BY SOFO ARCHON
Here are over 200 hand-picked quotes from the sharp mind of one my most-loved philosophers, Friedrich Nietzsche, on topics such as love, morality, truth, god, religion, power, happiness, and many more.
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“There are no facts, only interpretations.”
“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.”
“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.”
“Art is the supreme task and the truly metaphysical activity in this life.”
“Underneath this reality in which we live and have our being, another and altogether different reality lies concealed.”
“We obtain the concept, as we do the form, by overlooking what is individual and actual; whereas nature is acquainted with no forms and no concepts, and likewise with no species, but only with an X which remains inaccessible and undefinable for us.”
“Everything which distinguishes man from the animals depends upon this ability to volatilize perceptual metaphors in a schema, and thus to dissolve an image into a concept.”
“Our destiny exercises its influence over us even when, as yet, we have not learned its nature: it is our future that lays down the law of our today.”
“The advantage of a bad memory is that one can enjoy the same good things for the first time several times.”
“No one talks more passionately about his rights than he who in the depths of his soul doubts whether he has any. By enlisting passion on his side he wants to stifle his reason and its doubts: thus he will acquire a good conscience and with it success among his fellow men.”
“Many a man fails to become a thinker only because his memory is too good.”
“In the mountains of truth you will never climb in vain: either you will get up higher today or you will exercise your strength so as to be able to get up higher tomorrow.”
“Convictions are more dangerous enemies of truth than lies.”
“The more one seeks to rise into height and light, the more vigorously do ones roots struggle earthward, downward, into the dark, the deep — into evil.”
“Their wisdom speaks thus: “Only a fool remains alive, but such fools are we! And that is surely the most foolish thing about life!””
“I know of the hatred and envy of your hearts. You are not great enough not to know hatred and envy. Then be great enough not to be ashamed of them!”
“Watch them clamber, these swift monkeys! They clamber over one another and thus drag one another into the mud and the depth. They all want to get to the throne: that is their madness — as if happiness sat on the throne. Often, mud sits on the throne — and often the throne also on mud.”
“The true man wants two things: danger and play. For that reason he wants woman, as the most dangerous toy.”
“Man… cannot learn to forget, but hangs on the past: however far or fast he runs, that chain runs with him.”
“Philosophy is not suited for the masses, what they need is holiness.”
And whoever does not want to die of thirst among men must learn to drink out of all cups; and whoever would stay clean among men must know how to wash even with dirty water.
“People are always angry at anyone who chooses very individual standards for his life; because of the extraordinary treatment which that man grants to himself, they feel degraded, like ordinary beings.”
“The higher we soar, the smaller we appear to those who cannot fly.”
“Without music, life would be a mistake.”
“One is finally tempted to divide mankind into a minority (minimality) of those people who know how to make much out of little and a majority of those who know how to make a little out of much; indeed, one meets those perverse wizards who, instead of creating the world out of nothing, create nothing out of the world.”
“It is not the struggle of opinions that has made history so violent, but rather the struggle of belief in opinions, that is, the struggle of convictions.”
“For those who need consolation no means of consolation is so effective as the assertion that in their case no consolation is possible: it implies so great a degree of distinction that they at once hold up their heads again.”
“We are, all of us, growing volcanoes that approach the hour of their eruption; but how near or distant that is, nobody knows — not even God.”
“Possessions are generally diminished by possession.”
“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.”
“Mystical explanations are considered deep; the truth is, they are not even shallow.”
“The Christian resolution to find the world ugly and bad has made the world ugly and bad.”
“What is now decisive against Christianity is our taste, no longer our reasons.”
“We are always in our own company.”
“Thoughts are the shadows of our feelings — always darker, emptier, simpler.”
“Become who you are.’
“What is it: is man only a blunder of God, or God only a blunder of man?”
“Young people love what is interesting and odd, no matter how true or false it is. More mature minds love what is interesting and odd about truth. Fully mature intellects, finally, love truth, even when it appears plain and simple, boring to the ordinary person; for they have noticed that truth tends to reveal its highest wisdom in the guise of simplicity.”
