Quotes About Philosophy

Their [philosophers] thinking is, in fact, far less a discovery than a re-recognizing, a remembering, a return and a home-coming to a far-off, ancient common-household of the soul, out of which those ideas formerly grew: philosophizing is so far a kind of atavism of the highest order.

Every philosophy is a foreground philosophy — that is a hermit's judgment: There is something arbitrary in his stopping here to look back and look around, in his not digging deeper here but laying his spade aside; there is also something suspicious about it. Every philosophy also conceals a philosophy; every opinion is also a hideout, every word also a mask.

God is a thought who makes crooked all that is straight.

Saying yes to life, even in its strangest and hardest problems.

I do not refute ideals, I merely put on gloves when I deal with them...

You say you're a pessimist, but I happen to know that you're in the habit of practicing your flute for two hours every evening.

there is no being behind doing, effecting, becoming; the doer is merely a fiction added to the deed—the deed is everything.

inability to lie is still far from being love to truth. Be on your guard! ... He who cannot lie, doth not know what truth is.

A man recovers best from his exceptional nature - his intellectuality - by giving his animal instincts a chance.

Mystical explanations are considered deep. The truth is that they are not even superficial.

When Zarathustra had spoken these words, he again looked at the people, and was silent. There they stand, said he to his heart; there they laugh: they do not understand me; I am not the mouth for these ears.

He who does not lie does not know what truth is.

Truth as Circe. - Error has transformed animals into men; is truth perhaps capable of changing man back into an animal?

And if you gaze for long into an abyss, the abyss gazes also into you.

But the thought is one thing, the deed is another, and another yet is the image of the deed. The wheel of causality does not roll between them.

It is disgraceful for a philosopher to say: the good and the beautiful are one; if he adds 'also the true', one ought to beat him. Truth is ugly. We possess art lest we perish of the truth.

I and me are always too deeply in conversation.

The good men of every age are those who go to the roots of the old thoughts and bear fruit with them.

I would not know what the spirit of a philosopher might wish more to be than a good dancer.

I deny morality as I deny alchemy.

All modern philosophizing is political, policed by governments, churches, academics, custom, fashion, and human cowardice, all of which limit it to a fake learnedness.

People have always wanted to 'improve' human beings; for the most part, this has been called morality.

Man is no longer an artist, he has become a work of art.

When one has much to put in them, a day has a thousand pockets.