Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche was a German philosopher, cultural critic, composer, poet, writer, and philologist whose work has exerted a profound influence on modern intellectual history. Nietzsche’s writing spans philosophical polemics, poetry, cultural criticism, and fiction while displaying a fondness for aphorism and irony. He began his career as a classical philologist before turning to philosophy.
Prominent elements of his philosophy include his radical critique of truth in favor of perspectivism; a genealogical critique of religion and Christian morality and related theory of master-slave morality; the aesthetic affirmation of existence in response to the “death of God” and the profound crisis of nihilism; the notion of Apollonian and Dionysian forces; and a characterization of the human subject as the expression of competing wills, collectively understood as the will to power.
He also developed influential concepts such as the Übermensch and the doctrine of eternal return. In his later work, he became increasingly preoccupied with the creative powers of the individual to overcome cultural and moral mores in pursuit of new values and aesthetic health. His body of work touched a wide range of topics, including art, philology, history, religion, tragedy, culture, and science.
Nietzsche’s thought enjoyed renewed popularity in the 1960s and his ideas have since had a profound impact on 20th and early-21st century thinkers across philosophy-especially in schools of continental philosophy such as existentialism, postmodernism and post-structuralism-as well as art, literature, psychology, politics, and popular culture.
Some of the best quotes from Friedrich Nietzsche are listed below.
- “A bad conscience is easier to cope with than a bad reputation.” – Friedrich Nietzsche
- “A good writer possesses not only his own spirit but also the spirit of his friends.” – Friedrich Nietzsche
- “A living thing seeks above all to discharge its strength – life itself is will to power; self-preservation is only one of the indirect and most frequent results.” – Friedrich Nietzsche
- “A thinker sees his own actions as experiments and questions – as attempts to find out something. Success and failure are for him answers above all.” – Friedrich Nietzsche
- “A thought, even a possibility, can shatter and transform us.” – Friedrich Nietzsche
- “Ah, women. They make the highs higher and the lows more frequent.” – Friedrich Nietzsche
- “All I need is a sheet of paper and something to write with, and then I can turn the world upside down.” – Friedrich Nietzsche
- “All things are subject to interpretation. Whichever interpretation prevails at a given time is a function of power and not truth.” – Friedrich Nietzsche
- “All truly great thoughts are conceived while walking.” – Friedrich Nietzsche
- “And those who were seen dancing were thought to be insane by those who could not hear the music.” – Friedrich Nietzsche
- “Anyone who has declared someone else to be an idiot, a bad apple, is annoyed when it turns out in the end that he isn’t.” – Friedrich Nietzsche
- “Art is the proper task of life.” – Friedrich Nietzsche
- “At bottom, every man knows well enough that he is a unique being, only once on this earth.” – Friedrich Nietzsche
- “Become who you are!” – Friedrich Nietzsche
- “Blessed are the forgetful, for they get the better even of their blunders.” – Friedrich Nietzsche
- “Blessed are the sleepy ones: for they shall soon nod off.” – Friedrich Nietzsche
- “But the worst enemy you can meet will always be yourself.” – Friedrich Nietzsche
- “Close beside my knowledge lies my black ignorance.” – Friedrich Nietzsche
- “Convictions are more dangerous foes of truth than lies.” – Friedrich Nietzsche
- “Distrust all in whom the impulse to punish is powerful.” – Friedrich Nietzsche
- “Every attainment, every step forward in knowledge, follows from courage, from hardness against oneself, from cleanliness in relation to oneself.” – Friedrich Nietzsche
- “Every deep thinker is more afraid of being understood than of being misunderstood.” – Friedrich Nietzsche
- “Everything the State says is a lie, and everything it has it has stolen.” – Friedrich Nietzsche
- “For art to exist, for any sort of aesthetic activity or perception to exist, a certain physiological precondition is indispensable: intoxication.” – Friedrich Nietzsche
- “Glance into the world just as though time were gone: and everything crooked will become straight to you.” – Friedrich Nietzsche
- “God is dead. God remains dead. And we have killed him. How shall we comfort ourselves, the murderers of all murderers? What was holiest and mightiest of all that the world has yet owned has bled to death under our knives: who will wipe this blood off us? What water is there for us to clean ourselves? What festivals of atonement, what sacred games shall we have to invent?” – Friedrich Nietzsche
- “He who despises himself esteems himself as a self-despiser.” – Friedrich Nietzsche
- “He who has a why to live for can bear almost any how.” – Friedrich Nietzsche
- “He who would learn to fly one day must first learn to walk and run and climb and dance; one cannot fly into flying.” – Friedrich Nietzsche
- “Hope in reality is the worst of all evils because it prolongs the torments of man.” – Friedrich Nietzsche
- “I am a forest, and a night of dark trees: but he who is not afraid of my darkness, will find banks full of roses under my cypresses.” – Friedrich Nietzsche
- “I am no man, I am dynamite.” – Friedrich Nietzsche