“That which does not kill us makes us stronger.”
“One pays dearly for being immortal: one has to die several times while alive.”
“Christianity is a metaphysics of the hangman.”
“Freedom is the will to be responsible for ourselves. It is to preserve the distance which separates us from other men. To grow more indifferent to hardship, to severity, to privation, and even to life itself.”
“What is the seal of liberation? — No longer being ashamed in front of oneself.”
“For believe me! — the secret for harvesting from existence the greatest fruitfulness and the greatest enjoyment is: to live dangerously!”
“We want to be poets of our life — first of all in the smallest most everyday matters.”
“Whatever has value in our world now does not have value in itself, according to its nature — nature is always value-less, but has been given value at some time, as a present — and it was we who gave and bestowed it.”
“I would not know what the spirit of a philosopher might wish more to be than a good dancer.”
“Only those who keep changing remain akin to me.”
“You great star, what would your happiness be had you not those for whom you shine?”
“Every word instantly becomes a concept precisely insofar as it is not supposed to serve as a reminder of the unique and entirely individual original experience to which it owes its origin; but rather, a word becomes a concept insofar as it simultaneously has to fit countless more or less similar cases — which means, purely and simply, cases which are never equal and thus altogether unequal. Every concept arises from the equation of unequal things. Just as it is certain that one leaf is never totally the same as another, so it is certain that the concept “leaf” is formed by arbitrarily discarding these individual differences and by forgetting the distinguishing aspects.”
“You have evolved from worm to man, but much within you is still worm. Once you were apes, yet even now man is more of an ape than any of the apes.”
“I tell you: one must still have chaos within oneself, to give birth to a dancing star.”
“There is always some madness in love. But there is also always some reason in madness.”
“Brave, unconcerned, mocking, violent–thus wisdom wants us: she is a woman, and loves only a warrior.”
“Some are born posthumously.”
“What is good? All that heightens the feeling of power in man, the will to power, power itself. What is bad? All that is born of weakness. What is happiness? The feeling that power is growing, that resistance is overcome.”
“I would only believe in a God that knows how to dance.”
“Not by wrath does one kill, but by laughter.”
“You look up when you wish to be exalted. And I look down because I am exalted.”
“It is the stillest words that bring on the storm.”
“That something is irrational is no argument against its existence, but rather a condition for it.”
“We belong to a time in which culture is in danger of being destroyed by the means of culture.”
“The flame is not so bright to itself as to those on whom it shines: so too the wise man.”
“Whence come the highest mountains? I once asked. Then I learned that they came out of the sea. The evidence is written in their rocks and in the walls of their peaks. It is out of the deepest depth that the highest must come to its height.”
“Whatever has its price has little value.”
“Not whence you came shall henceforth constitute your honor, but whither you are going! Your will and your foot which has a will to go over and beyond yourselves — that shall constitute your new honor.”
“O my brothers, your nobility should not look backward but ahead! Exiles shall you be from all father- and forefather-lands! Your children’s land shall you love: this love shall be your new nobility — the undiscovered land in the most distant sea.”
“Free from what? As if that mattered to Zarathustra! But your eyes should tell me brightly: free for what?”
“Behind a remarkable scholar we not infrequently find an average human being, and behind an average artist we often find a very remarkable human being.”
“Those you cannot teach to fly, teach to fall faster.”
“The noble soul reveres itself.”
“It is not conflict of opinions that has made history so violent but conflict of belief in opinions, that is to say conflict of convictions.”
“Close beside my knowledge lies my black ignorance.”
“In Christianity neither morality nor religion come into contact with reality at any point.”
It is true: we love life not because we are used to living, but because we are used to loving.”
“We have already gone beyond whatever we have words for. In all talk there is a grain of contempt.
“Love is a state in which a man sees things most decidedly as they are not.”
“As is well known, the priests are the most evil enemies — but why? Because they are the most impotent. It is because of their impotence that in them hatred grows to monstrous and uncanny proportions, to the most spiritual and poisonous kind of hatred.”
