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Friedrich Nietzsche
Friedrich Nietzsche (October 15, 1844 - August 25, 1900) German philosopher
See also: The Antichrist, Beyond Good and Evil, and Thus Spake Zarathustra.
Sourced
- "The man of knowledge must be able not only to love his enemies but also to hate his friends."
- Source: Ecce Homo, Foreword
From "The Gay Science" (1882)
- "Die Leugner des Zufalls. - 'Kein Sieger glaubt an den Zufall.'"
- Translation: "Those who deny chance. - 'No victor believes in chance.'"
- Source: Die fröhliche Wissenschaft (The Gay Science), Third Book, Aphorism 258.
- "Was sagt dein Gewissen? - 'Du sollst der werden, der du bist.'"
- Translation: "What does your conscience say? - 'You shall become the person you are.'"
- Note: This is often rendered as "Become who you are."
- Note: It is noted here and here that the phrase was first used by Pindar , and was merely re-used by Nietzsche.
- Source: Die fröhliche Wissenschaft (The Gay Science), Third Book, Aphorism 270.
- "Everything good, fine or great they do is first of all an argument against the skeptic inside them." Sec. 284
- "Art furnishes us with eyes and hands and above all the good conscience to be able to turn ourselves into such a phenomenon." Sec. 107
- "To what extent can truth endure incorporation? That is the question; that is the experiment." Sec. 110
- "We are, all of us, growing volcanoes that approach the hour of their eruption; but how near or distant that is, nobody knows - not even God." Sec. 9
- "At this point the conservatives of all ages are thoroughly dishonest: they add lies." Sec. 29
- "A thinker sees his own actions as experiments and questions - as attempts to find out something. Success and failure are for him answers above all." Sec. 41
- "Pardon me, my friends, I have ventured to paint my happiness on the wall." Sec. 56
- "But let us not forget this either: it is enough to create new names and estimations and probabilities in order to create in the long run new 'things.'" Sec. 58
- "Without art we would be nothing but foreground and live entirely in the spell of that perspective which makes what is closest at hand and most vulgar appear as if it were vast, and reality itself." Sec. 78
- "Good prose is written only face to face with poetry." Sec. 92
- "Gott ist tot! Gott bleibt tot! Und wir haben ihn getötet." Aph. 125
- "God is dead! God stays dead! And we killed him. " Sec. 125
- "Morality is herd instinct in the individual." Sec. 116
- "The Christian resolution to find the world ugly and bad has made the world ugly and bad." Sec. 130
- "What is now decisive against Christianity is our taste, no longer our reasons." Sec. 132
- "To find everything profound - that is an inconvenient trait. It makes one strain one's eyes all the time, and in the end one finds more than one might have wished." Sec. 158
- "The most perfidious way of harming a cause consists of defending it deliberately with faulty arguments." Sec. 191
- "What is the seal of liberation? - No longer being ashamed in front of oneself." Sec. 275
- "There is something laughable about the sight of authors who enjoy the rustling folds of long and involved sentences: they are trying to cover up their feet." Sec. 282
- "For believe me: the secret for harvesting from existence the greatest fruitfulness and greatest enjoyment is - to live dangerously." Sec. 283
- "Perhaps man will rise ever higher as soon as he ceases to flow out into a god." Sec. 285
- "We want to be poets of our life - first of all in the smallest most everyday matters." Sec. 299
- "We are always in our own company." Sec. 166
- "I would not know what the spirit of a philosopher might wish more to be than a good dancer." Sec. 381
From "The Twilight of the Idols" (1888)
- "Plato ist langweilig"
- Translation: "Plato is boring"
- Source: Twilight of the Idols, What I Owe to the Ancients.
- "What? Is man merely a mistake of God's? Or God merely a mistake of man?" Maxims and Arrows, 7
- "What does not destroy me, makes me stronger." Maxims and Arrows, 8
- "Without music, life would be an error." Maxims and Arrows, 33
From "The Antichrist" (1888)
- "Einige werden posthum geboren."
