian meaning.

I found life easy, easiest, when it demanded the most difficult things of me.

Even your silence wants to choke me, you who are so abysmally silent.