“That every will must consider every other will its equal — would be a principle hostile to life, an agent of the dissolution and destruction of man, an attempt to assassinate the future of man, a sign of weariness, a secret path to nothingness.”
“It is no small art to sleep: for that purpose you must keep awake all day.”
“In the mountains, the shortest way is from peak to peak: but for that, you need long legs. Aphorisms should be peaks: and those to whom they are spoken, big and tall.”
“There is more wisdom in your body than in your deepest philosophy.”
“Of all that is written, I love only what a man has written with his own blood.”
“The broad effects which can be obtained by punishment in man and beast are the increase of fear, the sharpening of the sense of cunning, the mastery of the desires; so it is that punishment tames man, but does not make him “better.”
“All instincts that do not discharge themselves outwardly turn inward — this is what I call the internalization of man: thus it was that man first developed what was later called his ‘soul’.”
“The sick are the greatest danger for the healthy; it is not from the strongest that harm comes to the strong, but from the weakest.”
“What then is truth? A movable host of metaphors, metonymies, and anthropomorphisms: in short, a sum of human relations which have been poetically and rhetorically intensified, transferred, and embellished, and which, after long usage, seem to a people to be fixed, canonical, and binding. Truths are illusions which we have forgotten are illusions — they are metaphors that have become worn out and have been drained of sensuous force, coins which have lost their embossing and are now considered as metal and no longer as coins.”
“A strong and well-constituted man digests his experiences (deeds and misdeeds all included) just as he digests his meats, even when he has some tough morsels to swallow.”
“The doctrine of equality! … But there is no more venomous poison in existence: for it appears to be preached by justice itself, when it is actually the end of justice … “Equality to the equal; inequality to the unequal” — that would be true justice speaking: and its corollary, ‘never make the unequal equal’.”
“This is the hardest of all: to close the open hand out of love, and keep modest as a giver.”
“The very word “Christianity” is a misunderstanding — in truth, there was only one Christian, and he died on the cross.”
“Against boredom even gods struggle in vain.”
“That faith makes blessed under certain circumstances, that blessedness does not make of a fixed idea a true idea, that faith moves no mountains but puts mountains where there are none: a quick walk through a madhouse enlightens one sufficiently about this.”
“‘Faith’ means not wanting to know what is true.”
“The knight of knowledge must be able not only to love his enemies, but also to hate his friends.”
“Nothing on earth consumes a man more quickly than the passion of resentment.”
“To become what one is, one must not have the faintest idea what one is.”
“This is the antinomy: Insofar as we believe in morality we pass sentence on existence.”
“Morality is: the mediocre are worth more than the exceptions.”
“It is possible to imagine a society flushed with such a sense of power that it could afford to let its offenders go unpunished.”
“No shepherd, and one herd! Everyone wants the same, everyone is the same: whoever feels different goes willingly into the madhouse.”
‘The various languages placed side by side show that with words it is never a question of truth, never a question of adequate expression; otherwise, there would not be so many languages. The “thing in itself” (which is precisely what the pure truth, apart from any of its consequences, would be) is likewise something quite incomprehensible to the creator of language and something not in the least worth striving for. This creator only designates the relations of things to men, and for expressing these relations he lays hold of the boldest metaphors.’ To begin with, a nerve stimulus is transferred into an image: first metaphor. The image, in turn, is imitated in a sound: second metaphor. And each time there is a complete overleaping of one sphere, right into the middle of an entirely new and different one.”
“We believe that we know something about the things themselves when we speak of trees, colors, snow, and flowers; and yet we possess nothing but metaphors for things — metaphors which correspond in no way to the original entities.”
“It is not a lack of love, but a lack of friendship that makes unhappy marriages.”
“I’m not upset that you lied to me, I’m upset that from now on I can’t believe you.”
“You have your way. I have my way. As for the right way, the correct way, and the only way, it does not exist.”
“In heaven, all the interesting people are missing.”
“Those who were seen dancing were thought to be insane by those who could not hear the music.”