- “I assess the power of a will by how much resistance, pain, torture it endures and knows how to turn to its advantage” – Friedrich Nietzsche
- “I fear you close by; I love you far away.” – Friedrich Nietzsche
- “I hate you most because you attract, but are not strong enough to pull me to you.” – Friedrich Nietzsche
- “I know of no better life purpose than to perish in attempting the great and the impossible.” – Friedrich Nietzsche
- “I mistrust all systematizers and avoid them. The will to a system is a lack of integrity.” – Friedrich Nietzsche
- “I’m not upset that you lied to me, I’m upset that from now on I can’t believe you.” – Friedrich Nietzsche
- “If you gaze long enough into an abyss, the abyss will gaze back into you.” – Friedrich Nietzsche
- “In individuals, insanity is rare; but in groups, parties, nations and epochs, it is the rule.” – Friedrich Nietzsche
- “Invisible threads are the strongest ties.” – Friedrich Nietzsche
- “Is it better to out-monster the monster or to be quietly devoured?” – Friedrich Nietzsche
- “Is life not a thousand times too short for us to bore ourselves?” – Friedrich Nietzsche
- “It is hard enough to remember my opinions, without also remembering my reasons for them!” – Friedrich Nietzsche
- “It is my ambition to say in ten sentences what others say in a whole book.” – Friedrich Nietzsche
- “It is not a lack of love, but a lack of friendship that makes unhappy marriages.” – Friedrich Nietzsche
- “It is the same with man as with the tree. The more he seeks to rise into the height and light, the more vigorously do his roots struggle earthward, downward, into the dark, the deep – into evil.” – Friedrich Nietzsche
- “Living in a constant chase after gain compels people to expend their spirit to the point of exhaustion in continual pretense and overreaching and anticipating other.” – Friedrich Nietzsche
- “Love is a state in which a man sees things most decidedly as they are not.” – Friedrich Nietzsche
- “Man is something that shall be overcome. Man is a rope, tied between beast and overman — a rope over an abyss. What is great in man is that he is a bridge and not an end.” – Friedrich Nietzsche
- “Many a man fails as an original thinker simply because his memory is too good.” – Friedrich Nietzsche
- “My solitude doesn’t depend on the presence or absence of people; on the contrary, I hate who steals my solitude without, in exchange, offering me true company.” – Friedrich Nietzsche
- “Never yield to remorse, but at once tell yourself: remorse would simply mean adding to the first act of stupidity a second.” – Friedrich Nietzsche
- “No artist tolerates reality.” – Friedrich Nietzsche
- “No one can construct for you the bridge upon which precisely you must cross the stream of life, no one but you yourself alone.” – Friedrich Nietzsche
- “No price is too high to pay for the privilege of owning yourself.” – Friedrich Nietzsche
- “No shepherd and one herd! Everybody wants the same, everybody is the same: whoever feels different goes voluntarily into a madhouse.” – Friedrich Nietzsche
- “Nothing on earth consumes a man more quickly than the passion of resentment.” – Friedrich Nietzsche
- “Once you are awake, you shall remain awake eternally. „
- “One does not only wish to be understood when one writes; one wishes just as surely not to be understood.” – Friedrich Nietzsche
- “One must be a sea, to receive a polluted stream without becoming impure.” – Friedrich Nietzsche
- “One must give value to their existence by behaving as if one’s very existence were a work of art.” – Friedrich Nietzsche
- “One must shed the bad taste of wanting to agree with many. “Good” is no longer good when one’s neighbor mouths it. And how should there be a “common good”! The term contradicts itself: whatever can be common always has little value. In the end, it must be as it is and always has been: great things remain for the great, abysses for the profound, nuances and shudders for the refined, and, in brief, all that is rare for the rare.” – Friedrich Nietzsche
- “One ought to hold on to one’s heart; for if one lets it go, one soon loses control of the head too.” – Friedrich Nietzsche
- “One repays a teacher badly if one always remains nothing but a pupil.” – Friedrich Nietzsche
- “One sticks to an opinion because he prides himself on having come to it on his own, and another because he has taken great pains to learn it and is proud to have grasped it: and so both do so out of vanity.” – Friedrich Nietzsche
- “Perhaps I know best why it is man alone who laughs; he alone suffers so deeply that he had to invent laughter.” – Friedrich Nietzsche
- “Silence is worse; all truths that are kept silent become poisonous.” – Friedrich Nietzsche
- “Some men are born posthumously.” – Friedrich Nietzsche
- “Sometimes people don’t want to hear the truth because they don’t want their illusions destroyed.” – Friedrich Nietzsche
- “Success has always been a great liar” – Friedrich Nietzsche
- “Talking much about oneself can also be a means to conceal oneself. „
- “That which is done out of love is always beyond good and evil.” – Friedrich Nietzsche
- “The advantage of a bad memory is that one enjoys several times the same good things for the first time.” – Friedrich Nietzsche
- “The end of a melody is not its goal: but nonetheless, had the melody not reached its end it would not have reached its goal either. A parable.” – Friedrich Nietzsche
- “The higher we soar the smaller we appear to those who cannot fly.” – Friedrich Nietzsche
- “The individual has always had to struggle to keep from being overwhelmed by the tribe. If you try it, you will be lonely often, and sometimes frightened.” – Friedrich Nietzsche
