Power Quotes

One can promise actions, but not feelings, for the latter are involuntary. He who promises to love forever or hate forever or be forever faithful to someone is promising something that is not in his power.

It is the powerful who know how to honour, it is their art, their domain for invention.

I have found strength where one does not look for it: in simple, mild, and pleasant people, without the least desire to rule and, conversely, the desire to rule has often appeared to me a sign of inward weakness: they fear their own slave soul and shroud it in a royal cloak (in the end, they still become the slaves of their followers, their fame).

Every high degree of power always involves a corresponding degree of freedom from good and evil.

Life is an instinct for growth, for survival, for the accumulation of forces, for power.

No power can be maintained when it is only represented by hypocrites.

We praise or blame as one or the other affords more opportunity for exhibiting our power of judgement.

Wherever I found a living creature, there I found the will to power.

What is bad?-All that proceeds from weakness. What is happiness?-The feeling that power is increasing-that resistance has been overcome.

Without myth, however, every culture loses its healthy creative natural power: it is only a horizon encompassed with myth that rounds off to unity a social movement.

Watch them clamber, these swift monkeys! They clamber over one another and thus drag one another into the mud and the depth. They all want to get to the throne: that is their madness - as if happiness sat on the throne. Often, mud sits on the throne - and often the throne also on mud. Mad they all appear to me, clambering monkeys and overardent. Foul smells their idol, the cold monster: foul, they smell to me altogether, these idolators.

Anything which is a living and not a dying body... will have to be an incarnate will to power, it will strive to grow, spread, seize, become predominant-not from any morality or immorality but because it is living and because life simply is will to power... 'Exploitation'... belongs to the essence of what lives, as a basic organic function; it is a consequence of the will to power, which is after all the will to life.

He who wills believes with a fair amount of certainty that will and action are somehow one; he ascribes the success, the carrying out of the willing, to the will itself, and thereby enjoys an increase of the sensation of power which accompanies all success.

A certain type of person strives to become a master over all, and to extend his force, his will to power, and to subdue all that resists it. But he encounters the power of others, and comes to an arrangement, a union, with those that are like him: thus they work together to serve the will to power. And the process goes on.

The age of Socratic man is past: crown yourselves with ivy, grasp the thyrsus and do not be amazed if tigers and panthers lie down fawning at your feet.

There still shines the most important nuance by virtue of which the noble felt themselves to be men of a higher rank. They designate themselves simply by their superiority in power or by the most clearly visible signs of this superiority, for example, as the rich, the possessors.

To be incapable of taking one's enemies, one's accidents, even one's misdeeds seriously for very long-that is the sign of strong, full natures in whom there is an excess of the power to form, to mold, to recuperate and to forget. Such a man shakes off with a single shrug many vermin that eat deep into others.

Punishment makes men hard and cold; it concentrates; it sharpens the feeling of alienation; it strengthens the power of resistance.

In my opinion, Henrik Ibsen has become very German. With all his robust idealism and "Will to Truth," he never dared to ring himself free from moral-illusionism which says "freedom," and will not admit, even to itself, what freedom is: the second stage in the metamorphosis of the "Will to Power" in him who lacks it.

In the stream - mighty waters draw much stone and rubble along with them; mighty spirits many stupid and bewildered heads.