Quotes from Friedrich Nietzsche

Severim batmaktan baÅŸka bir yaÅŸam bilmeyenleri.

Not to cleave to our own virtues, nor become as a whole a victim to any of our specialties, to our hospitality for instance, which is the danger of dangers for highly developed and wealthy souls, who deal prodigally, almost indifferently with themselves, and push the virtue of liberality so far that it becomes a vice. One must know how TO CONSERVE ONESELF—the best test of independence.

How reluctant later generations will be to have anything to do with the relics of an era ruled, not by living men, but by pseudo-men dominated by public opinion.

Who has not for the sake of his reputation sacrificed himself?

Reason in language- oh what an old deceptive female she is! I am afraid we are not rid of God because we still have faith in grammar.

Our whole science is still, in spite of all its coldness, of all its freedom from passion, a dupe of the tricks of language, and has never succeeded in getting rid of that superstitious changeling "the subject" (the atom, to give another instance, is such a changeling, just as the Kantian "Thing-in-itself").

After a Great Victory.-The best thing in a great victory is that it deprives the conqueror of the fear of defeat. Why should I not be worsted for once ? he says to himself, I am now rich enough to stand it.

I do indeed find the cruelty of Nature which is so often referred to; but in a different place: Nature is cruel, but against her lucky and well-constituted children; she protects and shelters and loves the lowly.

There is nowadays, throughout almost the whole of Europe, a sickly irritability and sensitiveness towards pain, and also a repulsive irrestrainableness in complaining, an effeminizing, which, with the aid of religion and philosophical nonsense, seeks to deck itself out as something superior—there is a regular cult of suffering.

Lighting and thunder require time; the light of the stars requires time; deeds, though done, still require time to be seen and heard.

So long as the spectator has to figure out the meaning of this or that person, or the presuppositions of this or that conflict of inclinations and purposes, he cannot become completely absorbed in the activities and sufferings of the chief characters or feel breathless pity and fear.

I was in darkness, but I took three steps and found myself in paradise. The first step was a good thought, the second, a good word; and the third, a good deed.

Hat man sein Warum des Lebens, so verträgt man sich fast mit jedem Wie. Der Mensch strebt nicht nach Glück; nur der Engländer tut das.

A man whose sense of shame has some profundity encounters his destinies and delicate decisions, too, on paths which few ever reach and of whose mere existence his closest intimates must not know: his mortal danger is concealed from their eyes, and so is his regained sureness of life.

WE are unknown, we knowers, ourselves to ourselves: this has its own good reason.

What surprises me most when surveying the great destinies of man is always seeing before me the opposite of what Darwin and his school see or want to see today: selection in favor of the stronger, in favor of those who have come off better, the progress of the species. The very opposite is quite palpably the case: the elimination of the strokes of luck, the uselessness of the better-constituted types, the inevitable domination achieved by the average, even below-average types.

Seriousness in play. At sunset in Genoa, I heard from a tower a long chiming of bells; it kept on and on, and over the noise of the backstreets, as if insatiable for itself, it rang out into the evening sky and the sea air, so terrible and so childish at the same time, so melancholy. then I thoughts of Platos's words and felt them suddenly in my heart: all in all, nothing human is worth taking very seriously; nevertheless ...

Ik houd van hem, die vrij van geest en vrij van hart is: aldus is zijn hoofd slechts het ingewand van zijn hart; zijn hart echter drijft hem tot ondergang.

My formula for greatness in a human being is amor fati: that one wants nothing to be different, not forward, not backward, not in all eternity. Not merely bear what is necessary, still less conceal it — all idealism is mendaciousness in the face of what is necessary — but love it.

I want to learn more and more to see as beautiful what is necessary in things; then I shall be one of those who make things beautiful. Amor fati: let that be my love henceforth! I do not want to wage war against what is ugly…And all in all and on the whole: some day I wish to be only a Yes-sayer.

The better the state is established, the fainter is humanity. To make the individual uncomfortable, that is my task.

With all willing we are dealing simply with commanding and obeying, on the foundation... of a social structure of many souls, which is why a philosopher should exercise the right to conceive willing itself under the horizon of morality: that is, morality understood as a doctrine of the power relations under which the phenomenon life emerges.

It is possible to conceive of a society blessed with so great a consciousness of its own power as to indulge in the most aristocratic luxury of letting its wrong-doers go scot-free. -

Nihilism stands at the door: whence comes this uncanniest of all guests?