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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

“He who speaks a bit of a foreign language has more delight in it than he who speaks it well; pleasure goes along with superficial knowledge.”

Friedrich Nietzsche book Human, All Too Human

Source: Human, All Too Human

“The higher man is distinguished from the lower by his fearlessness and his readiness to challenge misfortune.”

Friedrich Nietzsche book The Will to Power

Source: The Will to Power

“Try for once to justify the meaning of your existence as it were a posteriori by setting yourself an aim, a goal… an exalted and noble 'to this end.' Perish in pursuit of this and only this”

Friedrich Nietzsche Untimely Meditations

Source: Untimely Meditations

“I and me are always too deeply in conversation: how could I endure it,
if there were not a friend?
The friend of the hermit is always the third one: the third one is the float which prevents the conversation of the two from sinking into the depth.”

Friedrich Nietzsche book Thus Spoke Zarathustra

Source: Thus Spoke Zarathustra

“Love of one is a piece of barbarism: for it is practised at the expense of all others. Love of God likewise.”

Friedrich Nietzsche book Beyond Good and Evil

Source: Beyond Good and Evil

“Your educators can only be your liberators.”

Friedrich Nietzsche Untimely Meditations

Source: Untimely Meditations

“For truth to tell, dancing in all its forms cannot be excluded from the curriculum of all noble education: dancing with the feet, with ideas, with words, and, need I add that one must also be able to dance with pen- that one must learn how to write”

Friedrich Nietzsche book Twilight of the Idols

Variant: Dancing in all its forms cannot be excluded from the curriculum of all noble education; dancing with the feet, with ideas, with words, and, need I add that one must also be able to dance with the pen?
Source: Twilight of the Idols

“And to me also, who appreciate life, the butterflies, and soap-bubbles, and whatever is like them amongst us, seem most to enjoy happiness.”

Friedrich Nietzsche book Thus Spoke Zarathustra

Source: Thus Spoke Zarathustra

“the lie is a condition of life.”

Friedrich Nietzsche

“Weariness that wants to reach the ultimate with one leap, with one fatal leap, a poor ignorant weariness that does not want to want any more: this created all gods and afterworlds.”

Friedrich Nietzsche book Thus Spoke Zarathustra

Source: Thus Spoke Zarathustra

“What is it: is man only a blunder of God, or God only a blunder of man?”

Friedrich Nietzsche book Twilight of the Idols

Wie? ist der Mensch nur ein Fehlgriff Gottes? Oder Gott nur ein Fehlgriff des Menschen?
Maxims and Arrows, 7
Variant: Which? Is man one of God's blunders or is God one of man's blunders?
Source: Twilight of the Idols (1888)

“Good writers have two things in common: they prefer to be understood rather than admired; and they do not write for knowing and over-acute readers.”

Friedrich Nietzsche

“Ten truths must you find during the day; otherwise will you seek truth during the night, and your soul will have been hungry.”

Friedrich Nietzsche book Thus Spoke Zarathustra

Source: Thus Spoke Zarathustra

“When we have to change our mind about a person, we hold the inconvenience he causes us very much against him.”

Friedrich Nietzsche book Beyond Good and Evil

Source: Beyond Good and Evil

“It is a terrible thought, to contemplate that an immense number of mediocre thinkers are occupied with really influential matters.”

Friedrich Nietzsche

“Those moralists, on the other hand, who, following in the footsteps of Socrates, offer the individual a morality of self-control and temperance as a means to his own advantage, as his personal key to happiness, are the exceptions.”

Friedrich Nietzsche

“How lovely it is that there are words and sounds. Are not words and sounds rainbows and illusive bridges between things which are eternally apart?”

Friedrich Nietzsche book Thus Spoke Zarathustra

Source: Thus Spoke Zarathustra

“To live alone one must be an animal or a god - says Aristotle. There is yet a third case: one must be both - a philosopher.”

Friedrich Nietzsche book Twilight of the Idols

Maxims and Arrows, 3
Twilight of the Idols (1888)

“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.

“One has to know the size of one's stomach.”

