Quotes About Philosophy

But it is the same with man as with the tree. The more he seeks to rise into the height and light, the more vigorously do his roots struggle earthword, downword, into the dark, the deep - into evil.

There are no eternal facts, as there are no absolute truths.

One must pay dearly for immortality; one has to die several times while still alive.

The irrationality of a thing is no argument against its existence, rather a condition of 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. I do not want to accuse; I do not even want to accuse those who accuse. Looking away shall be my only negation. And all in all and on the whole: some day I wish to be only a Yes-sayer.

Two great European narcotics, alcohol and Christianity.

I am one thing, my writings are another.

I obviously do everything to be hard to understand myself

The earth has a skin and that skin has diseases; one of its diseases is called man.

He who cannot put his thoughts on ice should not enter into the heat of dispute.

The text has disappeared under the interpretation.

There is an old illusion. It is called good and evil.

You say 'I' and you are proud of this word. But greater than this- although you will not believe in it - is your body and its great intelligence, which does not say 'I' but performs 'I'.

It is not when truth is dirty, but when it is shallow, that the lover of knowledge is reluctant to step into its waters.

Friedrich Nietzsche

Truths are illlusions which we have forgotten are illusions.

It is a self-deception of philosophers and moralists to imagine that they escape decadence by opposing it. That is beyond their will; and, however little they acknowledge it, one later discovers that they were among the most powerful promoters of decadence.

He who possesseth little is so much the less possessed. Blessed be moderate poverty!

There is a certain right by which we many deprive a man of life, but none by which we may deprive him of death; this is mere cruelty.

The overman...Who has organized the chaos of his passions, given style to his character, and become creative. Aware of life's terrors, he affirms life without resentment.

What then is truth? A movable host of metaphors, metonymies, and anthropomorphisms: in short, a sum of human relations which have been poetically and rhetorically intensified, transferred, and embellished, and which, after long usage, seem to a people to be fixed, canonical, and binding. Truths are illusions which we have forgotten are illusions — they are metaphors that have become worn out and have been drained of sensuous force.

A moral system valid for all is basically immoral.

What if a demon were to creep after you one night, in your loneliest loneliness, and say, 'This life which you live must be lived by you once again and innumerable times more; and every pain and joy and thought and sigh must come again to you, all in the same sequence. The eternal hourglass will again and again be turned and you with it, dust of the dust!' Would you throw yourself down and gnash your teeth and curse that demon? Or would you answer, 'Never have I heard anything more divine'?

One has to take a somewhat bold and dangerous line with this existence: especially as, whatever happens, we are bound to lose it.