Quotes from Friedrich Nietzsche

We must know how to preserve ourselves: the greatest test of independence.

Honor to the government, and obedience, and also to the crooked government! So desires good sleep. How can I help it, if power likes to walk on crooked legs?

For all the value that the true, the truthful, the selfless may deserve, it would still be possible that a higher and more fundamental value for life might have to be ascribed to deception, selfishness, and lust. It might even be possible that what constitutes the value of these good and revered things is precisely that they are insidiously related, tied to, and involved with these wicked, seemingly opposite things—maybe even one with them in essence. Maybe!

For your Bildung you should choose the most difficult and splendid problem, but as subject for a dissertation choose no more than a very limited and remote corner.

The lie of the ideal has till now been the curse on reality; on its account humanity itself has become fake and false right down to its deepest instincts - to the point of worshipping values opposite to the only ones which would guarantee it a flourishing, a future, the exaled right to a future.

For a tree to become tall it must grow tough roots among the rocks.

Even now it is ceasing to be art of the nobleman, and it is quite possible that some day one may find it so common and even vulgar that, along with all party literature and journalism, one would classify it as prostitution of the spirit.

He who considers more deeply knows that, whatever his acts and judgements may be, he is always wrong.

Life consists of rare, isolated moments of the greatest significance, and of innumerably many intervals, during which at best the silhouettes of those moments hover about us. Love, springtime, every beautiful melody, mountains, the moon, the sea – all these speak completely to the heart but once, if in fact they ever do get a chance to speak completely. For many men do not have those moments at all, and are themselves intervals and intermissions in the symphony of real life.

Fear is the mother of morality.

Man, the bravest of animals, and the one most accustomed to suffering, does not repudiate suffering as such; he desires it, he even seeks it out, provided he is shown a meaning for it, a purpose of suffering. The meaninglessness of suffering, not suffering itself, was the curse that lay over mankind so far — and the ascetic ideal offered man meaning!

Broad daylight; breakfast; return of cheerfulness and bons sens; Plato blushes for shame; all free spirits run riot.)

the existence of the world is justified only as an aesthetic phenomenon.

We think too fast, even while walking or on the way, or while engaged in other things, no matter how serious the subject.

One! O man! Take heed! Two! What says deep midnight's voice indeed? Three! I slept my sleep- Four! From deepest dream I've woke and plead:- Five! The world is deep, Six! And deeper than the day could read. Seven! Deep is its woe- Eight! Joy- deeper still than grief can be: Nine! Woe says: Hence! Go! Ten! But joys all want eternity- Eleven! Want deep profound eternity! Twelve!

The revolution made Napoleon possible: that is its justification. For the sake of a similar prize one would have to desire the anarchical collapse of our entire civilisation.

This is what is hardest: to close the open hand because one loves.

Whatever may be your desire to accomplish great deeds, the deep silence of pregnancy never comes to you! The event of the day sweeps you along like straws before the wind whilst ye lie under the illusion that ye are chasing the event,—poor fellows! If a man wishes to act the hero on the stage he must not think of forming part of the chorus; he should not even know how the chorus is made up.

In many people, incidentally, the gift of having good friends is much greater than the gift of being a good friend.

I mistrust all Systematisers and I avoid them — the will to a System is a lack of integrity.

When a man feels that he has a divine mission, say to lift up, to save or to liberate mankind - when a man feels the divine spark in his heart and believes that he is the mouthpiece of supernatural imperatives - when such a mission inflames him, it is only natural that he should stand beyond all merely reasonable standards of judgment. He feels that he is himself sanctified by this mission, that he is himself a type of a higher order!

There is nothing more terrible than a barbaric slave class, who have learned to regard their existence as an injustice, and now prepare to take vengeance, not only for themselves, but for all generations.

Every means hitherto employed with the intention of making mankind moral has been thoroughly immoral.

Where is the lightning to lick you with its tongue? Where is the madness with which you should be cleansed