Friedrich Nietzsche: Trending quotes (page 3)

“The sick are the greatest danger for the healthy; it is not from the strongest that harm comes to the strong, but from the weakest.”

Friedrich Nietzsche book On the Genealogy of Morality

Essay 3, Aphorism 14
On the Genealogy of Morality (1887)

Strong

“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 also gazes into you.”

Friedrich Nietzsche

Aphorism 146 from Jenseits von Gut und Böse (Beyond Good and Evil) an 1886 book by the German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche.

Translated from: 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.

Source: Gutenberg-DE

Translation source: Hollingdale
Misattributed

Fight

“If you have hitherto believed that life was one of the highest value and now see yourselves disappointed, do you at once have to reduce it to the lowest possible price?”

Friedrich Nietzsche book Human, All Too Human

II.1
Human, All Too Human (1878)

Life , Disappointment

“State is the name of the coldest of all cold monsters. Coldly it lies; and this lie slips from its mouth: 'I, the state, am the people’.”

Friedrich Nietzsche book Thus Spoke Zarathustra

Thus Spoke Zarathustra; A Book for All and None, trans. Kaufmann, New York: NY, Modern Library (1995) p. 48, 1.11: “On the New Idol”

People , Lie

“The advent of the Christian God, as the maximum god attained so far, was therefore accompanied by the maximum feeling of guilty indebtedness on earth.”

Friedrich Nietzsche book On the Genealogy of Morality

Essay 2, Section 20
On the Genealogy of Morality (1887)

God , Feeling

“We "conserve" nothing; neither do we want to return to any past periods; we are not by any means "liberal"; we do not work for "progress"; we do not need to plug up our ears against the sirens who in the market place sing of the future: their song about "equal rights," "a free society," "no more masters and no servants" has no allure for us.”

Friedrich Nietzsche

The Gay Science (1882)

Singing , Past , Future

“A philosophical frame of mind. Generally we strive to acquire one emotional stance, one viewpoint for all life situations and events: we usually call that being of a philosophical frame of mind. But rather than making oneself uniform, we may find greater value for the enrichment of knowledge by listening to the soft voice of different life situations; each brings its own views with it. Thus we acknowledge and share the life and nature of many by not treating ourselves like rigid, invariable, single individuals.”

Friedrich Nietzsche book Human, All Too Human

Section IX, "Man Alone with Himself" / aphorism 618
Human, All Too Human (1878), Helen Zimmern translation

Life , Nature , Knowledge

“One may certainly admire man as a mighty genius of construction, who succeeds in piling an infinitely complicated dome of concepts upon an unstable foundation, and, as it were, on running water. Of course, in order to be supported by such a foundation, his construction must be like one constructed of spiders' webs: delicate enough to be carried along by the waves, strong enough not to be blown apart by every wind.”

Friedrich Nietzsche

On Truth and Lie in an Extra-Moral Sense (1873)

Support , Strong , Water

“O, what nowadays does science not conceal! How much, at least, it is meant to conceal!”

Friedrich Nietzsche book On the Genealogy of Morality

Essay 3, Aphorism 23
On the Genealogy of Morality (1887)

Science

“The beautiful exists just as little as the true. In every case it is a question of the conditions of preservation of a certain type of man: thus the herd-man will experience the value feeling of the true in different things than will the overman.”

Friedrich Nietzsche book The Will to Power

Sec. 804 (Notebook W II 2. Fall 1887, KGW VIII, 2.220-1, KSA 12.554-5)
The Will to Power (1888)

Beauty , Feeling , Question

“It says nothing against the ripeness of a spirit that it has a few worms.”

Friedrich Nietzsche book Human, All Too Human

II.353
Human, All Too Human (1878)

“Mystical explanations are considered deep; the truth is, they are not even shallow.”

Friedrich Nietzsche

Sec. 126; variant translation: Mystical explanations are thought to be deep; the truth is that they are not even shallow.
The Gay Science (1882)

Truth

“He who is punished is never he who performed the deed. He is always the scapegoat.”

Friedrich Nietzsche

252
Daybreak — Thoughts on the Prejudices of Morality (1881)

“Dionysus:
Be clever, Ariadne! …
You have little ears; you have my ears:
Put a clever word in them! —
Must one not first hate oneself, in order to love oneself? …
I am your labyrinth …”

Friedrich Nietzsche book Dionysian-Dithyrambs

Dionysian-Dithyrambs (1888)

Love , Hate

“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.”

Friedrich Nietzsche

Sec. 9
The Gay Science (1882)

God , Distant

“Everything good, fine or great they do is first of all an argument against the skeptic inside them.”

Friedrich Nietzsche

Sec. 284
The Gay Science (1882)

“We are responsible to ourselves for our own existence; consequently we want to be the true helmsman of this existence and refuse to allow our existence to resemble a mindless act of chance.”

Friedrich Nietzsche Untimely Meditations

Wir haben uns über unser Dasein vor uns selbst zu verantworten; folglich wollen wir auch die wirklichen Steuermänner dieses Daseins abgeben und nicht zulassen, daß unsre Existenz einer gedankenlosen Zufälligkeit gleiche.
“Schopenhauer as educator,” § 3.1, R. Hollingdale, trans. (1983), p. 128
Untimely Meditations (1876)

Chance

“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."”

Friedrich Nietzsche

Sec. 58
The Gay Science (1882)

Forgetting

“… the republic of creative minds: each giant calling to his brother through the desolate intervals of time. And undisturbed by the wanton noises of the dwarfs that creep past beneath them, their high spirit-converse continues.”

Friedrich Nietzsche book Philosophy in the Tragic Age of the Greeks

Source: Philosophy in the Tragic Age of the Greeks (posthumous), p. 32

Time , Past

“Science rushes headlong, without selectivity, without “taste,” at whatever is knowable, in the blind desire to know all at any cost. Philosophical thinking, on the other hand, is ever on the scent of those things which are most worth knowing, the great and the important insights.”

Friedrich Nietzsche book Philosophy in the Tragic Age of the Greeks

Source: Philosophy in the Tragic Age of the Greeks (posthumous), p. 43

Thinking , Science