- “The irrationality of a thing is no argument against its existence, rather a condition of it.” – Friedrich Nietzsche
- “The lonely one offers his hand too quickly to whomever he encounters.” – Friedrich Nietzsche
- “The man of knowledge must be able not only to love his enemies but also to hate his friends.” – Friedrich Nietzsche
- “The most perfidious way of harming a cause consists of defending it deliberately with faulty arguments.” – Friedrich Nietzsche
- “The one necessary thing. A person must have one or the other. Either a cheerful disposition by nature, or a disposition made cheerful by art and knowledge.” – Friedrich Nietzsche
- “The snake which cannot cast its skin has to die. As well the minds which are prevented from changing their opinions; they cease to be mind.” – Friedrich Nietzsche
- “The surest way to corrupt a youth is to instruct him to hold in higher esteem those who think alike than those who think differently.” – Friedrich Nietzsche
- “The true man wants two things: danger and play. For that reason, he wants woman, as the most dangerous plaything.” – Friedrich Nietzsche
- “The visionary lies to himself, the liar only to others.” – Friedrich Nietzsche
- “The voice of beauty speaks softly; it creeps only into the most fully awakened souls” – Friedrich Nietzsche
- “The worst readers are those who behave like plundering troops: they take away a few things they can use, dirty and confound the remainder, and revile the whole.” – Friedrich Nietzsche
- “There are no beautiful surfaces without a terrible depth.” – Friedrich Nietzsche
- “There are no facts, only interpretations.” – Friedrich Nietzsche
- “There are two different types of people in the world, those who want to know, and those who want to believe.” – Friedrich Nietzsche
- “There is always some madness in love. But there is also always some reason in madness.” – Friedrich Nietzsche
- “There is an innocence in admiration: it occurs in one who has not yet realized that they might one day be admired.” – Friedrich Nietzsche
- “There is more wisdom in your body than in your deepest philosophy.” – Friedrich Nietzsche
- “They muddy the water, to make it seem deep.” – Friedrich Nietzsche
- “They’re so cold, these scholars! May lightning strike their food so that their mouths learn how to eat fire!” – Friedrich Nietzsche
- “Those you cannot teach to fly, teach to fall faster.” – Friedrich Nietzsche
- “Thoughts are the shadows of our feelings – always darker, emptier and simpler.” – Friedrich Nietzsche
- “Throw roses into the abyss and say: ‘here is my thanks to the monster who didn’t succeed in swallowing me alive.” – Friedrich Nietzsche
- “To live is to suffer, to survive is to find some meaning in the suffering.” – Friedrich Nietzsche
- “To predict the behavior of ordinary people in advance, you only have to assume that they will always try to escape a disagreeable situation with the smallest possible expenditure of intelligence.” – Friedrich Nietzsche
- “To recognize untruth as a condition of life – that certainly means resisting accustomed value feelings in a dangerous way; and a philosophy that risks this would by that token alone place itself beyond good and evil.” – Friedrich Nietzsche
- “Today as always, men fall into two groups: slaves and free men. Whoever does not have two-thirds of his day for himself, is a slave, whatever he may be: a statesman, a businessman, an official, or a scholar.” – Friedrich Nietzsche
- “True, we love life, not because we are used to living, but because we are used to loving.” – Friedrich Nietzsche
- “Ultimately, it is the desire, not the desired, that we love.” – Friedrich Nietzsche
- “Untroubled, scornful, outrageous – that is how wisdom wants us to be: she is a woman and never loves anyone but a warrior.” – Friedrich Nietzsche
- “Virtue is under certain circumstances merely an honorable form of stupidity.” – Friedrich Nietzsche
- “We have art in order not to die of the truth.” – Friedrich Nietzsche
- “We should consider every day lost on which we have not danced at least once.” – Friedrich Nietzsche
- “What destroys a man more quickly than to work, think and feel without inner necessity, without any deep personal desire, without pleasure – as a mere automaton of duty?” – Friedrich Nietzsche
- “What is happening to me happens to all fruits that grow ripe. It is the honey in my veins that makes my blood thicker, and my soul quieter.” – Friedrich Nietzsche
- “What is the seal of liberation? Not to be ashamed in front of oneself.” – Friedrich Nietzsche
- “What is this our life? A boat that swims in the sea, and all one knows for certain about it is that one day it will capsize.” – Friedrich Nietzsche
- “When we are tired, we are attacked by ideas we conquered long ago.” – Friedrich Nietzsche
- “Whenever I climb I am followed by a dog called ‘Ego’.” – Friedrich Nietzsche
- “Whoever fights monsters should see to it that in the process he does not become a monster.” – Friedrich Nietzsche
- “Whoever thought that he had understood something of me had merely construed something out of me, after his own image.” – Friedrich Nietzsche
- “Without music, life would be a mistake.” – Friedrich Nietzsche
- “You have your way. I have my way. As for the right way, the correct way, and the only way, it does not exist.” – Friedrich Nietzsche
- “You must be ready to burn yourself in your own flame; how could you rise anew if you have not first become ashes?” – Friedrich Nietzsche
- “You must have chaos within you to give birth to a dancing star.” – Friedrich Nietzsche
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