- "What is good? All that heightens the feeling of power in man, the will to power, power itself. What is bad? All that is born of weakness. What is happiness? The feeling that power is growing, that resistance is overcome." Sec. 2
- "In Christianity neither morality nor religion come into contact with reality at any point." Sec. 16
- "Love is a state in which a man sees things most decidedly as they are not." Sec. 23
- "The very word 'Christianity' is a misunderstanding —, in truth, there was only one Christian, and he died on the cross." Sec. 39
- "That faith makes blessed under certain circumstances, that blessedness does not make of a fixed idea a true idea, that faith moves no mountains but puts mountains where there are none: a quick walk through a madhouse enlightens one sufficiently about this." Sec. 51
- Note: Often rendered as "A casual stroll through the lunatic asylum shows that faith does not prove anything."
- "'Faith' means not wanting to know what is true." Sec. 52
- "Nihilist and Christian. They rhyme in German... and they do indeed do more than just rhyme." Sec. 58
- German: Nihilist und Christ: das reimt sich, das reimt sich nicht bloss...
- "I call Christianity the one great curse, the one great intrinsic depravity, the one great instinct for revenge for which no expedient is sufficiently poisonous, secret, subterranean, petty -- I call it the one mortal blemish of mankind." Sec. 62
From "Beyond Good and Evil" (1886)
- "It is some basic certainty which the noble soul has about itself, something which does not allow itself to be sought out or found or perhaps even to be lost. The noble soul has reverence for itself."
- "So you want to live 'according to nature?' Oh, you noble Stoics, what a fraud is in this phrase! Imagine something like nature, profligate without measure, indifferent without measure, without purpose and regard, without mercy and justice, fertile and barren and uncertain at the same time, think of indifference itself as power - how could you live according to this indifference? Living - isn't that wanting specifically to be something other than this nature? Isn't living assessing, preferring, being unfair, being limited, wanting to be different? And assuming your imperative to 'live according to nature' basically amounts to 'living according to life' - well how could you not? Why make a principle out of what you youselves are and must be?"
- "Physiologists should think twice before positioning the drive for self-preservation as the cardinal drive of an organic being. Above all, a living thing wants to discharge its strength - life itself is will to power -: self-preservation is only one of the indirect and most frequent consequences of this."
- "Independence is an issue that concerns very few people: - it is a prerogative of the strong. And even when somebody has every right to be independent, if he attempts such a thing without having to do so, he proves that he is probably not only strong, but brave to the point of madness. He enters a labyrinth, he multiplies by a thousand the dangers already inherent in the very act of living, not the least of which is the fact that no one with eyes will see how and where he gets lost and lonely and is torn limb from limb by some cave-Minotaur of conscience. And assuming a man like this is destroyed, it is an event so far from human comprehension that people do not feel it or feel for him: - and he cannot go back again! He cannot go back to their pity again! - -
- "People used to believe in 'the soul' as they believed in grammar and the grammatical subject: people said that 'I' was a condition and 'think' was a predicate and conditioned - thinking is an activity and a subject must be thought of as its cause. Now, with admirable tenacity and cunning, people are wondering whether they can get out of this net - wondering whether the reverse might be true: that 'think' is the condition and 'I' is conditioned, in which case 'I' would be a synthesis that only gets produced through thought itself."
- "There is a great ladder of religious cruelty, and, of its many rungs, three are the most important. People used to make human sacrifices to their god, perhaps even sacrificing those they loved the best. . .Then, during the moral epoch of humanity, people sacrificed the strongest instincts they had, their 'nature,' to their god; the joy of this particular festival shines in the cruel eyes of the ascetic, that enthusiastic piece of 'anti-nature.' Finally: what was left to be sacrificed? In the end, didn't people have to sacrifice all comfort and hope, everything holy or healing, any faith in hidden harmony or a future filled with justice and bliss? Didn't people have to sacrifice God himself and worship rocks, stupidity, gravity, fate, or nothingness out of sheer cruelty to themselves? To sacrifice God for nothingness - that paradoxical mystery of the final cruelty has been reserved for the race that is now approaching: by now we all know something about this. -
- "The sage as astronomer. - If you still experience the stars as something 'over you,' you still don't have the eyes of a knower."
- "Anyone who despises himself will still respect himself as a despiser."
- "Wer mit Ungeheuern kämpft, mag zusehn, dass er nicht dabei zum Ungeheuer wird. Und wenn du lange in einen Abgrund blickst, blickt der Abgrund auch in dich hinein."
- Translation: "He who fights with monsters should look to it that he himself does not become a monster. And when you gaze long into an abyss, the abyss gazes also into you."
