Quotes from Friedrich Nietzsche

Enemy you shall say but not villain, sick you shall say but not wretch, fool you shall say but not sinner.

If there are any persons who contest a received opinion ... let us thank them for it, open our minds to listen to them, and rejoice that there is some one to do for us what we otherwise ought, if we have any regard for either the certainty or the vitality of our convictions, to do with much greater labor for ourselves. —John Stuart Mill, On Liberty

O my friends! Thus speaketh the discerning one: shame, shame, shame—that is the history of man!

Believe me, friend Hellishnoise: the greatest events—they are not our loudest but our stillest hours.

We suffer from the malady of words, and have no trust in any feeling that is not stamped with its special word.

Let the young soul survey its own life with a view of the following question: 'What have you truly loved thus far? What has ever uplifted your soul, what has dominated and delighted it at the same time?

To love those who despise us, and to give one's hand to the phantom who tries to frighten us?

Morality is no longer the expression of the conditions of life and growth, no longer the most fundamental instinct of life, but it has become abstract, it has become the opposite of life

Behind thy thoughts and feelings, my brother, there is a mighty lord, an unknown sage—it is called Self; it dwelleth in thy body, it is thy body. There

No victor believes in chance.

The more a psychologist—a born, an unavoidable psychologist and soul-diviner—turns his attention to the more select cases and individuals, the greater is his danger of being suffocated by sympathy: he NEEDS sternness and cheerfulness more than any other man. For the corruption, the ruination of higher men, of the more unusually constituted souls, is in fact, the rule: it is dreadful to have such a rule always before one's eyes.

His word pronounced 'selfishness' blessed, the wholesome healthy selfishness that wells from a powerful soul—from a powerful soul to which belongs the high body, beautiful, triumphant, refreshing, around which everything becomes a mirror—the supple, persuasive body, the dancer whose parable and epitome is the self-enjoying soul.

Only those who continue to change remain my kin

Every kind of perfection is purchased at a high price on earth, where everything is perhaps purchased too dear; one is an expert in one's department at the price of being also a victim of one's department.

I want to teach them what is understood by so few today, least of all by those preachers of pity: to share not suffering but joy.

Do whatever you will, but first be such as are able to will.

The genius, in work and deed, is necessarily a squanderer: he squanders himself. That is his greatness! … He flows out, he overflows, he uses himself up, he does not spare himself—and this is a calamitous involuntary fatality, no less than a river's flooding the land.

Brave people are persuaded to an action when it is represented as more dangerous than it is.

He that feeds the hungry refreshes his own soul, says wisdom.

For, why is the triumph of Nihilism inevitable now? Because the very values current amongst us to-day will arrive at their logical conclusion in Nihilism,—because Nihilism is the only possible outcome of our greatest values and ideals,—because we must first experience Nihilism before we can realise what the actual worth of these "values" was....

how well Stoicism hides what one does not possess!);

Books for the general reader are always ill-smelling books, the odour of paltry people clings to them. Where the populace eat and drink, and even where they reverence, it is accustomed to stink.

At times, one can win clever people over to a principle merely by presenting it in the form of an outrageous paradox.

Human society: it is an attempt—so I teach—a long seeking: it seeketh however the ruler!— —An attempt, my brethren! And NO contract! Destroy, I pray you, destroy that word of the soft-hearted and half-and-half!