Friedrich Nietzsche Quotes: 653 Quotes on Love, Friendship, and the Intricacies of Human Relationships

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

“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

“Whom do I hate most among the rabble of today? The socialist rabble, the chandala apostles, who undermine the instinct, the pleasure, the worker’s sense of satisfaction with his small existence–who make him envious, who teach him revenge. The source of wrong is never unequal rights but the claim of “equal” rights.”

Friedrich Nietzsche book The Antichrist

Sec. 57
The Antichrist (1888)

Hate , Pleasure , Revenge , Sense

“…aesthetic Socratism, the chief law of which is, more or less: "to be beautiful everything must first be intelligible" — a parallel to the Socratic dictum: "only the one who knows is virtuous."”

Friedrich Nietzsche book The Birth of Tragedy

...aesthetischen Sokratismus...dessen oberstes Gesetz ungefähr so lautet: "alles muss verständig sein, um schön zu sein"; als Parallelsatz zu dem sokratischen "nur der Wissende ist tugendhaft."
Source: The Birth of Tragedy (1872), p. 62

Law , Beauty , Intelligence

“Socialism itself can hope to exist only for brief periods here and there, and then only through the exercise of the extremest terrorism. For this reason it is secretly preparing itself for rule through fear and is driving the word 'justice' into the heads of the half-educated masses like a nail so as to rob them of their reason… and to create in them a good conscience for the evil game they are to play.”

Friedrich Nietzsche book Human, All Too Human

Cambridge University Press, 1996, pp. 173-174
Human, All Too Human (1878)

Education , Fear , Justice , Hope

“Philological considerations have slowly but surely taken the place of profound explorations of eternal problems. The question becomes: What did this or that philosopher think or not think? And is this or that text rightly ascribed to him or not? And even: Is this variant of a classical text preferable to that other? Students in university seminars today are encouraged to occupy themselves with such emasculated inquiries. As a result, of course, philosophy itself is banished from the university altogether.”

Friedrich Nietzsche

So ist langsam an Stelle einer tiefsinnigen Ausdeutung der ewig gleichen Probleme ein historisches, ja selbst ein philologisches Abwägen und Fragen getreten: was der und jener Philosoph gedacht habe oder nicht, oder ob die und jene Schrift ihm mit Recht zuzuschreiben sei oder gar ob diese oder jene Lesart den Vorzug verdiene. Zu einem derartigen neutralen Sichbefassen mit Philosophie werden jetzt unsere Studenten in den philosophischen Seminarien unserer Universitäten angereizt: weshalb ich mich längst gewöhnt habe, eine solche Wissenschaft als Abzweigung der Philologie zu betrachten und ihre Vertreter danach abzuschätzen, ob sie gute Philologen sind oder nicht. Demnach ist nun freilich die Philosophie selbst von der Universität verbannt: womit unsre erste Frage nach dem Bildungswert der Universitäten beantwortet ist.
Anti-Education (1872)

Question , Problem , Thinking , Universe

“The objective of all human arrangements is through distracting one’s thoughts to cease to be aware of life.”

Friedrich Nietzsche Untimely Meditations

trans. Hollingdale (1983), “Schopenhauer as educator,” p. 154
Untimely Meditations (1876)

Life

“Could one count such dilettantes and old spinsters as that mawkish apostle of virginity, Mainländer, as a genuine German? In the last analysis he probably was a Jew (all Jews become mawkish when they moralize).”

Friedrich Nietzsche

Sec. 357
The Gay Science (1882)

“Attributed across social media to TSZ. Is actually quoted in TSZ, Penguin Classics, Reg Hollingdale translation, in the introduction pg 12. Attributed to 'posthumously produced notes' [Nachlass? ] Hollingdale continues.' In a man who thinks like this, the dichotomy between thinking and feeling, intellect and passion, has really disappeared. He feels his thoughts. He can fall in love with an idea. An idea can make him ill.”

