Quotes from Friedrich Nietzsche

In my dream, in my last morning-dream, I stood today on a promontory— beyond the world; I held a pair of scales, and weighed the world. Alas, that the rosy dawn came too early to me: she glowed me awake, the jealous one! Jealous is she always of the glows of my morning-dream.

O povo, contudo, dizia-me que a orelha grande era não só um homem, mas um grande homem, um gênio. Eu, porém, nunca acreditei no povo quando ele me falava de grandes homens, e sustento a minha idéia de que era um aleijado às avessas que tinha pouquíssimo de tudo e uma coisa em demasia.

Already even politics ceases to be the business of a gentleman ; and it is possible that one day it may be found to be so vulgar as to be brought, like all party literature and daily literature, under the rubric : Prostitution of the intellect.

Christianity is a hangman's metaphysics…

Todos querem o mesmo, todos são iguais: o que pensa de outro modo tende a ir para o manicómio.

Já não amo, pois, senão o país dos meus filhos, a terra incógnita entre mares longínquos; é essa que a minha vela deve incessantemente, procurar.

There cometh the time of the most despicable man, who can no longer despise himself. Lo! I show you THE LAST MAN. What is love? What is creation? What is longing? What is a star?--so asketh the last man and blinketh. The earth hath then become small, and on it there hoppeth the last man who maketh everything small. His species is ineradicable like that of the ground-flea; the last man liveth longest.

It is out of the deepest depth that the highest must come to its height

And we had made a nice misuse of that 'empiricism', we had created the world on the basis of it as a world of causes, as a world of will, as a world of spirit.

One has deprived becoming of its innocence if being in this or that state is traced back to will, to intentions, to accountable acts: the doctrine of will has been invented essentially for the purpose of punishment, that is of finding guilty.

Ich mag eure kalte Gerechtigkeit nicht; und aus dem Auge eurer Richter blickt mir immer der Henker und sein kaltes Eisen. (Ich don't like your cold justice; and from the eyes of your judges seems to always gaze the hangman and his cold iron.)

Du gehst zu Frauen? Vergiss die Peitsche nicht!

But the state tells lies in all the tongues of good and evil; and whatever it says it lies—and whatever it has it has stolen. Everything about it is false;

we immoralists especially are trying with all our might to remove the concept of guilt and the concept of punishment from the world and to purge psychology, history, nature, the social institutions and sanctions of them

The discovery of the laws of numbers was made on the basis of an error already predominant in the earliest times, that several things might be identical (but actually there are no identical things), or that there are at least things (but there is no 'thing'). The assumption of multiplicity is always presupposes that there is something that occurs multiple times: but this is precisely where error already holds sway, already we invent beings, unities that do not exist.

Greatness of character consists in having one's feelings under control. And even without any pleasure in this restraint, but merely because.

IF there were gods, how could I endure it to be no God!

And when a person goeth through fire for his teaching -- what doth that prove! It is more, verily, when out of one's own burning cometh one's own teaching!

It also seems to me that the rudest word, the rudest letter, is more good-natured, more straightforward, than silence.

There are losses which communicate a sublimity to the soul which makes it refrain from lamentation and go about in silence as though among tall black cypress-trees.

That is the greatest error ever committed, the most disastrous error on earth: believing that in the forms of reason, we had in our possession a criterion of reality, whereas we had them in order to gain mastery over reality, in order to misunderstand it in a shrewd way... — And behold, the world became false precisely because of the qualities which constitute its reality: change, becoming, multiplicity, opposition, strife, war.

Cynicism is the only form in which base souls approach honesty; and the higher man must listen closely to every coarse or subtle cynicism, and congratulate himself when a clown without shame or a scientific satyr speaks out precisely in front of him.

One of the subtlest means of deceiving, at least as long as possible, and of successfully representing oneself to be stupider than one really is - which in everyday life is often as desirable as an umbrella,- is called ENTHUSIASM, including what belongs to it, for instance, virtue.

How Rhythm Beautifies.- Rhythm casts a veil over reality; it causes various artificiality's of speech and obscurities of thought; by the shadow it throws upon thought it sometimes conceals it, and sometimes brings it into prominence. As shadow is necessary to beauty, so the "dull" is necessary to lucidity. Art makes the aspect of life endurable by throwing over it the veil of obscure thought.