Quotes from Friedrich Nietzsche

This modernity makes us ill: whinging peace and cowardly compromise, the whole virtuous filth of the modern mentality. This tolerance and largeur of the heart that "forgives" everything because it "understands" everything is a desert wind for us. Better to live amid the ice than among modern virtues and other such southern winds!

If, however, thou hast a suffering friend, then be a resting-place for his suffering; like a hard bed, however, a camp-bed: thus wilt thou serve him best. And if a friend doeth thee wrong, then say: I forgive thee what thou hast done unto me; that thou hast done it unto THYSELF, however--how could I forgive that! Thus speaketh all great love: it surpasseth even forgiveness and pity. One should hold fast one's heart; for when one letteth it go, how quickly doth one's head run away!

People who go through many spiritual changes retain some views and habits from earlier stages, which then jut out into their new thinking and acting like a bit of inexplicable antiquity and gray stonework, often ornamenting the whole region.

Verhasst ist mir das Folgen und das Führen. Gehorchen? Nein! Und aber nein - Regieren! Wer sich nicht schrecklich ist, macht Niemand Schrecken: Und nur wer Schrecken macht, kann Andre führen. Verhasst ist mir's schon, selber mich zu führen! Ich liebe es, gleich Wald- und Meeresthieren, Mich für ein gutes Weilchen zu verlieren, In holder Irrniss grüblerisch zu hocken, Von ferne her mich endlich heimzulocken, Mich selber zu mir selber - zu verführen.

In warring against stupidity, the most just and gentle of men at last become brutal.

I undertook something that not everyone may undertake: I descended into the depths, I bored into the foundations

SUPPOSING that Truth is a woman—what then? Is there not ground for suspecting that all philosophers, in so far as they have been dogmatists, have failed to understand women—that the terrible seriousness and clumsy importunity with which they have usually paid their addresses to Truth, have been unskilled and unseemly methods for winning a woman?

Men were thought of as 'free' so that they could become guilty: consequently, every action had to be thought of as willed, the origin of every action as lying in the consciousness

If, as Gibbon says, nothing but time - though a long time- is required for a world to perish; so nothing but time -though still more time- is required for a false idea to be destroyed in Germany.

the Alexandrian man, who is basically a librarian and copy editor and goes miserably blind from the dust of books and printing errors.

It is the belief in the moral opposition between Good and Evil that makes the world tremendously hateful and eternally conflict ridden.

Whoever does not know how to find the way to his ideal lives more frivolously and impudently than the man without an ideal.

What alone can our teaching be? – That no one gives a human being his qualities: not God, not society, not his parents or ancestors, not he himself (– the nonsensical idea here last rejected was propounded, as 'intelligible freedom', by Kant, and perhaps also by Plato before him). No one is accountable for existing at all, or for being constituted as he is, or for living in the circumstances and surroundings in which he lives.

Love's cruel notion. - Every great love brings with it the cruel idea of killing the object of that love, so that he may be removed once and for all from the wicked game of change: for love dreads change more than it does destruction.

What language will such a spirit speak when it talks to itself alone?

Why does man not see things? He is himself standing in the way: he conceals things.

Man träumt gar nicht, oder interessant -- Man muss lernen, ebeson zu wachen: -- gar nicht, oder interessant

B: But why, then, do you write? - A: Well, my friend, I say this in confidence: until now I have found no other means of getting rid of my thoughts. (part 2- 93)

There are men who desire power simply for the sake of the happiness it will bring; these belong chiefly to political parties. Other men have the same yearning, even when power means visible disadvantages, the sacrifice of their happiness, and well-being; they are the ambitious. Other men, again, are only like dogs in a manger, and will have power only to prevent its falling into the hands of others on whom they would then be dependent.

There is no beast without cruelty

If God wrote the New Testament, he knew surprisingly little Greek.

What? You seek something? You wish to multiply yourself tenfold, a hundredfold? You seek followers? Seek zeros!

The Church and morality say, "A race, a people is destroyed by vice and luxury." My reconstituted reason says: when a people is perishing, physiologically degenerating, the effects of this are vice and luxury (that is, the need for stronger and stronger, more and more frequent stimuli, the kind of stimuli that are familiar to every exhausted nature).

I TEACH YOU THE SUPERMAN. Man is something that is to be surpassed. What have ye done to surpass man? All