Friedrich Nietzsche book Ecce homo

Source: Ecce Homo

“The complete irresponsibility of man for his actions and his nature is the bitterest drop which he who understands must swallow.”

Friedrich Nietzsche book Human, All Too Human

Source: Human, All Too Human

“No one can draw more out of things, books included, than he already knows. A man has no ears for that to which experience has given him no access.”

Friedrich Nietzsche

“To him who feels himself preordained to contemplation and not to belief, all believers are too noisy and obtrusive; he guards against them.”

Friedrich Nietzsche book Beyond Good and Evil

Source: Beyond Good and Evil

“The most common sort of lie is that by which a man deceives himself: the deception of others is a relatively rare offense.”

Friedrich Nietzsche

Source: The Anti-Christ

“That for which we find words is something already dead in our hearts. There is always a kind of contempt in the act of speaking.”

Friedrich Nietzsche

“When man does not have firm, calm lines on the horizon of his life- mountain and forest lines, as it were- then a man's innermost will becomes agitated, preoccupied, and wistful.”

Friedrich Nietzsche

“We set no special value on the possession of a virtue until we percieve that it is entirely lacking in our adversary.”

Friedrich Nietzsche book Human, All Too Human

Variant: We do not place especial value on the possession of a virtue until we notice its total absence in our opponent.
Source: Human, All Too Human

“In conversation we are sometimes confused by the tone of our own voice, and mislead to make assertions that do not at all correspond to our opinions.”

Friedrich Nietzsche book Human, All Too Human

Source: Human, All Too Human

“Companions the creator seeks, not corpses, not herds and believers. Fellow creators the creator seeks -- those who write new values on new tablets. Companions the creator seeks, and fellow harvesters; for everything about him is ripe for the harvest.”

Friedrich Nietzsche

“Of what is great one must either be silent or speak with greatness. With greatness--that means cynically and with innocence.”

Friedrich Nietzsche book The Will to Power

Source: The Will to Power

“Behind a remarkable scholar we not infrequently find an average human being, and behind an average artist we often find a very remarkable human being.”

Friedrich Nietzsche

“The person who fights monsters should make sure that in the process, he does not become a monster himself. Because when you stare down at an abyss, the abyss stares back at you.”

Friedrich Nietzsche

Variant: Whoever fights monsters should see to it that in the process he does not become a monster. And if you gaze long enough into an abyss, the abyss will gaze back into you.

“And as long as you are in any way ashamed before yourself, you do not yet belong with us.”

Friedrich Nietzsche

Source: The Gay Science

“It was a subtle refinement of God to learn Greek when he wished to write a book – and that he did not learn it better.”

Friedrich Nietzsche

“I fear that, with our current veneration for the natural and the real, we have arrived at the opposite pole to all idealism, and have landed in the region of the waxworks.”

Friedrich Nietzsche book The Birth of Tragedy

Source: The Birth of Tragedy

“I go into solitude so as not to drink out of everybody's cistern. When I am among the many I live as the many do, and I do not think I really think. After a time it always seems as if they want to banish my self from myself and rob me of my soul.”

Friedrich Nietzsche

“The consequences of our actions take hold of us, quite indifferent to our claim that meanwhile we have 'improved.”

Friedrich Nietzsche book Beyond Good and Evil

Source: Beyond Good and Evil

“it is only as anthat existence and the world are eternally.”

Friedrich Nietzsche

Source: The Birth of Tragedy/The Case of Wagner

“The final reward of the dead - to die no more”

Friedrich Nietzsche

“The wisest man would be the one richest in contradictions, who has, as it were, antennae for all types of men---as well as his great moments of grand harmony---a rare accident even in us! A sort of planetary motion”

Friedrich Nietzsche book The Will to Power

Source: The Will to Power

“It may be that until now there has been no more potent means for beautifying man himself than piety: it can turn man into so much art, surface, play of colors, graciousness that his sight no longer makes one suffer.”

Friedrich Nietzsche book Beyond Good and Evil

Source: Beyond Good and Evil

“i have never pondered over questions that are not questions.”

Friedrich Nietzsche

On the Genealogy of Morals/Ecce Homo