- Source: Beyond Good and Evil, Aphorism 146
- "Was aus Liebe getan wird, geschieht immer jenseits von Gut und Böse."
- Translation: "What is done out of love always takes place beyond good and evil."
- Source; Beyond Good and Evil, Aphorism 153
From "Thus Spoke Zarathustra" (1883-1885)
- "Watch them clamber, these swift monkeys! They clamber over one another and thus drag one another into the mud and the depth. They all want to get to the throne: that is their madness - as if happiness sat on the throne. Often, mud sits on the throne - and often the throne also on mud. Mad they all appear to me, clambering monkeys and overardent. Foul smells their idol, the cold monster: foul, they smell to me altogether, these idolators."
Source: Thus Spoke Zarathustra, Part 1, "On the New Idol"
- "Ich würde nur an einen Gott glauben, der zu tanzen verstünde."
- Translation: "I should only believe in a God that would know how to dance."
- Source: Thus Spoke Zarathustra, Part 7, "Vom Lesen und Schreiben"/"Reading and Writing"
- "Deshalb will er das Weib, als das gefährlichste Spielzeug"
- "Also aber rathe ich euch, meine Freunde: misstraut Allen, in welchen der Trieb, zu strafen, mächtig ist! Das ist Volk schlechter Art und Abkunft; aus ihren Gesichtern blickt der Henker und der Spürhund. Misstraut allen Denen, die viel von ihrer Gerechtigkeit reden! Wahrlich, ihren Seelen fehlt es nicht nur an Honig. Und wenn sie sich selber 'die Guten und Gerechten' nennen, so vergesst nicht, dass ihnen zum Pharisäer Nichts fehlt als - Macht!"
- "But thus do I counsel you, my friends: distrust all in whom the impulse to punish is powerful! They are people of bad race and lineage; out of their countenances peer the hangman and the sleuth-hound. Distrust all those who talk much of their justice! Verily, in their souls not only honey is lacking. And when they call themselves 'the good and just,' forget not, that for them to be Pharisees, nothing is lacking but- power!" (Thomas Common translation)
- Variant:"But thus I counsel you, my friends: Mistrust all in whom the impulse to punish is powerful. They are people of a low sort and stock; the hangman and the bloodhound look out of their faces. Mistrust all who talk much of their justice! Verily, their souls lack more than honey. And when they call themselves the good and the just, do not forget that they would be pharisees, if only they had-- power."
- Source: Also sprach Zarathustra (Thus Spake Zarathustra) Ch.29, The Tarantulas
- (Similar statements are attributed to Goethe, and to Dostoevsky)
Attributed
- "Ah, women. They make the highs higher and the lows more frequent."
- "A woman may very well form a friendship with a man, but for this to endure, it must be assisted by a little physical antipathy."
- "At times one remains faithful to a cause only because its opponents do not cease to be insipid."
- Perhaps this is a rendering of Gay Science, Sec. 229?
- "For out of fear and need each religion is born, creeping into existence on the byways of reason."
- "I cannot believe in a God who wants to be praised all the time."
- Perhaps a rendering of Gay Science, Sec. 141?
- "In heaven all the interesting people are missing."
- Source: From the Nachlaß, KSA 13: 11[153]
- Original context: "Die Kirche hat deutsche Kaiser auf Grund ihrer Laster in Bann gethan: als ob ein Mönch oder Priester über das mitreden dürfte, was ein Friedrich der Zweite von sich fordern darf. Ein Don Juan wird in die Hölle geschickt: das ist sehr naiv. Hat man bemerkt, daß im Himmel alle interessanten Menschen fehlen?"
- "The surest way to corrupt a youth is to instruct him to hold in higher esteem those who think alike than those who think differently."
- Source: The Dawn, Sec. 297
- "There are no facts, only interpretations."
- "Two great European narcotics, alcohol and Christianity."
- Source: Twilight of the Idols, What the Germans lack, 2; also in The Antichrist, Sec. 60, and Gay Science, Sec. 147
- "After the old god has been assassinated, I am ready to rule the world."
- "Swallow your poison, for you need it badly."
- "What is bad? But I have said this already: all that comes of weakness, of envy, of revenge. The anarchist and the Christian have the same origin."
- "You need chaos in your soul to give birth to a dancing star."
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