Quotes from book
Beyond Good and Evil

Name: Beyond Good and Evil
Author: Friedrich Nietzsche

Friedrich NietzscheOriginal title Jenseits von Gut und Böse, Vorspiel einer Philosophie der Zukunft (German, 1886)

Beyond Good and Evil: Prelude to a Philosophy of the Future is a book by philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche that expands the ideas of his previous work Thus Spoke Zarathustra with a more critical and polemical approach. It was first published in 1886.

“He who fights too long against dragons becomes a dragon himself; and if you gaze too long into the abyss, the abyss will gaze into you.”

Friedrich Nietzsche book Beyond Good and Evil

Beyond Good and Evil, Aphorism 146
Variant: He who fights with monsters should look to it that he himself does not become a monster. And if you gaze long into an abyss, the abyss also gazes into you.

“I obviously do everything to be "hard to understand" myself”

Friedrich Nietzsche book Beyond Good and Evil

Source: Beyond Good and Evil

“Is not life a hundred times too short for us— to bore ourselves?”

Friedrich Nietzsche book Beyond Good and Evil

Ist das Leben nicht hundert Mal zu kurz, sich in ihm— zu langweilen?
Beyond Good and Evil, Chapter VII, 227

“Ultimately, it is the desire, not the desired, that we love.”

Friedrich Nietzsche book Beyond Good and Evil

Variant: One loves ultimately one's desires, not the thing desired.
Source: Beyond Good and Evil

“One must be born to any superior world — to make it plainer, one must be bred for it. One has a right to philosophy (taking the word in its greatest sense) only by virtue of one's breeding; one's ancestors, one's "blood," decides this, too. Many generations must have worked on the origin of a philosopher; each one of his virtues must have been separately earned, cared for, passed on, and embodied.”

Friedrich Nietzsche book Beyond Good and Evil

Beyond Good and Evil, translated by Marianne Cowan [Henry Regnery Company, 1955, p. 139]; Jenseits von Gut und Böse [Philipp Reclam, Stuttgart, 1988, p. 130]

“We imagine that hardness, violence, slavery, peril in the street and in the heart, concealment, Stoicism, temptation, and deviltry of every sort, everything evil, frightful, tyrannical, raptor- and snake-like in man, serves as well for the advancement of the species "man" as their opposite.”

Friedrich Nietzsche book Beyond Good and Evil

Beyond Good and Evil, translated by Marianne Cowan [Henry Regnery Company, 1955, p. 50]; Jenseits von Gut und Böse [Philipp Reclam, Stuttgart, 1988, p. 130]

“What strange, perplexing, questionable questions!”

Friedrich Nietzsche book Beyond Good and Evil

Beyond Good and Evil

“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

“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

“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