“We should consider every day lost on which we have not danced at least once.”
“Sometimes people don’t want to hear the truth because they don’t want their illusions destroyed.”
“I cannot believe in a God who wants to be praised all the time.”
“He who has a why to live for can bear almost any how.”
“Be careful, lest in casting out your demon you exorcise the best thing in you.”
“A good writer possesses not only his own spirit but also the spirit of his friends.”
“Two great European narcotics, alcohol and Christianity.”
“Man believes that the world itself is filled with beauty — he forgets that it is he who has created it. He alone has bestowed beauty upon the world — alas! only a very human, an all too human, beauty.”
“It is my ambition to say in ten sentences what everyone else says in a whole book — what everyone else does not say in a whole book.”
“There are no beautiful surfaces without a terrible depth.”
“Every deep thinker is more afraid of being understood than of being misunderstood.”
“Art is the proper task of life.”
“What labels me, negates me.”
“That which is done out of love is always beyond good and evil.”
“All things are subject to interpretation. Whichever interpretation prevails at a given time is a function of power and not truth.”
“He who would learn to fly one day must first learn to walk and run and climb and dance; one cannot fly into flying.”
“Only idiots fail to contradict themselves three times a day.”
“Invisible threads are the strongest ties.”
“After coming into contact with a religious man I always feel I must wash my hands.”
“They muddy the water, to make it seem deep.”
“Talking much about oneself can also be a means to conceal oneself.”
“I know of no better life purpose than to perish in attempting the great and the impossible.”
“A thought, even a possibility, can shatter and transform us.”
“The voice of beauty speaks softly; it creeps only into the most fully awakened souls.”
“Is life not a thousand times too short for us to bore ourselves?”
“Silence is worse; all truths that are kept silent become poisonous.”
“There are no eternal facts, as there are no absolute truths.”
“But thus do I counsel you, my friends: distrust all in whom the impulse to punish is powerful! They are people of bad race and lineage; out of their countenances peer the hangman and the sleuth-hound. Distrust all those who talk much of their justice! Verily, in their souls not only honey is lacking. And when they call themselves ‘the good and just,’ forget not, that for them to be Pharisees, nothing is lacking but — power!”
“One must give value to their existence by behaving as if ones very existence were a work of art.”
“Ultimately, it is the desire, not the desired, that we love.”
“It is not when truth is dirty, but when it is shallow, that the lover of knowledge is reluctant to step into its waters.”
“Hope in reality is the worst of all evils because it prolongs the torments of man.”
“One ought to hold on to one’s heart; for if one lets it go, one soon loses control of the head too.”
“Perhaps I know best why it is man alone who laughs; he alone suffers so deeply that he had to invent laughter.”
“In individuals, insanity is rare; but in groups, parties, nations and epochs, it is the rule.”
“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.”
“Man is the cruelest animal.”
“There are two different types of people in the world, those who want to know, and those who want to believe.”
“Stupidity in a woman is unfeminine.”
“When someone hides something behind a bush and looks for it again in the same place and finds it there as well, there is not much to praise in such seeking and finding. Yet this is how matters stand regarding seeking and finding “truth” within the realm of reason. If I make up the definition of a mammal, and then, after inspecting a camel, declare “look, a mammal’ I have indeed brought a truth to light in this way, but it is a truth of limited value. That is to say, it is a thoroughly anthropomorphic truth which contains not a single point which would be “true in itself” or really and universally valid apart from man. At bottom, what the investigator of such truths is seeking is only the metamorphosis of the world into man.”
“You must be ready to burn yourself in your own flame; how could you rise anew if you have not first become ashes?”
“Many are stubborn in pursuit of the path they have chosen. Few in pursuit of the goal.”
“Truths are illusions which we have forgotten are illusions.”
“It is impossible to suffer without making someone pay for it; every complaint already contains revenge.”
“The pure soul is a pure lie.”
“Morality is the herd-instinct in the individual.”
“Not every end is the goal. 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.”
“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.”
