Quotes By Friedrich Nietzsche

The love of truth has its reward in heaven and even on earth.

What is evil? Whatever springs from weakness.

Read from a distant star, the majuscule script of our earthly existence would perhaps lead to the conclusion that the earth was the distinctively ascetic planet, a nook of disgruntled, arrogant creatures filled with a profound disgust with themselves, at the earth, at all life, who inflict as much pain on themselves as they possibly can out of pleasure in inflicting pain which is probably their only pleasure.

Not that you lied to me but that I no longer believe you, has shaken me.

Mastery has been achieved when one neither makes a mistake nor hesitates in the performance.

Tourists. They climb mountains like animals, stupid and sweating; one has forgotten to tell them that there are beautiful views on the way up.

What makes us heroic? Confronting simultaneously our supreme suffering and our supreme hope.

People to whom their daily life appears too empty and monotonous easily grow religious; this is comprehensible and excusable, only they have no right to demand religious sentiments from those whose daily life is not empty and monotonous.

In the end things must be as they are and have always been - the great things remain for the great, the abysses for the profound, the delicacies and thrills for the refined, and, to sum up shortly, everything rare for the rare.

When self control is lacking in small things, the ability to apply it to matters of importance withers away. Every day in which one does not at least deny himself some trifle is badly spent and a threat to the day following.

The snake that cannot shed its skin perishes. As well the minds which are prevented from changing their opinions; they cease to be mind.

In all institutions from which the cold wind of open criticism is excluded, an innocent corruption begins to grow like a mushroom - for example, in senates and learned societies.

The people we keep standing in the anteroom of our favor either start fermenting or turn sour.

Poets are shameless with their experiences: they exploit them.

One must know how to conserve oneself - the best test of independence.

You must climb above yourself - up and beyond, until you have even your stars under you.

But thus do I counsel you, my friends: distrust all in whom the impulse to punish is powerful! Distrust all those who talk much of their justice!

Never to talk about oneself is a very refined form of hypocrisy.

Desire is happiness: satisfaction as happiness is merely the ultimate moment of desire. To be wish and wish alone is happiness, and a new wish over and over again.

Partial knowledge is more triumphant than complete knowledge; it takes things to be simpler than they are, and so makes its theory more popular and convincing.