Friedrich Nietzsche: Trending quotes

Friedrich Nietzsche trending quotes. Read the latest quotes in collection
Friedrich Nietzsche: 1310 quotes832 likes

“Mathematics would certainly have not come into existence if one had known from the beginning that there was in nature no exactly straight line, no actual circle, no absolute magnitude.”

Friedrich Nietzsche

As quoted in The Puzzle Instinct : The Meaning of Puzzles in Human Life‎ (2004) by Marcel Danesi, p. 71 from Human All-Too-Human

“Christianity is a metaphysics of the hangman…”

Friedrich Nietzsche book Twilight of the Idols

Das Christenthum ist eine Metaphysik des Henkers...
The Four Great Errors, Section 7
Twilight of the Idols (1888)

“One must have a good memory to be able to keep the promises one makes.”

Friedrich Nietzsche book Human, All Too Human

I.59
Human, All Too Human (1878)

“You sacrifice yourself, your wealth torments you,
You give away yourself,
You don't take care of yourself, you don't love yourself;
Great agony always compels you,
The agony of an overflowing barn, an overabundant heart;
But no one thanks you any longer …”

Friedrich Nietzsche book Dionysian-Dithyrambs

Dionysian-Dithyrambs (1888)

“Thoughts in a poem. The poet presents his thoughts festively, on the carriage of rhythm: usually because they could not walk.”

Friedrich Nietzsche book Human, All Too Human

1.189
Human, All Too Human (1878)

“How far I was then from all that resignationism!”

Friedrich Nietzsche book The Birth of Tragedy

Oh wie ferne war mir damals gerade dieser ganze Resignationismus!
"Attempt at a Self-criticism", p. 10
The Birth of Tragedy (1872)

“The modern scientific counterpart to belief in God is the belief in the universe as an organism: this disgusts me. This is to make what is quite rare and extremely derivative, the organic, which we perceive only on the surface of the earth, into something essential, universal, and eternal! This is still an anthropomorphizing of nature!”

Friedrich Nietzsche

KSA 9,11 [201]

“Whoever has overthrown an existing law of custom has hitherto always first been accounted a bad man: but when, as did happen, the law could not afterwards be reinstated and this fact was accepted, the predicate gradually changed: - history treats almost exclusively of these bad men who subsequently became good men!”

Friedrich Nietzsche

20
Daybreak — Thoughts on the Prejudices of Morality (1881)

“Where there have been powerful governments, societies, religions, public opinions, in short wherever there has been tyranny, there the solitary philosopher has been hated; for philosophy offers an asylum to a man into which no tyranny can force it way, the inward cave, the labyrinth of the heart.”

Friedrich Nietzsche Untimely Meditations

trans. Hollingdale, “Schopenhauer as educator,” § 3.3, p. 139
Untimely Meditations (1876)

“I now myself live, in every detail, striving for wisdom, while I formerly merely worshipped and idolized the wise.”

Friedrich Nietzsche

Letter to Mathilde Mayer, July 16, 1878, cited in Karl Jaspers, Nietzsche (Baltimore: 1997), p. 46

“If each us had a different kind of sense perception — if we could only perceive things now as a bird, now as a worm, now as a plant, or if one of us saw a stimulus as red, another as blue, while a third even heard the same stimulus as a sound — then no one would speak of such a regularity of nature, rather, nature would be grasped only as a creation which is subjective in the highest degree. After all, what is a law of nature as such for us? We are not acquainted with it in itself, but only with its effects, which means in its relation to other laws of nature — which, in turn, are known to us only as sums of relations. Therefore all these relations always refer again to others and are thoroughly incomprehensible to us in their essence.”

Friedrich Nietzsche

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

“Do you believe then that the sciences would have arisen and grown up if the sorcerers, alchemists, astrologers and witches had not been their forerunners; those who, with their promisings and foreshadowings, had first to create a thirst, a hunger, and a taste for hidden and forbidden powers?”

Friedrich Nietzsche

Variant translation: Do you believe then that the sciences would ever have arisen and become great if there had not beforehand been magicians, alchemists, astrologers and wizards, who thirsted and hungered after abscondite and forbidden powers?
Sec. 300
The Gay Science (1882)

“Our own opinions. The first opinion that occurs to us when we are suddenly asked about a matter is usually not our own, but only the customary one, appropriate to our caste, position, or parentage; our own opinions seldom swim near the surface.”

Friedrich Nietzsche book Human, All Too Human

Section IX, "Man Alone with Himself" / aphorism 571
Human, All Too Human (1878), Helen Zimmern translation

“Haste is universal because everyone is in flight from himself.”

Friedrich Nietzsche Untimely Meditations

trans. Hollingdale (1983), “Schopenhauer as educator,” p. 158
Untimely Meditations (1876)

“Preparatory Men. — I welcome all signs that a more virile, warlike age is about to begin, which will restore honor to courage above all! For this age shall prepare the way for one yet higher, and it shall gather the strength that this higher age will require some day — the age that will carry heroism into the search for knowledge and that will wage wars for the sake of ideas and their consequences.”

Friedrich Nietzsche

The Gay Science (1882)

“The only thing of interest in a refuted system is the personal element. It alone is what is forever irrefutable.”

Friedrich Nietzsche book Philosophy in the Tragic Age of the Greeks

Source: Philosophy in the Tragic Age of the Greeks (posthumous), p. 25

“Unhappiness. The distinction that lies in being unhappy is so great that when someone says, "But how happy you must be!" we usually protest.”

Friedrich Nietzsche book Human, All Too Human

Section IX, "Man Alone with Himself" / aphorism 534
Human, All Too Human (1878), Helen Zimmern translation

“Freedom means that the manly instincts which delight in war and victory dominate over other instincts, for example, over those of "pleasure." The human being who has become free — and how much more the spirit who has become free — spits on the contemptible type of well-being dreamed of by shopkeepers, Christians, cows, females, Englishmen, and other democrats. The free man is a warrior. —”

Friedrich Nietzsche book Twilight of the Idols

Twilight of the Idols (1888)

“[I am dynamite]I know my fate. One day my name will be associated with the memory of something tremendous — a crisis without equal on earth, the most profound collision of conscience, a decision that was conjured up against everything that had been believed, demanded, hallowed so far. I am no man, I am dynamite.”

Friedrich Nietzsche book Ecce homo

"Why I am a Destiny", 1
Ecce Homo (1888)

“Art furnishes us with eyes and hands and above all the good conscience to be able to turn ourselves into such a phenomenon.”

Friedrich Nietzsche

Sec. 107
The Gay Science (1882)