“There will always be rocks in the road ahead of us. They will be stumbling blocks or stepping stones; it all depends on how you use them.”
“What is the truth, but a lie agreed upon.”
“Dancing in all its forms cannot be excluded from the curriculum of all noble education; dancing with the feet, with ideas, with words, and, need I add that one must also be able to dance with the pen?”
“All credibility, all good conscience, all evidence of truth come only from the senses.”
“Love, too, has to be learned.”
“Man’s maturity: to have regained the seriousness that he had as a child at play.”
“I love the great despisers because they are the great adorers.”
“That for which we find words is something already dead in our hearts.”
“As long as you still experience the stars as something “above you”, you lack the eye of knowledge.’
“I love him who seeks to create over and beyond himself and thus perishes.”
“Every true faith is infallible. It performs what the believing person hopes to find in it. But it does not offer the least support for the establishing of an objective truth. Here the ways of men divide. If you want to achieve peace of mind and happiness, have faith. If you want to be a disciple of truth, then search.”
“All great things must first wear terrifying and monstrous masks, in order to inscribe themselves on the hearts of humanity.”
“You say that a good cause will even sanctify war! I tell you, it is the good war that sanctifies every cause!”
“The concept of “God” has hitherto been the greatest objection to existence.”
“I am no man, I am dynamite.”
“One must not let oneself be misled: they say ‘Judge not!’ but they send to Hell everything that stands in their way.”
“Every talent must unfold itself in fighting.”
“The essence of all beautiful art, all great art, is gratitude.”
“A moral system valid for all is basically immoral.”
“There is not enough religion in the world to destroy the world’s religions.”
“Life is that which must overcome itself again and again.”
“Once you are awake, you shall remain awake eternally.”
“Love is not consolation. It is light.”
“The life of the enemy . Whoever lives for the sake of combating an enemy has an interest in the enemy’s staying alive.”
“A thought comes when it will, not when I will.”
“I have learned to walk: since then I have run. I have learned to fly: since then I do not have to be pushed in order to move. Now I am nimble, now I fly, now I see myself under myself, now a god dances within me.”
“I change too quickly: my today refutes my yesterday. When I ascend I often jump over steps, and no step forgives me that.”
“Joyous distrust is a sign of health. Everything absolute belongs to pathology.”
“God is a thought who makes crooked all that is straight.”
“What else is love but understanding and rejoicing in the fact that another person lives acts and experiences otherwise than we do?”
“The believer in magic and miracles reflects on how to impose a law on nature–: and, in brief, the religious cult is the outcome of this reflection.”
“A politician divides mankind into two classes: tools and enemies.”
“The desire for a strong faith is not the proof of a strong faith, rather the opposite. If one has it one may permit oneself the beautiful luxury of skepticism: one is secure enough, fixed enough for it.”
“Existence really is an imperfect tense that never becomes a present.”
“No one can draw more out of things, books included, than he already knows. A man has no ears for that to which experience has given him no access.’
“When one has not had a good father, one must create one.”
“We ought to face our destiny with courage.”
“Deeds need time, even after they are done, in order to be seen or heard.’
“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.”
“Companions the creator seeks, not corpses, not herds and believers. Fellow creators the creator seeks — those who write new values on new tablets. Companions the creator seeks, and fellow harvesters; for everything about him is ripe for the harvest.”
“Come, let us kill the spirit of gravity!”
“Every word is a prejudice.”
“You say ‘I’ and you are proud of this word. But greater than this- although you will not believe in it – is your body and its great intelligence, which does not say ‘I’ but performs ‘I’.”
“Only Individuals have a sense of responsibility.”
“Knowledge kills action; action requires the veils of illusion.”
“He who fights too long against dragons becomes a dragon himself; and if you gaze too long into the abyss, the abyss will gaze into you.”
“We labour at our daily work more ardently and thoughtlessly than is necessary to sustain our life because it is even more necessary not to have leisure to stop and think. Haste is universal because everyone is in flight from himself.”
“One should die proudly when it is no longer possible to live proudly.”
Thanks to The Unbounded Spirit for this article