46 Nietzsche Quotes

Friedrich Nietzsche, a German philosopher known for his profound and often provocative ideas, has left a lasting legacy through his extensive body of work. His thoughts on life, morality, and the human condition continue to inspire, challenge, and resonate with readers across generations. In this blog post, we have carefully selected 46 of Nietzsche's most powerful quotes, capturing the essence of his complex and revolutionary philosophy. Whether you're a long-time admirer or just beginning your exploration of his writings, these quotes are sure to provoke thought and stir your spirit. Dive into the mind of one of history's most enigmatic thinkers and discover insights that can both enlighten and unsettle.

1. “The familiarity of superiors embitters one, because it may not be returned.” - Friedrich Nietzsche

2. “If a man has character, he has also his typical experience, which always recurs.” - Friedrich Nietzsche

3. “as the "people of the centre" in everysense of the term, the Germans are more intangible, more ample, more contradictory, more unknown, more incalculable, more surprising, and even more terrifying than other peoples are to themselves:--they escape DEFINITION, and are thereby alone the despair of the French.” - Friedrich Nietzsche

4. “A nation is a detour of nature to arrive at five or six great men- yes, and then to get around them.” - Friedrich Nietzsche

5. “Are you going to change yet again, shift your position according to the questions that are put to you, and say that the objections are not really directed at the place from which you are speaking? Are you going to declare yet again that you have never been what you have been reproached with being? Are you already preparing the way out that will enable you in your next book to spring up somewhere else and declare as you're now doing: no, no, I'm not where you are lying in wait for me, but over here, laughing at you?' 'What, do you imagine that I would take so much trouble and so much pleasure in writing, do you think that I would keep so persistently to my task, if I were not preparing – with a rather shaky hand – a labyrinth into which I can venture, into which I can move my discourse... in which I can lose myself and appear at last to eyes that I will never have to meet again. I am no doubt not the only one who writes in order to have no face. Do not ask who I am and do not ask me to remain the same: leave it to our bureaucrats and our police to see that our papers are in order. At least spare us their morality when we write.” - Michel Foucault

6. “You would not enjoy Nietzsche, sir. He is fundamentally unsound.” - P.G. Wodehouse

7. “My genius is in my nostrils.” - Friederich Nietzsche

8. “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

9. “Physiologists should think before putting down the instinct of self-preservation as the cardinal instinct of an organic being. 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

10. “A man who wills commands something within himself that renders obedience, or that he believes renders obedience.” - Friedrich Nietzsche

11. “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

12. “Those who have a 'why' to live, can bear with almost any 'how'.” - Viktor E. Frankl

13. “No other German writer of comparable stature has been a more extreme critic of German nationalism than Nietzsche.” - Walter Kaufmann

14. “For this is how things are: the diminution and leveling of European man constitutes our greatest danger, for the sight of him makes us weary.—We can see nothing today that wants to grow greater, we suspect that things will continue to go down, down, to become thinner, more good-natured, more prudent, more comfortable, more mediocre, more indifferent, more Chinese, more Christian—there is no doubt that man is getting 'better' all the time.” - Friedrich Nietzsche

15. “You desire to LIVE "according to Nature"? Oh, you noble Stoics, what fraud of words! Imagine to yourselves a being like Nature, boundlessly extravagant, boundlessly indifferent, without purpose or consideration, without pity or justice, at once fruitful and barren and uncertain: imagine to yourselves INDIFFERENCE as a power—how COULD you live in accordance with such indifference? To live—is not that just endeavouring to be otherwise than this Nature? Is not living valuing, preferring, being unjust, being limited, endeavouring to be different? And granted that your imperative, "living according to Nature," means actually the same as "living according to life"—how could you do DIFFERENTLY? Why should you make a principle out of what you yourselves are, and must be? In reality, however, it is quite otherwise with you: while you pretend to read with rapture the canon of your law in Nature, you want something quite the contrary, you extraordinary stage-players and self-deluders! In your pride you wish to dictate your morals and ideals to Nature, to Nature herself, and to incorporate them therein; you insist that it shall be Nature "according to the Stoa," and would like everything to be made after your own image, as a vast, eternal glorification and generalism of Stoicism! With all your love for truth, you have forced yourselves so long, so persistently, and with such hypnotic rigidity to see Nature FALSELY, that is to say, Stoically, that you are no longer able to see it otherwise—and to crown all, some unfathomable superciliousness gives you the Bedlamite hope that BECAUSE you are able to tyrannize over yourselves—Stoicism is self-tyranny—Nature will also allow herself to be tyrannized over: is not the Stoic a PART of Nature?... But this is an old and everlasting story: what happened in old times with the Stoics still happens today, as soon as ever a philosophy begins to believe in itself. It always creates the world in its own image; it cannot do otherwise; philosophy is this tyrannical impulse itself, the most spiritual Will to Power, the will to "creation of the world," the will to the causa prima.” - Friedrich Nietzsche

