Quotes About Philosophy

If we have our own why in life, we shall get along with almost any how. Man does not strive for pleasure; only the Englishman does.

The worst things, however, are the petty thoughts. Verily, better to have done evilly than to have thought pettily!

I want, once and for all, not to know many things. Wisdom requires moderation in knowledge as in other things.

What is the greatest thing you can experience? It is the hour of your greatest contempt. The hour in which even your happiness becomes loathsome to you, and so also your reason and virtue.

Intoxicating joy it is for the sufferer to look away from his suffering and forget himself. Intoxicating joy and self-forgetting, the world once seemed to me.

Whoever looks into himself as into vast space and carries galaxies in himself, also knows how irregular all galaxies are; they lead into the chaos and labyrinth of existence.

Yet tell me, my brothers: if a goal for humanity is still lacking, is there not still lacking--humanity itself?

We are unknown to ourselves, we men of knowledge--and with good reason. We have never sought ourselves--how could it happen that we should ever find ourselves?

My task: the dehumanization of Nature, and then the naturalization of humanity, after it has attained the pure concept of 'Nature'. Human beings and philosophers have in the past projected the human into nature — let us dehumanize nature.

All truth is simple... is that not doubly a lie?

What are man's truths ultimately? Merely his irrefutable errors.

And he will also find the little god whom girls like best: beside the well he lies, still, with his eyes shut. Verily, in bright daylight he fell asleep, the sluggard! Did he chase after the butterflies too much?... He may cry and weep - but he is laughable even when he weeps. And with tears in his eyes he shall ask you for a dance and I myself will sing a song for his dance: a dancing and mocking song on the spirit of gravity... (p.108 - The Dancing Song)

Still am I the richest and most to be envied - I, the lonesomest one!

Every smallest step in the field of free thinking, and of the personally formed life, has ever been fought for at the cost of spiritual and physical tortures . . . change has required its innumerable martyrs. . . . Nothing has been bought more dearly than that little bit of human reason and sense of freedom that is now the basis of our pride.

I live in my own light, I drink back into myself the flames that break from me

There are no egoistic or unegoistic actions: both concepts are psychological absurdities.

This - is now my way: where is yours?' Thus I answered those who asked me 'the way'. For the way - does not exist!

This is precisely why the Jews are the most disastrous people in world history: they have left such a falsified humanity in their wake that even today Christians can think of themselves as anti-Jewish without understanding that they are the ultimate conclusion of Judaism.

The awakened and knowing say: body I am entirely, and nothing else; and soul is only a word for something about the body.

I praise, I do not reproach, [nihilism's] arrival. I believe it is one of the greatest crises, a moment of the deepest self-reflection of humanity. Whether man recovers from it, whether he becomes master of this crisis, is a question of his strength

Is language the adequate expression of all realities?

What does nihilism mean? That the highest values devaluate themselves. The aim is lacking; 'why?' finds no answer.

All beings so far have created something beyond themselves. Do you want to be the ebb of that great tide, and revert back to the beast rather than surpass mankind? What is the ape to a man? A laughing-stock, a thing of shame. And just so shall a man be to the Superman: a laughing-stock, a thing of shame. You have evolved from worm to man, but much within you is still worm. Once you were apes, yet even now man is more of an ape than any of the apes.

The beast lives unhistorically; for it 'goes into' the present, like a number, without leaving any curious remainder.