Quotes from Friedrich Nietzsche

A dangerous crossing, a dangerous wayfaring, a dangerous looking-back, a dangerous trembling and halting.

It is not true that the unconscious goal in the evolution of every conscious being (animal, man, mankind, etc) is its 'highest happiness': the case, on the contrary, is that every stage of evolution possesses a special and incomparable happiness neither higher nor lower but simply its own. Evolution does not have happiness in view, but evolution and nothing else.

Oh, my friends, that your self be in your deed as the mother is in her child - let that be your word concerning virtue!

Though I may seem at times somewhat distant from you, through the gray mist of my own moods, I am never far; my thoughts always circle around you.

Physician, heal thyself: then wilt thou also heal thy patient. Let it be his best cure to see with his eyes him who maketh himself whole.

On a political sickbed a people is usually rejuvenated and rediscovers its spirit, after having gradually lost it in seeking and preserving power. Culture owes its peaks to politically weak ages.

The great wars of the present age are the effects of the study of history.

A friendly voice seldom reaches me nowadays. I am alone now, absurdly alone; and in the course of my relentless and underground struggle against everything that human beings till now have revered and loved, I have imperceptibly become something like a lair myself - something hidden away, which people do not find, even if they go out and look for it. But people do not go out in search of such things…

It is unworthy of great spirits to spread abroad the agitation they feel

Extreme positions are not relieved by more moderate ones, but by extreme opposite positions.

All higher education belongs only to the exception: one must be privileged to have a right to so high a privilege. All great, all beautiful things can never be common property: pulchrum est paucorum hominum. What contributes to the decline of German culture? That "higher education" is no longer a privilege — the democratism of Bildung, which has become "common" — too common.

All history is the experimental refutation of the theory of the so-called moral order of things.

You force all things to flow towards you and into you, so that they shall flow back again out of your fountain as the gifts of your love.

I have thought of you much, and have shared with you in thought much that has been elevating, stirring, and gay, so much so that it has been like living with my dear friends. If only you know how novel and strange that seems to an old hermit like me? How often it has made me laugh at myself!

The work of a suffering and tortured God, the world then seemed to me. The dream and fiction of a god, the world then seemed to me.; coloured smoke before the eyes of a discontented god. [...] The creator wished to look away from himself; so he created the world. [...] a drunken joy to its imperfect creator.

All my human relationships have to do with a mask of me, and I must perpetually be the victim of living a completely hidden life.

we know the way; we got our knowledge of it from thousands of years in the labyrinth. Who else has found it?—The man of today?—"I don't know either the way out or the way in; I am whatever doesn't know either the way out or the way in"—so sighs the man of today… . This is the sort of modernity that made us ill,—we sickened on lazy peace

But an essentially mechanical world would be an essentially meaningless world! Suppose that one assessed the value of a piece of music according to how much of it could be counted, calculated, put into formulas; how absurd such a 'scientific' assessment of music would be! What would one have comprehended, understood, known about it? Nothing, absolutely nothing of what is really 'music' in it!

Ten truths must you find during the day; otherwise you will seek truth during the night, and your soul will stay hungry. Ten times must you laugh during the day, and be cheerful; otherwise your stomach, the father of affliction and gloom, will disturb you in the night.

Egoism is the law of perspective applied to feelings: what is closest appears large and weighty, and as one moves farther away size and weight decrease.

Whoever knows he is deep tries to be clear, but whoever wants to seem deep to the crowd tries to be obscure. For the crowd supposes that anything it cannot see to the bottom must be deep: it is so timid and goes so unwillingly into the water.

Most books are born from the smoke and vapour of the brain: and to vapour and smoke may they well return. For having no fire within themselves, they shall be visited with fire.

Einer hat immer Unrecht: aber mit zweien beginnt die Wahrheit. Einer kann sich nicht beweisen: aber zweie kann man bereits nicht widerlegen.

what was silent in the father speaks in the son