Quotes from Friedrich Nietzsche

These wisest men of all ages should be scrutinized closely. Were they all perhaps shaky on their legs? Tottery? Decadent? Late? Could it be that wisdom appears on earth as a Raven, attracted by a little whiff of carrion?

Thus do the gods justify the life of man: they themselves live it--the only satisfactory theodicy!

There are only necessities: there is no one who commands, no one who obeys, no one who transgresses. Once you know there are no purposes, you also know there is no accident; for only against a world of purposes does the word 'accident' have a meaning.

In this condition one enriches everything out of one's own abundance: what one sees, what one desires, one sees swollen, pressing, strong, over laden with energy. The man in this condition transforms things until they mirror his power - until they are reflections of his perfections

Where we encounter the naïve in art, we should recognize the highest effect of Apollinian culture--which always must first overthrow an empire of Titans and slay monsters, and which must have triumphed over an abysmal and terrifying view of the world and the keenest susceptibility to suffering through recourse to the most forceful and pleasurable illusions.

What do you think most humane ?-To spare a person shame.

That passion is better than stoicism or hypocrisy; that straightforwardness, even in evil, is better than losing oneself in trying to observe traditional morality; that the free man is just as able to be good as evil, but that the unemancipated man is a disgrace to nature, and has no share in heavenly or earthly bliss

He who cannot find the way to HIS ideal, lives more frivolously and shamelessly than the man without an ideal.

In the heroic effort of the individual to attain universality, in the attempt to transcend the curse of individuation and to become the one world-being, he suffers in his own person the primordial contradiction that is concealed in things, which means that he commits sacrilege and suffers.

But even your best love is only an enraptured simile and a painful ardour. It is a torch to light you to loftier paths.

A living thing seeks above all to DISCHARGE its strength—life itself is WILL TO POWER; self-preservation is only one of the indirect and most frequent RESULTS thereof.

There is no eternal justice.

Alcoholic drinks do not agree with me. A single glass of wine or beer a day is amply sufficient to turn life into a valley of tears for me.

But one thing is the thought, another thing is the deed, and another thing is the idea of the deed. The wheel of causality doth not roll between them.

Only the boldest Utopians would dream of the economy of kindness.

Battle not with monsters lest you become a monster and if you gaze into the abyss the abyss gazes into you

I myself, to be sure - I have as yet seen no great man. That which is great, the acutest eye is at present insensible to it. It is the kingdom of the populace.

Coming to power is a costly business: power makes stupid.… The Germans – once they were called the nation of thinkers: do they still think at all? Nowadays the Germans are bored with intellect, the Germans mistrust intellect, politics devours all seriousness for really intellectual things

He who would learn to fly one day must first learn to stand and walk and run and climb and dance; one cannot fly into flying.

But this nation has deliberately made itself stupid, for practically a thousand years: nowhere else are the two great European narcotics, alcohol and Christianity, so viciously abused.

And even in woman's conscious love, there is still always surprise and lightning and night, along with the light.

I pass through this people and keep mine eyes open: they do not forgive me for do not envying their virtues. They bite at me, because I say unto them that for small people, small virtues are necessary - and because it is hard for me to understand that small people are necessary!

Truth is a mobile army of metaphors, metonyms, anthropomorphisms, in short, a sum of human relations which were poetically and rhetorically heightened, transferred, and adorned, and after long use seem solid, canonical, and binding to a nation. Truths are illusions about which it has been forgotten that they are illusions. from On Truth and Lying in an Extra-Moral Sense

Every company is bad company except that of one's equals.