Quotes from Friedrich Nietzsche

There are feelings which want to kill the lonely; and if they do not succeed, well, then they themselves must die. But are you capable of this—to be a murderer?

Don't ask, How will I climb the mountain, just climb the mountain.

Like tourists huffing and puffing to reach the peak we forget the view on the way up.

wherever the strength of a faith steps decisively into the foreground, we infer a certain weakness in its ability to demonstrate its truth, even the improbability of what it believes. We, too, do not deny that the belief "makes blessed," but for that very reason we deny that the belief proves something—a strong belief which confers blessedness creates doubts about what it has faith in. It does not ground "truth." It grounds a certain probability— delusion.

In all speaking there is a grain of contempt. Language, so it seems, was invented only for what is mediocre, common, communicable. In language, speakers vulgarize themselves right away.

The knight of knowledge must be able not only to love his enemies, but also to hate his friends.

We have already gone beyond whatever we have words for.

This crown of the laughter, the rosary crown: to you, my brothers, I throw this crown! I pronounced laughter holy: you higher men, learn — to laugh!

For the male sickness of self-contempt, the surest cure is to be loved by a clever woman

They want more, they learn to make claims, the tribute of respect is at last felt to be well-nigh galling; rivalry for rights, indeed actual strife itself, would be preferred: in a word, woman is losing modesty. And let us immediately add that she is also losing taste. She is unlearning to fear man: but the woman who unlearns to fear sacrifices her most womanly instincts.

A man's stomach is the reason he does not easily take himself for a God.

Die Forderung, geliebt zu werden, ist die größte der Anmaßungen.

The ancestors of the mightiest tribes must have grown to prodigious proportions . . . in the end the ancestor is necessarily transfigured into a god.

It is the business of the very few to be independent; it is a privilege of the strong. And whoever attempts it, even with the best right, but without being OBLIGED to do so, proves that he is probably not only strong, but also daring beyond measure.

More honestly and purely speaks the healthy body, perfect and square-built; and it speaks of the meaning of the earth.-

We are unknown to ourselves, we knowers, and with good reason. We have never looked at ourselves.

It is a comfort to me to know that above the steam and filth of human lowlands there is a higher, brighter humanity, very small in number (for everything outstanding is by its nature rare): one belongs to it, not because one is more talented or more virtuous or more heroic or more loving than the men below, but—because one is colder, brighter, more far-seeing, more solitary; because one endures, prefers, demands solitude as happiness.

In order that there may be institutions, there must be a kind of will, instinct, or imperative, which is anti-liberal to the point of malice: the will to tradition, to authority, to responsibility for centuries to come, to the solidarity of chains of generations, forward and backward ad infinitum.

the Germans love frankness and honesty. It is so convenient to be frank and honest. This confidingness, this complacence, this showing the cards of German honesty, is probably the most dangerous and most successful disguise which the German is up to nowadays.

I see you exhausted by poisonous flies; I see you bleeding and torn at a hundred spots; and your pride refuses even to be angry. They would have blood from you in all innocence; blood is what bloodless souls crave - and therefore they sting in all innocence.

One puts to one's lips what drives one faster into the abyss".

It is so little true that martyrs offer any support to the truth of a cause that I am inclined to deny that any martyr has ever had anything to do with the truth at all.

Not when truth is dirty, but when it is shallow, does the enlightened man dislike to wade into its waters

Whoever reaches his ideal transcends it eo ipso.