Quotes By Friedrich Nietzsche

People who have given us their complete confidence believe that they have a right to ours. The inference is false, a gift confers no rights.

On the mountains of truth you can never climb in vain: either you will reach a point higher up today, or you will be training your powers so that you will be able to climb higher tomorrow.

Mystical explanations are thought to be deep; the truth is that they are not even shallow.

Art is the proper task of life.

We should consider every day lost on which we have not danced at least once. And we should call every truth false which was not accompanied by at least one laugh.

Art is not merely an imitation of the reality of nature, but in truth a metaphysical supplement to the reality of nature, placed alongside thereof for its conquest.

Whoever has witnessed another's ideal becomes his inexorable judge and as it were his evil conscience.

One must still have chaos in oneself to be able to give birth to a dancing star.

If there is something to pardon in everything, there is also something to condemn.

Whenever I climb I am followed by a dog called 'Ego'.

There are people who want to make men's lives more difficult for no other reason than the chance it provides them afterwards to offer their prescription for alleviating life; their Christianity, for instance.

Whoever battles with monsters had better see that it does not turn him into a monster. And if you gaze long into an abyss, the abyss will gaze back into you.

Behind all their personal vanity, women themselves always have an impersonal contempt for woman.

When one has a great deal to put into it a day has a hundred pockets.

And if you gaze for long into an abyss, the abyss gazes also into you.

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.

The abdomen is the reason why man does not readily take himself to be a god.

The best weapon against an enemy is another enemy.

This is what is hardest: to close the open hand because one loves.

He who would learn to fly one day must first learn to stand and walk and run and climb and dance; one cannot fly into flying.

The irrationality of a thing is no argument against its existence, rather a condition of it.

To use the same words is not a sufficient guarantee of understanding; one must use the same words for the same genus of inward experience; ultimately one must have one's experiences in common.

It is not when truth is dirty, but when it is shallow, that the lover of knowledge is reluctant to step into its waters.

A pair of powerful spectacles has sometimes sufficed to cure a person in love.

Existence really is an imperfect tense that never becomes a present.

Admiration for a quality or an art can be so strong that it deters us from striving to possess it.

Egoism is the very essence of a noble soul.

There is not enough love and goodness in the world to permit giving any of it away to imaginary beings.

Whoever despises himself nonetheless respects himself as one who despises.

Morality is the herd-instinct in the individual.