Quotes from Friedrich Nietzsche

When I came to men, then found I them resting on an old infatuation: all of them thought they had long known what was good and bad for men.

Do I then strive after happiness? I strive after my work!

Always at home. - One day we reach our goal, and now point with pride to the long travels we undertook to reach it. In fact, we were not even aware of traveling. But we got so far because we fancied at every point that we were at home.

Excelsior! You will never again pray, never again repose in limitless trust - you deny it to yourself to remain halted before an ultimate wisdom, ultimate good, ultimate power, and there unharness your thoughts

When our head feels too weak to answer the objections of our opponent our heart answers by casting suspicion on the motives behind his objections.

Punishment.—A strange thing, our punishment! It does not cleanse the criminal, it is no atonement; on the contrary, it pollutes worse than the crime does. The

And again, there are those who sit in their swamp and speak thus from the rushes: 'Virtue - that means to sit quietly in the swamp. We bite nobody and avoid him who wants to bite: and in everything we hold the opinion that is given us.

The Free Man is a Warrior. I do not believe in any Rights that are not supported by the power required to enforce them.

What to do in order to believe?"—an absurd question. What is wrong with Christianity is that it refrains from doing all those things that Christ commanded should be done.

Some of them will, but most of them are willed. Some of them are genuine, but most of them are bad actors.

In our very democratic, or rather, very plebeian age, education and culture must be essentially the art of deceiving - deceiving with regard to origin, with regard to the inherited plebeianism in body and soul.

To one man, solitude is the escape of an invalid; for another, it is escape from the invalids.

Why should one live? All is vain! To live- that is to thresh straw; to live- that is to burn oneself and yet not get warm.-

Nothing avails: every master has but one disciple, and that one becomes unfaithful to him, for he too is destined for mastership.   [408]

We should call every truth false which was not accompanied by at least one laugh.

Everything goes, everything comes back; eternally rolls the wheel of Being. Everything dies, everything blooms again; eternally runs the year of Being. Everything breaks, everything is joined anew; eternally is built the same house of Being. Everything separates, everything greets itself again; eternally true to itself remains the ring of Being.

A nation goes to pieces when it confounds its duty with the general concept of duty. Nothing works a more complete and penetrating disaster than every impersonal duty, every sacrifice before the Moloch of abstraction.

If this is not an age of decay and declining vitality, it is at least one of headlong and arbitrary experimentation:— and it is probable that a superabundance of bungled experiments should create an overall impression as of decay— and perhaps even decay itself.

whatever is done from love always occurs beyond good and evil.

A sedentary life is the real sin against the Holy Spirit. Only those thoughts that come by walking have any value.

when an exceptional person treats a mediocre one more delicately than he treats himself and his equals, this is not just courtesy of the heart—it is his duty

The poison from which the weaker nature perishes strengthens the strong man - and he does not call it poison.

We are alien to each other, and their virtues are even more repugnant to my taste than their falsehoods and false dice.

One in three all friends are: Brothers in distress, equals facing rivals, free men - facing death!