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

Immerse yourself in the profound and thought-provoking words of Friedrich Nietzsche. Explore his most famous quotes on love, friendship, and the intricacies of human relationships. Discover the wisdom and insight that continue to resonate with readers around the world.

Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche was a German philosopher whose work has had a profound influence on contemporary philosophy. He began his career as a classical philologist before turning to philosophy and became the youngest person to hold the Chair of Classical Philology at the University of Basel. However, he resigned due to health problems and spent the remainder of his life under the care of his mother and sister. Nietzsche's work spanned various disciplines such as philosophy, poetry, cultural criticism, and fiction. His philosophy included a radical critique of truth, a genealogical critique of religion and morality, and an affirmation of life in response to nihilism.

Nietzsche also developed influential concepts such as the Übermensch and eternal return. After his death, his sister edited his manuscripts to fit her own ideology, associating Nietzsche's work with fascism and Nazism. However, scholars later defended Nietzsche against this interpretation. Despite this controversy, Nietzsche's ideas have had a profound impact on 20th- and early 21st-century thinkers in philosophy, art, literature, politics, and popular culture.

✵ 15. October 1844 – 25. August 1900  •  Other names Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche
Friedrich Nietzsche photo
Friedrich Nietzsche: 655 quotes831 likes

Friedrich Nietzsche Quotes

“They're so cold, these scholars!
May lightning strike their food
so that their mouths learn how
to eat fire!”

Friedrich Nietzsche

“There is a certain right by which we many deprive a man of life, but none by which we may deprive him of death; this is mere cruelty.”

Friedrich Nietzsche book Human, All Too Human

Source: Human, All Too Human

“Many a man fails to become a thinker only because his memory is too good.”

Friedrich Nietzsche book Human, All Too Human

Mancher wird nur deshalb kein Denker, weil sein Gedächtnis zu gut ist.
II.122
Human, All Too Human (1878)

“There is no such thing as moral phenomena, but only a moral interpretation of phenomena”

Friedrich Nietzsche book Beyond Good and Evil

Source: Beyond Good and Evil

“Glance into the world just as though time were gone: and everything crooked will become straight to you.”

Friedrich Nietzsche

Source: Sämtliche Werke: Kritische Studienausgabe in 15 Einzelbänden

“Woman was God’s second mistake.”

Friedrich Nietzsche

“In the end we are always rewarded for our good will, our patience, fair-mindedness, and gentleness with what is strange.”

Friedrich Nietzsche

Source: The Gay Science

“What destroys a man more quickly than to work, think and feel without inner necessity, without any deep personal desire, without pleasure - as a mere automaton of duty?”

Friedrich Nietzsche

Source: The Anti-Christ/Ecce Homo/Twilight of the Idols/Other Writings

“I hate you most because you attract, but are not strong enough to pull me to you.”

Friedrich Nietzsche book Thus Spoke Zarathustra

Source: Thus Spoke Zarathustra

“Those you cannot teach to fly, teach to fall faster.”

Friedrich Nietzsche

“I want to learn more and more to see as beautiful what is necessary in things, then I shall be one of those who make things beautiful. Amor fati: let that be my love from henceforth!”

Friedrich Nietzsche book The Gay Science

Source: Gay Science

“But thus do I counsel you, my friends: distrust all in whom the impulse to punish is powerful!”

Friedrich Nietzsche

Variant: Distrust all in whom the impulse to punish is powerful.
Source: Thus Spake Zarathustra: A Book for All and None

“Whoever thought that he had understood something of me had merely construed something out of me, after his own image.”

Friedrich Nietzsche

“Untroubled, scornful, outrageous - that is how wisdom wants us to be: she is a woman and never loves anyone but a warrior.”

Friedrich Nietzsche book Thus Spoke Zarathustra

Source: Thus Spoke Zarathustra

“One has to take a somewhat bold and dangerous line with this existence: especially as, whatever happens, we are bound to lose it.”

Friedrich Nietzsche Untimely Meditations

Source: Untimely Meditations

“To recognize untruth as a condition of life--that certainly means resisting accustomed value feelings in a dangerous way; and a philosophy that risks this would by that token alone place itself beyond good and evil.”

Friedrich Nietzsche book Beyond Good and Evil

Source: Beyond Good and Evil

“Every attainment, every step forward in knowledge, follows from courage, from hardness against oneself, from cleanliness in relation to oneself.”

