Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche quotes

I tell you: one must still have chaos in one, to give birth to a dancing star.

What is great in man is that he is a bridge and not a goal: what is lovable in man is that he is an OVER-GOING and a DOWN-GOING.

Man is something that is to be surpassed.

Of all that is written, I love only what a person hath written with his blood. Write with blood, and thou wilt find that blood is spirit.

Man is a rope stretched between the animal and the Superman—a rope over an abyss.

Lo! I show you THE LAST MAN.

I should only believe in a God that would know how to dance.

One requiteth a teacher badly if one remain merely a scholar.

Many die too late, and some die too early. Yet strange soundeth the precept: “Die at the right time!”

“Could it be possible! This old saint in the forest hath not yet heard of it, that GOD IS DEAD!”

Knowledge kills action, action requires the veil of illusion--it is this lesson which Hamlet teaches, and not the cheap wisdom of John-a-Dreams who from too much reflection, as it were from a surplus of possibilities, does not arrive at action at all.

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

These earnest ones may be informed that I am convinced that art is the highest task and the properly metaphysical activity of this life, as it is understood by the man, to whom, as my sublime protagonist on this path, I would now dedicate this essay.

Man is no longer an artist, he has become a work of art: the artistic power of all nature here reveals itself in the tremors of drunkenness to the highest gratification of the Primordial Unity.

Even Euripides was, in a certain sense, only a mask: the deity that spoke through him was neither Dionysus nor Apollo, but an altogether new-born demon, called Socrates.

Besides, he feels that a culture built up on the principles of science must perish when it begins to grow illogical, that is, to avoid its own conclusions.

"We believe in eternal life," tragedy exclaims; while music is the proximate idea of this life.

I fear, however, that we on the other hand with our present worship of the natural and the real have landed at the nadir of all idealism, namely in the region of cabinets of wax-figures.

I repeat, therefore, my former proposition, that it is only as an æsthetic phenomenon that existence and the world, appear justified: and in this sense it is precisely the function of tragic myth to convince us that even the Ugly and Discordant is an artistic game which the will, in the eternal fulness of its joy, plays with itself.

What is best of all is for ever beyond your reach: not to be born, not to be, to be nothing. The second best for you, however, is soon to die.

He who fights with monsters should be careful lest he thereby become a monster. And if thou gaze long into an abyss, the abyss will also gaze into thee.

What is done out of love always takes place beyond good and evil.

The falseness of an opinion is not for us any objection to it: it is here, perhaps, that our new language sounds most strangely.

Objection, evasion, joyous distrust, and love of irony are signs of health; everything absolute belongs to pathology.

The sense of the tragic increases and declines with sensuousness.

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

One loves ultimately one's desires, not the thing desired.

The vanity of others is only counter to our taste when it is counter to our vanity.

In short, systems of morals are only a SIGN-LANGUAGE OF THE EMOTIONS.

vanity is an atavism.