Friedrich Nietzsche

Disputed

Love , Feeling , Quotes , Idea

“We have seen how it is originally language which works on the construction of concepts, a labor taken over in later ages by science. Just as the bee simultaneously constructs cells and fills them with honey, so science works unceasingly on this great columbarium of concepts, the graveyard of perceptions.”

Friedrich Nietzsche

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

Age , Bee , Science

“There still shines the most important nuance by virtue of which the noble felt themselves to be men of a higher rank. They designate themselves simply by their superiority in power (as "the powerful," "the masters," "the commanders") or by the most clearly visible signs of this superiority, for example, as "the rich," "the possessors"”

Friedrich Nietzsche book On the Genealogy of Morality

this is the meaning of 'Arya,' and of corresponding words in Iranian and Slavic
Essay 1, Section 5
On the Genealogy of Morality (1887)

Men

“When one gives up Christian belief one thereby deprives oneself of the right to Christian morality. For the latter is absolutely not self-evident: one must make this point clear again and again, in spite of English shallowpates.”

Friedrich Nietzsche book Twilight of the Idols

Expeditions of an Untimely Man §5
Twilight of the Idols (1888)

“The world is poor for him who has never been sick enough for this 'voluptuousness of hell':”

Friedrich Nietzsche book Ecce homo

"Why I am Destiny", 6. Trans. R. J. Hollingdale
Ecce Homo (1888)

World , Hell

“It is the misfortune of active men that their activity is almost always a bit irrational. For example, one must not inquire of the money-gathering banker what the purpose for his restless activity is: it is irrational. Active people roll like a stone, conforming to the stupidity of mechanics.”

Friedrich Nietzsche book Human, All Too Human

Human, All Too Human (1878)

Money , People , Men , Stupidity

“I am a pure-blooded Polish nobleman, without a single drop of bad blood, certainly not German blood. When I look for my diametric opposite, an immeasurably shabby instinct, I always think of my mother and sister, — it would blaspheme my divinity to think I am related to this sort of canaille.”

Friedrich Nietzsche book Ecce homo

The way my mother and sister treat me to this very day is a source of unspeakable horror; a real time bomb is at work here, which can tell with unerring certainty the exact moment I can be hurt — in my highest moments, … because at that point I do not have the strength to resist poison worms …
"Why I Am So Wise", 3, as translated in The Anti-Christ, Ecce Homo, Twilight of the Idols, and Other Writings (2005) edited by Aaron Ridley and Judith Norman, p. 77
Ecce Homo (1888)

Bad luck , Thinking , Sister , Relation ships

“Now, when suffering is always the first of the arguments marshalled against life, as its most questionable feature, it is salutary to remember the times when people made the opposite assessment, because they could not do without making people suffer and saw first-rate magic in it, a veritable seductive lure to life. Perhaps pain - I say this to comfort the squeamish - did not hurt as much then as it does now; at least, a doctor would be justified in assuming this, if he had treated a Negro (taken as a representative for primeval man) for serious internal inflammations which would drive the European with the stoutest constitution to distraction; - they do not do that to Negroes.”

Friedrich Nietzsche book On the Genealogy of Morality

The curve of human capacity for pain actually does seem to sink dramatically and almost precipitously beyond the first ten thousand or ten million of the cultural elite; and for myself, I do not doubt that in comparison with one night of pain endured by a single, hysterical blue stocking, the total suffering of all the animals who have been interrogated by the knife in scientific research is as nothing.
Essay 2, Section 7
On the Genealogy of Morality (1887)

Hurt , Pain , Time , Question

“In his heart every man knows quite well that, being unique, he will be in the world only once and that no imaginable chance will for a second time gather together into a unity so strangely variegated an assortment as he is: he knows it but he hides it like a bad conscience—why? From fear of his neighbor, who demands conventionality and cloaks himself with it. But what is it that constrains the individual to fear his neighbor, to think and act like a member of a herd, and to have no joy in himself? Modesty, perhaps, in a few rare cases. With the great majority it is indolence, inertia. … Men are even lazier than they are timid, and fear most of all the inconveniences with which unconditional honesty and nakedness would burden them. Artists alone hate this sluggish promenading in borrowed fashions and appropriated opinions and they reveal everyone’s secret bad conscience, the law that every man is a unique miracle.”

