Best Friedrich Nietzsche Quotes

He who cannot obey himself will be commanded. That is the nature of living creatures.

At bottom every man knows well enough that he is a unique being, only once on this earth; and by no extraordinary chance will such a marvelously picturesque piece of diversity in unity as he is, ever be put together a second time.

Whatever is done for love always occurs beyond good and evil.

The true man wants two things: danger and play. For that reason he wants woman, as the most dangerous plaything.

Insanity in individuals is something rare -- but in groups, parties, nations, and epochs it is the rule.

And if your friend does evil to you, say to him, I forgive you for what you did to me, but how can I forgive you for what you did to yourself?

Fanatics are picturesque, mankind would rather see gestures than listen to reasons.

The strongest knowledge (that of the total freedom of the human will) is nonetheless the poorest in successes: for it always has the strongest opponent, human vanity.

In the consciousness of the truth he has perceived, man now sees everywhere only the awfulness or the absurdity of existence and loathing seizes him.

A matter that becomes clear ceases to concern us.

Nothing is beautiful, only man: on this piece of naivete rests all aesthetics, it is the first truth of aesthetics. Let us immediately add its second: nothing is ugly but degenerate man -- the domain of aesthetic judgment is therewith defined.

Of all that is written, I love only what a person has written with his own blood.

When one has not had a good father, one must create one.

Not by wrath does one kill, but by laughter.

There is more wisdom in your body than in your deepest philosophy.

If you believed more in life you would fling yourself less to the moment.

Without music, life would be an error. The German imagines even God singing songs

Let us beware of saying there are laws in nature. There are only necessities: there is no one to command, no one to obey, no one to transgress. When you realize there are no goals or objectives, then you realize, too, that there is no chance: for only in a world of objectives does the word chance have any meaning.

The most common lie is that which one lies to himself; lying to others is relatively an exception.

The anarchist and the Christian have a common origin.

A letter is an unannounced visit, the postman the agent of rude surprises. One ought to reserve an hour a week for receiving letters and afterwards take a bath.

He who laughs best today, will also laughs last.

Love is a state in which a man sees things most decidedly as they are not.

The spiritualization of sensuality is called love: it is a great triumph over Christianity.

Morality is the herd-instinct in the individual.

In the mountains the shortest route is from peak to peak, but for that you must have long legs. Aphorisms should be peaks: and those to whom they are spoken should be big and tall of stature.

The aphorism in which I am the first master among Germans, are the forms of eternity; my ambition is to say in ten sentences what everyone else says in a book -- what everyone else does not say in a book.

For the woman, the man is a means: the end is always the child.

The advantage of a bad memory is that one enjoys several times the same good things for the first time.

I fear animals regard man as a creature of their own kind which has in a highly dangerous fashion lost its healthy animal reason -- as the mad animal, as the laughing animal, as the weeping animal, as the unhappy animal.

Mathematics would certainly have not come into existence if one had known from the beginning that there was in nature no exactly straight line, no actual circle, no absolute magnitude.

It is obvious that all sense has gone out of modern marriage: which is, however, no objection to marriage but to modernity.

The best friend is likely to acquire the best wife, because a good marriage is based on the talent for friendship.

Madness is something rare in individuals -- but in groups, parties, peoples, ages it is the rule.

I love those who do not know how to live for today.

The significance of language for the evolution of culture lies in this, that mankind set up in language a separate world beside the other world, a place it took to be so firmly set that, standing upon it, it could lift the rest of the world off its hinges and make itself master of it. To the extent that man has for long ages believed in the concepts and names of things as in aeternae veritates he has appropriated to himself that pride by which he raised himself above the animal: he really thought that in language he possessed knowledge of the world.

Our treasure lies in the beehive of our knowledge. We are perpetually on the way thither, being by nature winged insects and honey gatherers of the mind.

We have no organ at all for knowledge, for truth: we know (or believe or imagine) precisely as much as may be useful in the interest of the human herd, the species: and even what is here called usefulness is in the end only a belief, something imagined and perhaps precisely that most fatal piece of stupidity by which we shall one day perish.

A sedentary life is the real sin against the Holy Spirit. Only those thoughts that come by walking have any value.

What is wanted -- whether this is admitted or not -- is nothing less than a fundamental remolding, indeed weakening and abolition of the individual: one never tires of enumerating and indicating all that is evil and inimical, prodigal, costly, extravagant in the form individual existence has assumed hitherto, one hopes to manage more cheaply, more safely, more equitably, more uniformly if there exist only large bodies and their members.

You have your way. I have my way. As for the right way, the correct way, and the only way, it does not exist.

Instinct. When the house burns one forgets even lunch. Yes, but one eats it later in the ashes.

One receives as reward for much ennui, despondency, boredom --such as a solitude without friends, books, duties, passions must bring with it --those quarter-hours of profoundest contemplation within oneself and nature. He who completely entrenches himself against boredom also entrenches himself against himself: he will never get to drink the strongest refreshing draught from his own innermost fountain.

The word Christianity is already a misunderstanding -- in reality there has been only one Christian, and he died on the Cross.

Judgments, value judgments concerning life, for or against, can in the last resort never be true: they possess value only as symptoms, they come into consideration only as symptoms -- in themselves such judgments are stupidities.

One may sometimes tell a lie, but the grimace that accompanies it tells the truth.