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

“Are you one who looks on? or lends a hand? - or who looks away, sidles off?… Third question for the conscience.”

Friedrich Nietzsche book Twilight of the Idols

Source: Twilight of the Idols

Question

“Art is not merely an imitation of the reality of nature, but in truth a metaphysical supplement to the reality of nature, placed alongside thereof for its conquest.”

Friedrich Nietzsche

Truth , Art , Nature , Reality

“And we should consider every day lost on which we have not danced at least once. And we should call every truth false which was not accompanied by at least one laugh”

Friedrich Nietzsche

Truth , Dance , Falseness

“You may lie with your mouth, but with the mouth you make as you do so you none the less tell the truth.”

Friedrich Nietzsche

Truth , Lie

“Every word is a prejudice.”

Friedrich Nietzsche

“Here the ways of men part: if you wish to strive for peace of soul and pleasure, then believe; if you wish to be a devotee of truth, then inquire.”

Friedrich Nietzsche book Twilight of the Idols

Letter to Elisabeth Nietzsche, Bonn, 1865-06-11. Quoted in Walter Kaufmann, The Faith of a Heretic (opening epigram).
Variant: Here the ways of men divide. If you wish to strive for peace of soul and happiness, then believe; if you wish to be a disciple of truth, then inquire.
Source: Twilight of the Idols

Men , Pleasure , Truth , Peace

“Human life is inexplicable, and still without meaning: a fool may decide its fate.”

Friedrich Nietzsche book Thus Spoke Zarathustra

Source: Thus Spoke Zarathustra

Life , Fate , Fools

“In reality, hope is the worst of all evils, because it prolongs man’s torments.”

Friedrich Nietzsche book Human, All Too Human

... die Hoffnung: sie ist in Wahrheit das übelste der Übel, weil sie die Qual der Menschen verlängert.
I.71
Variant: Hope in reality is the worst of all evils because it prolongs the torments of man.
Source: Human, All Too Human (1878)

Hope , Hope , Reality , Evil

“On the mountains of truth you can never climb in vain: either you will reach a point higher up today, or you will be training your powers so that you will be able to climb higher tomorrow.”

Friedrich Nietzsche

Truth , Mountain , Training

“Are you a slave? Then you cannot be a friend. Are you a tyrant? Then you cannot have friends.”

Friedrich Nietzsche book Thus Spoke Zarathustra

Source: Thus Spoke Zarathustra

“The very word "Christianity" is a misunderstanding — in truth, there was only one Christian, and he died on the cross.”

Friedrich Nietzsche book The Antichrist

This has commonly been paraphrased: The last Christian died on the cross.
Sec. 39
The Antichrist (1888)

Truth

“What strange, perplexing, questionable questions!”

Friedrich Nietzsche book Beyond Good and Evil

Beyond Good and Evil

Question

“O Solitude! You are my home, Solitude!”

Friedrich Nietzsche book Thus Spoke Zarathustra

Thus Spoke Zarathustra

Home , Solitude

“Let us face ourselves. We are Hyperboreans!”

Friedrich Nietzsche

“First principle: one must need to be strong — otherwise one will never become strong. — Those large hothouses [Treibhäuser] for the strong, for the strongest kind of human being that has ever been, the aristocratic commonwealths of the type of Rome or Venice, understood freedom exactly in the sense in which I understand the word freedom: as something one has and does not have, something one wants, something one conquers…”

Friedrich Nietzsche book Twilight of the Idols

Twilight of the Idols (1888)

Understanding , Sense , Freedom , Strong

“Do not forget, man, consumed by lust:
you—are the stone, the desert, are death …”

Friedrich Nietzsche book Dionysian-Dithyrambs

Dionysian-Dithyrambs (1888)

Death , Forgetting

“There exists no more repulsive and desolate creature in the world than the man who has evaded his genius and who now looks furtively to left and right, behind him and all about him. In the end such a man becomes impossible to get hold of, since he is wholly exterior, without kernel: a tattered, painted bag of clothes; a decked-out ghost that cannot inspire even fear and certainly not pity.”

