Quotes About Nietzsche

Nietzsche: "I call an animal, a species, an individual corrupt, when it loses its instincts, when it prefers what is injurious to it.

Following Nietzsche's arguments concerning the genealogy of the word "good"(and "evil"), one could also say that the main difference between "masters"and the "herd" (as the new masters) is that masters are the ones who "give names" (and can thus say "this is so-and-so") whereas the "herd" fights for the -interpretation- of these names ("this -means- so-and-so"). Yet this interpretation is itself a form of mastery, and is often much more tyrannical than the act of "giving names".

Friedrich Nietzsche, the German philosopher, said that what he resented in most Christians was what he perceived as a constant underlying resentment: (1) a denied resentment toward God for demanding sacrifice, (2) toward others for not appreciating our sacrifice, (3) sacrificing as much as we sacrifice, (4) and a resentment toward others for not having to do it!

Human life, for Nietzsche, is ultimately a part of a kind of vast game…[which] is, so to speak, the only game in town….The nature of the game, he holds, establishes a standard for the evaluation of everything falling within its compass. The availability of this standard places evaluation on footing that is as firm as that on which the comprehension of life and the world stands.

What is evil?-Whatever springs from weakness.

Schopenhauer had been Hitler's philosophical god in the early days. In power it was Nietzsche.

Sometimes in our relationship to another human being the proper balance of friendship is restored when we put a few grains of impropriety onto our own side of the scale.

Nietzsche's message to us was to live life in such a way that we would be willing to repeat the same life eternally.

It took just such evil and painful things for the great emancipation to occur," Nietzsche said. He is also the one who said that what doesn't kill us makes us stronger.

When Nietzsche said, "God is dead", he himself immediately replaced God with a new God, the Superman. Who would bother with Nietzsche's philosophy if he pronounced God dead and then hanged himself? Nietzsche immediately resurrected God, hence God was never dead. God is always ready to be re-expressed. It's not the concept of God that's wrong, it's the concept of the wrong God, wrongly defined and understood.

Nietzsche talked about "good and bad" in the context of nobility. The nobles regarded the exceptional as good and the mediocre as bad. When the "good and bad" of the nobility was replaced by the "good and evil" of the mob, exceptionalism was declared evil, and mediocrity was sanctified. The holy mediocrities are now everywhere. The kingdom of mediocrity is absolute … absolute shit!

How on earth Nietzsche, a supporter of Dionysus, went through a phase of vegetarianism is mind-boggling. Just as bad, Nietzsche was no fan of alcohol. No wonder Dionysus smote his sacrilegious ass and drove him insane, a common fate for all those that defy Dionysus.

God is a feeble, emasculated non-God on a cross who can't even save himself. If he can't save himself, how can he save you? Give us Nietzsche's Superman any day. God is dead. Long live the Overman. The task is to get stronger and stronger, not weaker and weaker.

Jealous is every virtue of the others, and a dreadful thing is jealousy. Even virtues may succumb by jealousy.

Nietzsche said the newspaper had replaced the prayer in the life of the modern bourgeois , meaning that the busy, the cheap, the ephemeral, had usurped all that remained of the eternal in his daily life.

The side of modernity that is less interesting to Americans, which seeks less for political solutions than for understanding and satisfaction of man in his fullness or completeness, finds its profoundest statement in Nietzsche.

Nietzsche said, the greatest deeds are thoughts, that the world revolves around the inventors of new values, revolves silently. Nietzsche was such an inventor, and we are still revolving around him. The spectacle consists in how his views have been trivialized by democratic man desirous of tricking himself out in borrowed finery

People with menial jobs conjure up what Nietzsche calls a background world, forcing themselves to believe in an earthly or heavenly paradise. Their mental Eden is as seductive as their job is repugnant.

Nietzsche should not be taken seriously as a political theorist, at least not at the level of his positive prescriptions. But the Nietzsche who denounces the insipidity and mediocrity that result from democracy's levelling impulses could not be more acute.

Folly is so human that it has common roots with poetry and tragedy; it is revealed as much in the insane asylum as in the writings of a Cervantes or a Shakespeare, or in the deep psychological insights and cries of revolt of a Nietzsche.

Dreyfus (1991) claims that Heidegger radicalized "the insights already contained in the writings of such pragmatists as Nietzsche, Peirce, James, and Dewey" (p. 6). See also Haugeland 1982, where he writes: "I make Heidegger out to be less like Husserl and/or Sartre than is usual, and more like Dewey (and to a lesser extent) Sellars and the later Wittgenstein" (p. 15).

The philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche explored the burden of the unlived that is not reclaimed: Zarathustra goes to the grave with the unfulfilled dreams of his youth. He speaks to them as if they were ghosts who have betrayed him bitterly. They struck up a dance and then spoiled the music. Did the past make his path so weighty? Did his unlived life impede him and consign him to a life that seems not to pass?

The greatest progress that the human race has made lies in learning how to make correct inferences. —Nietzsche, Human, AU-Too-Human

Against that positivism which stops before phenomena, saying there are only facts," I should say; no, it is precisely facts that do not exist, only interpretations. Nietzsche, The Will to Power