Famous Quotes

Quotes by Friedrich Nietzsche

• 'Evil men have no songs.' How is it that the Russians have songs?
• A casual stroll through the lunatic asylum shows that faith does not prove anything.
• A good writer possesses not only his own spirit but also the spirit of his friends.
• A great value of antiquity lies in the fact that its writings are the only ones that modern men still read with exactness.
• A pair of powerful spectacles has sometimes sufficed to cure a person in love.
• A subject for a great poet would be God's boredom after the seventh day of creation.
• A woman may very well form a friendship with a man, but for this to endure, it must be assisted by a little physical antipathy.
• Admiration for a quality or an art can be so strong that it deters us from striving to possess it.
• Ah, women. They make the highs higher and the lows more frequent.
• All credibility, all good conscience, all evidence of truth come only from the senses.
• All sciences are now under the obligation to prepare the ground for the future task of the philosopher, which is to solve the problem of value, to determine the true hierarchy of values.
• All things are subject to interpretation whichever interpretation prevails at a given time is a function of power and not truth.
• All truly great thoughts are conceived by walking.
• All truth is simple... is that not doubly a lie?
• An artist has no home in Europe except in Paris.
• And 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.
• Art is the proper task of life.
• Art raises its head where creeds relax.
• Behind all their personal vanity, women themselves always have an impersonal contempt for woman.
• Convictions are more dangerous foes of truth than lies.
• Does wisdom perhaps appear on the earth as a raven which is inspired by the smell of carrion?
• Experience, as a desire for experience, does not come off. We must not study ourselves while having an experience.
• Faith: not wanting to know what is true.
• Fear is the mother of morality.
• For art to exist, for any sort of aesthetic activity to exist, a certain physiological precondition is indispensable: intoxication.
• Genteel women suppose that those things do not really exist about which it is impossible to talk in polite company.
• Glance into the world just as though time were gone: and everything crooked will become straight to you.
• Go up close to your friend, but do not go over to him! We should also respect the enemy in our friend.
• God is a thought who makes crooked all that is straight.
• Great indebtedness does not make men grateful, but vengeful and if a little charity is not forgotten, it turns into a gnawing worm.
• He who fights with monsters might take care lest he thereby become a monster. Is not life a hundred times too short for us to bore ourselves?
• He who has a why to live can bear almost any how.
• He who laughs best today, will also laughs last.
• 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.
• Hope in reality is the worst of all evils because it prolongs the torments of man.
• I assess the power of a will by how much resistance, pain, torture it endures and knows how to turn to its advantage.
• I cannot believe in a God who wants to be praised all the time.
• I do not know what the spirit of a philosopher could more wish to be than a good dancer. For the dance is his ideal, also his fine art, finally also the only kind of piety he knows, his 'divine service.'