Friedrich Nietzsche Untimely Meditations

Es gibt kein öderes und widrigeres Geschöpf in der Natur als den Menschen, welcher seinem Genius ausgewichen ist und nun nach rechts und nach links, nach rückwärts und überallhin schielt. Man darf einen solchen Menschen zuletzt gar nicht mehr angreifen, denn er ist ganz Außenseite ohne Kern, ein anbrüchiges, gemaltes, aufgebauschtes Gewand.
“Schopenhauer as educator,” § 3.1, R. Hollingdale, trans. (1983), p. 128
Untimely Meditations (1876)

World , Fear , Painting , Clothes

“Being silent is something one completely unlearns if, like him, one has been for so long a solitary mole - -”

Friedrich Nietzsche

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

“If a temple is to be erected, a temple must be destroyed.”

Friedrich Nietzsche book On the Genealogy of Morality

Essay 2, Section 24
On the Genealogy of Morality (1887)

“What follows, then? That one had better put on gloves before reading the New Testament. The presence of so much filth makes it very advisable. One would as little choose early Christians for companions as Polish Jews: not that one need seek out an objection to them — neither has a pleasant smell.”

Friedrich Nietzsche book The Antichrist

Sec. 46
The Antichrist (1888)

Reading

“One will rarely err if extreme actions be ascribed to vanity, ordinary actions to habit, and mean actions to fear.”

Friedrich Nietzsche book Human, All Too Human

I.74
Human, All Too Human (1878)

Fear

“The man who does not wish to belong to the mass needs only to cease taking himself easily; let him follow his conscience, which calls to him: “Be your self! All you are now doing, thinking, desiring, is not you yourself.””

Friedrich Nietzsche Untimely Meditations

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

Thinking

“I call Christianity the one great curse, the one great intrinsic depravity, the one great instinct for revenge for which no expedient is sufficiently poisonous, secret, subterranean, petty — I call it the one immortal blemish of mankind.”

Friedrich Nietzsche book The Antichrist

Sec. 62
The Antichrist (1888)

Secret , Revenge

“Meaning and morality of one's life come from within oneself. Healthy, strong individuals seek self-expansion by experimenting and by living dangerously. Life consists of an infinite number of possibilities, and the healthy person explores as many of them as possible. Religions that teach pity, self-contempt, humility, self-restraint and guilt are incorrect. The good life is ever-changing, challenging, devoid of regret, intense, creative, and risky.”

Friedrich Nietzsche

Attributed to Nietzsche on quotes sites and on social media, the original quotation is from An Introduction to the History of Psychology by B. R. Hergenhahn (2008, page 226) and is the author's summary of Nietzsche's ideas: "The meaning and morality of one's life come from within oneself. Healthy, strong individuals seek self-expansion by experimenting, by living dangerously. Life consists of an almost infinite number of possibilities, and the healthy person (the superman) explores as many of them as possible. Religions or philosophies that teach pity, humility, submissiveness, self-contempt, self-restraint, guilt, or a sense of community are simply incorrect. [...] For Nietzsche, the good life is ever-changing, challenging, devoid of regret, intense, creative, and risky."
Misattributed

Life , Religion , Strong , Change

“I keep having the same experience and keep resisting it every time. I do not want to believe it although it is palpable: the great majority of people lack an intellectual conscience. Indeed, it has often seemed to me as if anyone calling for an intellectual conscience were as lonely in the most densely populated cities as if he were in a desert. Everybody looks at you with strange eyes and goes right on handling his scales, calling this good and that evil. Nobody even blushes when you intimate that their weights are underweight; nor do people feel outraged; they merely laugh at your doubts. I mean: the great majority of people does not consider it contemptible to believe this or that and to live accordingly, without first having given themselves an account of the final and most certain reasons pro and con, and without even troubling themselves about such reasons afterward: the most gifted men and the noblest women still belong to this "great majority." But what is goodheartedness, refinement, or genius to me, when the person who has these virtues tolerates slack feelings in his faith and judgments and when he does not account the desire for certainty as his inmost craving and deepest distress--as that which separates the higher human beings from the lower.”

Friedrich Nietzsche

Sec. 2
The Gay Science (1882)

Women , Men , People , Faith

“Life and experience. If one notices how some individuals know how to treat their experiences (their insignificant everyday experiences) so that these become a plot of ground that bears fruit three times a year; while others (and how many of them!) are driven through the waves of the most exciting turns of fate, of the most varied currents of their time or nation, and yet always stay lightly on the surface, like cork: then one is finally tempted to divide mankind into a minority (minimality) of those people who know how to make much out of little and a majority of those who know how to make a little out of much; indeed, one meets those perverse wizards who, instead of creating the world out of nothing, create nothing out of the world.”