Friedrich Nietzsche

“Convictions are prisons.”

Friedrich Nietzsche

The Birth of Tragedy/Seventy-five Aphorisms/The Anti-Christ

“no one talks more passionately about his rights than he who in the depths of his soul doubts whether he has any”

Friedrich Nietzsche book Human, All Too Human

I.597
Human, All Too Human (1878)
Context: No one talks more passionately about his rights than he who in the depths of his soul doubts whether he has any. By enlisting passion on his side he wants to stifle his reason and its doubts: thus he will acquire a good conscience and with it success among his fellow men.

“Some are born posthumously.”

Friedrich Nietzsche

Einige werden posthum geboren.
Foreword
The Antichrist (1888)
Source: The Anti-Christ

“As soon as a religion comes to dominate it has as its opponents all those who would have been its first disciples.”

Friedrich Nietzsche book Human, All Too Human

Source: Human, All Too Human

“.— A person must have one or the other. Either a cheerful disposition by nature, or a disposition made cheerful by art and knowledge.”

Friedrich Nietzsche book Human, All Too Human

Source: Human, All Too Human

“I am no man, I am dynamite.”

Friedrich Nietzsche book Ecce homo

Source: Ecce Homo

“There are terrible people who, instead of solving a problem, bungle it and make it more difficult for all who come after. Whoever can't hit the nail on the head should, please, not hit at all.”

Friedrich Nietzsche

“How much truth can a spirit bear, how much truth can a spirit dare?… that became for me more and more the real measure of value.”

Friedrich Nietzsche

“No artist tolerates reality.”

Friedrich Nietzsche

“Words are but symbols for the relations of things to one another and to us; nowhere do they touch upon absolute truth…. Through words and concepts we shall never reach beyond the wall off relations, to some sort of fabulous primal ground of things.”

Friedrich Nietzsche book Philosophy in the Tragic Age of the Greeks

Source: Philosophy in the Tragic Age of the Greeks

“I fear you close by; I love you far away.”

Friedrich Nietzsche book Thus Spoke Zarathustra

Source: Thus Spoke Zarathustra

“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

The Gay Science (1882)

“I tell you: one must still have chaos in one, to give birth to a dancing star. I tell you: you have still chaos in you.”

Friedrich Nietzsche book Thus Spoke Zarathustra

Variant: One must still have chaos in oneself to be able to give birth to a dancing star.
Source: Thus Spoke Zarathustra

“Without cruelty there is no festival: thus the longest and most ancient part of human history teaches — and in punishment there is so much that is festive!”

Friedrich Nietzsche book On the Genealogy of Morality

Essay 2, Section 6
On the Genealogy of Morality (1887)
Source: On the Genealogy of Morals/Ecce Homo

“Christianity gave Eros poison to drink; he did not die of it, certainly, but degenerated to Vice.”

Friedrich Nietzsche book Beyond Good and Evil

Source: Beyond Good and Evil

“So long as men praise you, you can only be sure that you are not yet on your own true path but on someone else's.”

Friedrich Nietzsche

“I love those who do not know how to live, except by going under, for they are those who cross over.”

Friedrich Nietzsche book Thus Spoke Zarathustra

Source: Thus Spoke Zarathustra

“The desire for a strong faith is not the proof of a strong faith, rather the opposite. If one has it one may permit oneself the beautiful luxury of skepticism: one is secure enough, fixed enough for it.”

Friedrich Nietzsche book Twilight of the Idols

Source: Twilight of the Idols

“For believe me! — the secret for harvesting from existence the greatest fruitfulness and the greatest enjoyment is: to live dangerously!”

Friedrich Nietzsche

Sec. 283; Variant translation: For believe me: the secret for harvesting from existence the greatest fruitfulness and greatest enjoyment is — to live dangerously.
The Gay Science (1882)
Context: For believe me! — the secret for harvesting from existence the greatest fruitfulness and the greatest enjoyment is: to live dangerously! Build your cities on the slopes of Vesuvius! Send your ships into uncharted seas! Live at war with your peers and yourselves! Be robbers and conquerors as long as you cannot be rulers and possessors, you seekers of knowledge! Soon the age will be past when you could be content to live hidden in forests like shy deer! At long last the search for knowledge will reach out for its due: — it will want to rule and possess, and you with it!