Quotes from Friedrich Nietzsche

Let us face ourselves. We are Hyperboreans!

No matter how strongly a thing may be believed, strength of belief is no criterion of truth.' But what is truth? Perhaps a kind of belief that has become a condition of life?

Due to its lack of tranquillity, our civilisation is heading toward a new barbarism.

Of all that is written, I love only what a person hath written with his blood. Write with blood, and thou wilt find that blood is spirit. It

Anti-theses.- The most senile thing ever thought about man is contained in the celebrated saying 'the ego is always hateful'; the most childish is the even more celebrated 'love thy neighbor as thyself'. - In the former, knowledge of human nature has ceased, in the latter it has not yet even begun.

The wasteland grows.

Where the strong are weak, and the noble all too mild—there it builds its disgusting nest: the parasite lives where the great have small wounded recesses.

Certainly one quality which nowadays has been best forgotten—and that is why it will take some time yet for my writings to become readable—is essential in order to practise reading as an art—a quality for the exercise of which it is necessary to be a cow, and under no circumstances a modern man!—rumination.   SILS-MARIA, UPPER ENGADINE, July, 1887.

The obscurities in my soul terrify galaxies.

The cult of the madman is also always the cult of him who is rich in vitality, and who is a powerful man.

Nothing is beautiful, only people are beautiful: all aesthetics is based on this naïveté, this is its first truth. Let us immediately add its second: the only thing ugly is a degenerating person, - this defines the realm of aesthetic judgment.

To sacrifice God for nothingness—this paradoxical mystery of the ultimate cruelty has been reserved for the rising generation; we all know something thereof already.

E embora sejais elevados e de espécie superior, em vós encerram-se muitas coisas torcidas e disformes. Não há ferreiro no mundo capaz de vos reformar e endireitar.

I am a railing alongside the torrent; whoever is able to grasp me may grasp me! Your crutch, however, I am not.--

Fourth proposition. To divide the world into a 'real' and an 'apparent' world, whether in the manner of Christianity or in the manner of Kant (which is, after all, that of a cunning Christian –) is only a suggestion of décadence – a symptom of declining life.…

To me, the masses seem to be worth a glance only in three respects: first as blurred copies of great men, presented on bad paper with worn out printing plates, then as the resistance against the great men, and finally as working implements of the great. For the rest, let the devil and statistics carry them off!

It is true we love life; not because we are wont to live, but because we are wont to love. There is always some madness in love. But there is always, also, some method in madness. And to me also, who appreciate life, the butterflies, and soap-bubbles, and whatever is like them amongst us, seem most to enjoy happiness

Wherever authority is still part of accepted usage and one does not 'give reasons' but commands, the dialectician is a kind of buffoon: he is laughed at, he is not taken seriously. – Socrates was the buffoon who got himself taken seriously: what was really happening when that happened?

Better, however, to be foolish with happiness than foolish with misfortune, better to dance awkwardly than walk lamely.

Man's complete lack of responsibility, for his behavior and for his nature, is the bitterest drop which the man of knowledge must swallow.

Something might be true, even if it were also harmful and dangerous in the highest degree; indeed, it might be part of the essential nature of existence that to understand it completely would lead to our own destruction. The strength of a person's spirit would then be measured by how much truth he could tolerate, or more precisely, to what extent he 'needs' to have it diluted, disguised, sweetened, muted, falsified.

The formation of a herd is a significant victory and advance in the struggle against depression.

This cup wants to become empty again, and Zarathustra wants to become human again.

We have stopped deriving humanity from 'spirit', from 'divinity', we have stuck human beings back among the animals. We see them as the strongest animals because they are the most cunning: one consequence of this is their spirituality.