Friedrich Nietzsche book Human, All Too Human

Section IX, "Man Alone with Himself" / aphorism 627
Human, All Too Human (1878), Helen Zimmern translation

Life , Fate , People , World

“Our institutions are no good any more: on that there is universal agreement. However, it is not their fault but ours. Once we have lost all the instincts out of which institutions grow, we lose institutions altogether because we are no longer good for them.”

Friedrich Nietzsche book Twilight of the Idols

Twilight of the Idols (1888)

Universe

“Art is the supreme task and the truly metaphysical activity in this life…”

Friedrich Nietzsche book The Birth of Tragedy

Diesen Ernsthaften diene zur Belehrung, dass ich von der Kunst als der höchsten Aufgabe und der eigentlich metaphysischen Thätigkeit dieses Lebens im Sinne des Mannes überzeugt bin, dem ich hier, als meinem erhabenen Vorkämpfer auf dieser Bahn, diese Schrift gewidmet haben will.
"Preface to Richard Wagner", p. 13
The Birth of Tragedy (1872)

Life , Art

“Whoever is completely and wholly an artist is to all eternity separated from the "real," the actual; on the other hand, one can understand how he may sometimes weary to the point of desperation of the eternal "unreality" and falsity of his innermost existence- and that then he may well attempt what ia most forbidden him, to lay hold of actuality, for once actually to be.”

Friedrich Nietzsche book On the Genealogy of Morality

Third Essay, Section 4
On the Genealogy of Morality (1887)

Understanding

“Man believes that the world itself is filled with beauty — he forgets that it is he who has created it. He alone has bestowed beauty upon the world — alas! only a very human, an all too human, beauty.”

Friedrich Nietzsche book Twilight of the Idols

Expeditions of an Untimely Man, 19
Twilight of the Idols (1888)

World , Beauty , Forgetting

“…to the priestly class — decadence is no more than a means to an end. Men of this sort have a vital interest in making mankind sick, and in confusing the values of "good" and "bad," "true" and "false" in a manner that is not only dangerous to life, but also slanders it.”

Friedrich Nietzsche book The Antichrist

Sec. 24
The Antichrist (1888)

Life , Men , Falseness

“I will make an attempt to attain freedom, the youthful soul says to itself; and is it to be hindered in this by the fact that two nations happen to hate and fight one another, or that two continents are separated by an ocean, or that all around it a religion is taught with did not yet exist a couple of thousand years ago. All that is not you, it says to itself.”

Friedrich Nietzsche Untimely Meditations

“Schopenhauer as educator,” § 3.1, R. Hollingdale, trans. (1983), p. 128
Untimely Meditations (1876)

Hate , Youth , Religion , Soul

“That which Heraclitus avoided, however, is still the same at that which we shun today: the noise and democratic chatter of the Ephesians, their politics, their latest news of the “Empire,” … their market business of “today”—for we philosophers need to be spared one thing above all: everything to do with “today.” We reverence what is still, cold, noble, distant, past, and in general everything in the face of which the soul does not have to defend itself and wrap itself up.”

Friedrich Nietzsche book On the Genealogy of Morality

Essay 3, Aphorism 8, W. Kaufmann, trans., in Basic Writings of Nietzsche (1992), p. 546
On the Genealogy of Morality (1887)

Soul , Business , Distant , Past

“The value of many men and books rests solely on their faculty for compelling all to speak out the most hidden and intimate things.”

Friedrich Nietzsche

Bartlett's Familiar Quotations, 10th ed. (1919), Maxims

Men , Books

“In order to be able thus to misjudge, and thus to grant left-handed veneration to our classics, people must have ceased to know them. This, generally speaking, is precisely what has happened. For, otherwise, one ought to know that there is only one way of honoring them, and that is to continue seeking with the same spirit and with the same courage, and not to weary of the search.”

Friedrich Nietzsche Untimely Meditations

Um aber unsere Klassiker so falsch beurteilen und so beschimpfend ehren zu können, muß man sie gar nicht mehr kennen: und dies ist die allgemeine Tatsache. Denn sonst müßte man wissen, daß es nur eine Art gibt, sie zu ehren, nämlich dadurch, daß man fortfährt, in ihrem Geiste und mit ihrem Mute zu suchen, und dabei nicht müde wird.
(A. Ludovici trans.), § 1.2
Untimely Meditations (1876)

People , Way , Search , Courage

“To those human beings who are of any concern to me I wish suffering, desolation, sickness, ill-treatment, indignities — I wish that they should not remain unfamiliar with profound self-contempt, the torture of self-mistrust, the wretchedness of the vanquished: I have no pity for them, because I wish them the only thing that can prove today whether one is worth anything or not — that one endures.”

