Quotes About Existence

Necessity is not an established fact, but rather an interpretation.

When one does away with oneself one does the most estimable thing possible: one thereby almost deserves to live.

Every philosophy is the philosophy of some stage of life.

We operate with nothing but things which do not exist, with lines, planes, bodies, atoms, divisible time, divisible space -- how should explanation even be possible when we first make everything into an image, into our own image!

In the consciousness of the truth he has perceived, man now sees everywhere only the awfulness or the absurdity of existence and loathing seizes him.

If we have our own 'why' of life, we can bear almost any 'how.'

Is not life a hundred times too short for us to bore ourselves?

Only as an aesthetic phenomenon is existence and the world eternally justified.

My doctrine is: Live that thou mayest desire to live again—that is thy duty—for in any case thou wilt live again!

Regarding life, the wisest men of all ages have judged alike: it is worthless.

Man is a rope stretched between the animal and the Superman—a rope over an abyss.

I love those who do not know how to live for today.

What is it: is man only a blunder of God, or God only a blunder of man?

I want to teach men the sense of their existence, which is the Superman, the lightning out of the dark cloud man.

Genteel women suppose that those things do not really exist about which it is impossible to talk in polite company.

The world itself is the will to power - and nothing else! And you yourself are the will to power - and nothing else!

A subject for a great poet would be God's boredom after the seventh day of creation.

When Zarathustra was alone… he said to his heart: "Could it be possible! This old saint in the forest hath not yet heard of it, that God is dead!"

There cannot be a God because if there were one, I could not believe that I was not He.

Although the most acute judges of the witches and even the witches themselves, were convinced of the guilt of witchery, the guilt nevertheless was non-existent. It is thus with all guilt.

At the bottom every man knows well enough that he is a unique human being, only once on this earth; and by no extraordinary chance will such a marvelously picturesque piece of diversity in unity as he is, ever be put together a second time.

Perhaps I know why it is man alone who laughs He alone suffers so deeply that he had to invent laughter.

Is man merely a mistake of God's? Or God merely a mistake of man?