Friedrich Nietzsche Untimely Meditations

“Schopenhauer as educator” ("Schopenhauer als Erzieher"), § 3.1, R. Hollingdale, trans. (1983), p. 127
Untimely Meditations (1876)

Chance , Time , Hate , Law

“May I really say it! All truths are bloody truths to me—take a look at my previous writings.”

Friedrich Nietzsche

Notebooks (Summer 1880) 4[271]

Truth

“Most men are too concerned with themselves to be malicious.”

Friedrich Nietzsche book Human, All Too Human

I.85
Human, All Too Human (1878)

Men

“The most noble kind of beauty is that which does not carry us away suddenly, whose attacks are not violent or intoxicating (this kind easily awakens disgust), but rather the kind of beauty which infiltrates slowly, which we carry along with us almost unnoticed, and meet up with again in dreams; finally, after it has for a long time lain modestly in our heart, it takes complete possession of us, filling our eyes with tears, our hearts with longing.”

Friedrich Nietzsche

“New Domestic Animals. I want to have my lion and my eagle about me, that I may always have hints and premonitions concerning the amount of my strength or weakness. Must I look down on them today, and be afraid of them? And will the hour come once more when they will look up to me, and tremble?”

Friedrich Nietzsche book The Gay Science

Sec. 314
The Gay Science (1882)

Animals

“Even the most beautiful scenery is no longer assured of our love after we have lived in it for three months, and some distant coast attracts our avarice: possessions are generally diminished by possession…”

Friedrich Nietzsche book The Gay Science

The Gay Science (1882), Sec. 14

Love , Distant , Making love , Beauty

“Rejoicing in our joy, not suffering over our suffering, makes someone a friend.”

Friedrich Nietzsche

Joy , Suffering

“Does wisdom perhaps appear on the earth as a raven which is inspired by the smell of carrion?”

Friedrich Nietzsche

Appearance , Wisdom

“You need chaos in your soul to give birth to a dancing star.”

Friedrich Nietzsche

Soul , Dance , Star , Birth

“The 'kingdom of God' is not something one waits for; it has no yesterday or tomorrow, it does not come 'in a thousand years”

Friedrich Nietzsche book The Antichrist

it is an experience within a heart; it is everywhere, it is nowhere...
Sec. 34
The Antichrist (1888)

God , Waiting

“But the worst enemy you can meet will always be yourself; you ambush yourself in caverns and forests.”

Friedrich Nietzsche book Thus Spoke Zarathustra

Source: Thus Spoke Zarathustra. The Way of the Creator.
Context: But the worst enemy you can meet will always be yourself; you ambush yourself in caverns and forests. You solitary one, you go the way to yourself! And your way leads you past yourself and your seven devils! You will be a heretic to yourself, and a sorcerer and a soothsayer, and a fool, and a doubter, and a reprobate, and a villain. You must be ready to burn yourself in your own flame; how could you rise anew if you have not first become ashes!

“I have somehow something like "influence" ... In the Anti-Semitic Correspondence ... my name is mentioned in almost every issue. Zarathustra ... has charmed the anti-Semites; there is a special anti-Semitic interpretation of it that made me laugh very much.”

Friedrich Nietzsche

As quoted in "Idea of Anti-Semitism Filled Nietzsche With Ire and Melancholy" in The New York Times (19 December 1987) http://query.nytimes.com/gst/fullpage.html?res=9B0DE0D91E3EF93AA25751C1A961948260

“Not every end is the goal. The end of a melody is not its goal, and yet if a melody has not reached its end, it has not reached its goal.”

Friedrich Nietzsche

Variant: The end of a melody is not its goal: but nonetheless, had the melody not reached its end it would not have reached its goal either. A parable.