Friedrich Nietzsche book The Will to Power

Sec 910 (Autumn 1887, KSA 12.513)
The Will to Power (1888)

Suffering

“To say it once again: today I find it an impossible book — badly written, clumsy and embarrassing, its images frenzied and confused, sentimental, in some places saccharine-sweet to the point of effeminacy, uneven in pace, lacking in any desire for logical purity, so sure of its convictions that it is above any need for proof, and even suspicious of the propriety of proof, a book for initiates, 'music' for those who have been baptized in the name of music and who are related from the first by their common and rare experiences of art, a shibboleth for first cousins in artibus [in the arts] an arrogant and fanatical book that wished from the start to exclude the profanum vulgus [the profane mass] of the 'educated' even more than the 'people'; but a book which, as its impact has shown and continues to show, has a strange knack of seeking out its fellow-revellers and enticing them on to new secret paths and dancing-places.”

Friedrich Nietzsche book The Birth of Tragedy

Nochmals gesagt, heute ist es mir ein unmögliches Buch, - ich heisse es schlecht geschrieben, schwerfällig, peinlich, bilderwüthig und bilderwirrig, gefühlsam, hier und da verzuckert bis zum Femininischen, ungleich im Tempo, ohne Willen zur logischen Sauberkeit, sehr überzeugt und deshalb des Beweisens sich überhebend, misstrauisch selbst gegen die Schicklichkeit des Beweisens, als Buch für Eingeweihte, als "Musik" für Solche, die auf Musik getauft, die auf gemeinsame und seltene Kunst-Erfahrungen hin von Anfang der Dinge an verbunden sind, als Erkennungszeichen für Blutsverwandte in artibus, - ein hochmüthiges und schwärmerisches Buch, das sich gegen das profanum vulgus der "Gebildeten" von vornherein noch mehr als gegen das "Volk" abschliesst, welches aber, wie seine Wirkung bewies und beweist, sich gut genug auch darauf verstehen muss, sich seine Mitschwärmer zu suchen und sie auf neue Schleichwege und Tanzplätze zu locken.
"Attempt at a Self-Criticism", p. 5
The Birth of Tragedy (1872)

People , Secret , Books , Education

“Benefiting and hurting others are ways of exercising one's power upon others; that is all one desires in such cases. One hurts those whom one wants to feel one's power, for pain is a much more efficient means to that end than pleasure; pain always raises the question about its origin while pleasure is inclined to stop with itself without looking back. We benefit and show benevolence to those who are already dependent on us in some way (which means that they are used to thinking of us as causes); we want to increase their power because in that way we increase ours, or we want to show them how advantageous it is to be in our power; that way they will become more satisfied with their condition and more hostile to and willing to fight against the enemies of our power.”

Friedrich Nietzsche

Sec. 13
The Gay Science (1882)

Pain , Hostility , Pleasure , Way

“Traffic with one's higher self. Everyone has his good day, when he finds his higher self; and true humanity demands that we judge someone only when he is in this condition, and not in his workdays of bondage and servitude. We should, for example, assess and honor a painter according to the highest vision he was able to see and portray. But people themselves deal very differently with this, their higher self, and often act out the role of their own self, to the extent that they later keep imitating what they were in those moments. Some regard their ideal with shy humility and would like to deny it: they fear their higher self because, when it speaks, it speaks demandingly. In addition, it has a ghostly freedom of coming or staying away as it wishes; for that reason it is often called a gift of the gods, while actually everything else is a gift of the gods (of chance): this, however, is the man himself.”

Friedrich Nietzsche book Human, All Too Human

Section IX, "Man Alone with Himself" / aphorism 624
Human, All Too Human (1878), Helen Zimmern translation

God , People , Fear , Freedom

“Whoever wishes to justify [ Philosophy] must show … to what ends a healthy culture uses and has used philosophy.”

