Quotes from Friedrich Nietzsche

Sleep knocks on my eyes: they grow heavy. Sleep touches my mouth: it stays open. Truly, he comes to me on soft soles, the dearest of thieves, and steals my thoughts from me

The more abstract the truth you wish to teach, the more must you allure the senses to it.

Zarathustra has become a child, an awakened one

that which does not kill him makes him stronger.

Do not let yourself be deceived: great spirits are sceptical. Zarathustra is a sceptic. The power, the freedom that comes from the strength and super-strength of spirit, proves itself through scepticism.

This- is now my way,- where is yours? Thus did I answer those who asked me the way. For the way- it does not exist!

There are heights of the soul from which even tragedy ceases to look tragic; and rolling together all the woe of the world -- who could dare to decide whether its sight would necessarily seduce us and compel us to feel pity and thus double this woe?

Virtue is knowledge; man sins only from ignorance; he who is virtuous is happy." In these three basic forms of optimism lies the death of tragedy.

To confirm the great principle with which civilization begins: any custom is better than no custom.

There is more wisdom in your body than in your best wisdom. And who then knows why your body needs precisely your best wisdom?

Misunderstanding of the dream. In the ages of crude primeval culture man believed that in dreams he got to know another real world; here is the origin of all metaphysics.

I fear that the animals regard man as a creature of their own kind which has in a highly dangerous fashion lost its healthy animal reason – as the mad animal, as the laughing animal, as the weeping animal, as the unhappy animal.

Virtue has all the instincts of the average man against it: it is unprofitable, imprudent, it isolates; it is related to passion and not very accessible to reason; it spoils the character, the head, the mind — according to the standards of mediocre men; it rouses to enmity toward order, toward the lies that are concealed in every order, institution, actuality — it is the worst of vices, if one judges by its harmful effects on others.

Rather go out of the way! Flee into concealment! And have your masks and your ruses, that ye may be mistaken for what you are, or somewhat feared! And pray, don't forget the garden, the garden with golden trellis-work! And have people around you who are as a garden—or as music on the waters at eventide, when already the day becomes a memory. Choose the GOOD solitude, the free, wanton, lightsome solitude, which also gives you the right still to remain good in any sense whatsoever!

The man consummatig his life dies his death triumphantly,surrounded by men filled with hope and making solmn vows, thus one should learn to die. Friedrich Nietzsche - thus spoke zarathustra.

First principle: any explanation is better than none. Because it is at bottom only a question of wanting to get rid of oppressive ideas, one is not exactly particular about what means one uses to get rid of them: the first idea which explains that the unknown is in fact the known does so much good that one 'holds it for true'. Proof by pleasure ('by potency') as criterion of truth.

My wisdom consists in my having been many things and in many places in order to become one person—in order to be able to attain to one thing.

dead through immortality.' We

He reacts slowly to every kind of stimulus, with that slowness which a protracted caution and a willed pride have bred in him – he tests an approaching stimulus, he is far from going out to meet it. He believes in neither 'misfortune' nor in 'guilt': he knows how to forget – he is strong enough for everything to have to turn out for the best for him. Very well, I am the opposite of a décadent: for I have just described myself.

Are we immoralists doing harm to virtue?—Just as little as the anarchists are harming the princes. Only since the princes have been shot at have they been sitting securely on their thrones again. Moral: one must take shots at morality.

Something might be true, even if it is also harmful and dangerous in the highest degree.

When the past speaks it always speaks as an oracle: only if you are an architect of the future and know the present will you understand it.

I demand from a book harmony as unity and moderation; that determines the choice of words, the type and number of metaphors, the development and conclusion

moral judgments can never be taken literally: literally, they always contain nothing but nonsense. But they are semiotically invaluable all the same: they reveal, at least to those who are in the know, the most valuable realities of cultures and inner states that did not know enough to "understand" themselves. Morality is just a sign language, just a symptomatology: you already have to know what it's all about in order to get any use out of it.