Friedrich Nietzsche book Philosophy in the Tragic Age of the Greeks

Source: Philosophy in the Tragic Age of the Greeks (posthumous), p. 27

“A Path to Equality. - A few hours of mountain climbing turn a rascal and a saint into two pretty similar creatures. Fatigue is the shortest way to Equality and Fraternity--and, in the end, Liberty will surrender to Sleep.”

Friedrich Nietzsche book Human, All Too Human

II.263
Human, All Too Human (1878)

Way , Mountain , Sleep

“The states in which we infuse a transfiguration and a fullness into things and poetize about them until they reflect back our fullness and joy in life…three elements principally: sexuality, intoxication and cruelty — all belonging to the oldest festal joys.”

Friedrich Nietzsche book The Will to Power

Sec. 801 (Notebook W II 1. Fall 1887, KGW VIII, 2.57-8, KSA 12.393-4)
The Will to Power (1888)

Life , Joy

“It is mere illusion and pretty sentiment to expect much from mankind if he forgets how to make war. And yet no means are known which call so much into action as a great war, that rough energy born of the camp, that deep impersonality born of hatred, that conscience born of murder and cold-bloodedness, that fervor born of effort of the annihilation of the enemy, that proud indifference to loss, to one's own existence, to that of one's fellows, to that earthquake-like soul-shaking that a people needs when it is losing its vitality.”

Friedrich Nietzsche book Human, All Too Human

Human, All Too Human (1878)

War , People , Soul , Effort

“Perhaps no philosopher is more correct than the cynic. The happiness of the animal, that thorough cynic, is the living proof of cynicism.”

Friedrich Nietzsche Untimely Meditations

§ 2.1, cited in Peter Sloterdijk, Critique of Cynical Reason (1987), p. ix
Untimely Meditations (1876)

Animals , Happiness

“Woe to the thinker who is not the gardener but only the soil of the plants that grow in him!”

Friedrich Nietzsche

382
Daybreak — Thoughts on the Prejudices of Morality (1881)

“The broad effects which can be obtained by punishment in man and beast are the increase of fear, the sharpening of the sense of cunning, the mastery of the desires; so it is that punishment tames man, but does not make him "better."”

Friedrich Nietzsche book On the Genealogy of Morality

Essay 2, Section 15
On the Genealogy of Morality (1887)

Fear , Sense

“The homogenizing of European man … requires a justification: it lies in serving a higher sovereign species that stands upon the former which can raise itself to its task only by doing this. Not merely a master race whose sole task is to rule, but a race with its own sphere of life, with an excess of strength … strong enough to have no need of the tyranny of the virtue-imperative.”

Friedrich Nietzsche book The Will to Power

Sec. 898 (Notebook W II 1. Fall 1887, KGW VIII, 2.88-90, KSA 12.424-6)
The Will to Power (1888)

Life , Strong

“The rights a man arrogates to himself are related to the duties he imposes on himself, to the tasks to which he feels equal. The great majority of men have no right to existence, but are a misfortune to higher men.”

Friedrich Nietzsche book The Will to Power

Sec. 872 (Notebook W I 1. Spring 1884, KGW VII, 2.97-8, KSA 11.101-2)
The Will to Power (1888)

Men , Feeling

“In this way, a philosophy which veiled the Philistine confessions of its founder beneath neat twists and flourishes of language proceeded further to discover a formula for the canonization of the commonplace. It expatiated upon the rationalism of all reality, and thus ingratiated itself with the Culture-Philistine, who also loves neat twists and flourishes, and who, above all, considers himself real, and regards his reality as the standard of reason for the world. From this time forward he began to allow every one, and even himself, to reflect, to investigate, to aestheticise, and, more particularly, to make poetry, music, and even pictures—not to mention systems of philosophy; provided, of course, that … no assault were made upon the “reasonable” and the “real”—that is to say, upon the Philistine.”

Friedrich Nietzsche Untimely Meditations

(A. Ludovici trans.), “David Strauss,” § 1.2, p. 17
Untimely Meditations (1876)

Love , World , Music , Way

“This is the antinomy: Insofar as we believe in morality we pass sentence on existence.”

Friedrich Nietzsche book The Will to Power

Sec. 6 (Notebook W II 2. Autumn 1887, KGW VIII, 2.237, KSA 12.571 [citations are to Nietzsche's manuscripts by archival code, and the page numbers in which the entire section can be found transcribed therefrom, in the hardcover and softcover historical-critical editions]).
The Will to Power (1888)