16. “Ahistorical commentators who too readily dismiss Nietzsche's interest in physiological questions (e.g., DeMan 1979: 119; Nehamas 1985: 120) miss the centrality of such ways of thinking to Nietzsche's naturalism and to the whole intellectual climate of the period. 'The naturalization of the image of man under the influence of natural science was the work of the materialist movement of the middle of the century' (Schnädelbach 1983: 229). In this regard, Nietzsche was very much a thinker of his times.” - Brian Leiter

17. “They were handsome, proper and normal family fathers who built the concentration camps and whipped the prisoners to death. And who was Nietzsche? A narcotized syphilitic.” - Jens Bjørneboe

18. “It is the fate of great achievements, born from a way of life that sets truth before security, to be gobbled up by you and excreted in the form of shit. For centuries great, brave, lonely men have been telling you what to do. Time and again you have corrupted, diminished and demolished their teachings; time and again you have been captivated by their weakest points, taken not the great truth, but some trifling error as your guiding principal. This, little man, is what you have done with Christianity, with the doctrine of sovereign people, with socialism, with everything you touch. Why, you ask, do you do this? I don't believe you really want an answer. When you hear the truth you'll cry bloody murder, or commit it. … You had your choice between soaring to superhuman heights with Nietzsche and sinking into subhuman depths with Hitler. You shouted Heil! Heil! and chose the subhuman. You had the choice between Lenin's truly democratic constitution and Stalin's dictatorship. You chose Stalin's dictatorship. You had your choice between Freud's elucidation of the sexual core of your psychic disorders and his theory of cultural adaptation. You dropped the theory of sexuality and chose his theory of cultural adaptation, which left you hanging in mid-air. You had your choice between Jesus and his majestic simplicity and Paul with his celibacy for priests and life-long compulsory marriage for yourself. You chose the celibacy and compulsory marriage and forgot the simplicity of Jesus' mother, who bore her child for love and love alone. You had your choice between Marx's insight into the productivity of your living labor power, which alone creates the value of commodities and the idea of the state. You forgot the living energy of your labor and chose the idea of the state. In the French Revolution, you had your choice between the cruel Robespierre and the great Danton. You chose cruelty and sent greatness and goodness to the guillotine. In Germany you had your choice between Goring and Himmler on the one hand and Liebknecht, Landau, and Muhsam on the other. You made Himmler your police chief and murdered your great friends. You had your choice between Julius Streicher and Walter Rathenau. You murdered Rathenau. You had your choice between Lodge and Wilson. You murdered Wilson. You had your choice between the cruel Inquisition and Galileo's truth. You tortured and humiliated the great Galileo, from whose inventions you are still benefiting, and now, in the twentieth century, you have brought the methods of the Inquisition to a new flowering. … Every one of your acts of smallness and meanness throws light on the boundless wretchedness of the human animal. 'Why so tragic?' you ask. 'Do you feel responsible for all evil?' With remarks like that you condemn yourself. If, little man among millions, you were to shoulder the barest fraction of your responsibility, the world would be a very different place. Your great friends wouldn't perish, struck down by your smallness.” - Wilhelm Reich

19. “What then is truth? A mobile army of metaphors, metonyms, and anthropomorphisms—in short, a sum of human relations which have been enhanced, transposed, and embellished poetically and rhetorically, and which after long use seem firm, canonical, and obligatory to a people: truths are illusions about which one has forgotten that this is what they are; metaphors which are worn out and without sensuous power; coins which have lost their pictures and now matter only as metal, no longer as coins.” - Friedrich Nietzsche

20. “Die Forderung, geliebt zu werden, ist die größte der Anmaßungen.” - Friedrich Nietzsche

21. “O puro espírito é pura mentira. Enquanto o padre continuar a passar por ser uma espécie superior - o padre, esse negador, esse caluniador, esse envenenador da vida por profissão - , não há resposta para a pergunta: que é a verdade? A verdade fica logo colocada em cima da cabeça, se o advogado confesso do nada e da negação passa por ser o representante da verdade...” - Friedrich Nietzsche

22. “We can never comprehend the depths of gloom of night in the light of day".” - Matthew Strecher

23. “The real world is much smaller than the imaginary” - Friedrich Nietzsche

24. “When you stare into the abyss the abyss stares back at you.” - Friedrich Nietzsche

25. “One has to take a somewhat bold and dangerous line with this existence: especially as, whatever happens, we are bound to lose it.” - Friedrich Nietzsche

26. “What is good? All that heightens the feeling of power, 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.” - Friedrich Nietzsche

27. “Everyone who has ever built anywhere a new heaven first found the power thereto in his own hell.” - Friedrich Nietzsche

28. “The mother of excess is not joy but joylessness.” - Friedrich Nietzsche

29. “In the later part of his creative life Nietzsche suffered acutely from loneliness. Like his alter ego, Zarathustra, he found himself alone on a (Swiss) mountain top. But, intellectually at least, he accepted this condition. Since, he reasoned, a radical social critic, a 'free spirit' such as himself, sets himself ever more in opposition to the foundational agreements on which social life depends, he reduces the pool of possible comrades, and so of possible friends, to vanishing point.” - Julian Young

30. “Everything goes, everything comes back; eternally rolls the wheel of being. Everything dies, everything blossoms again; eternally runs the year of being. Everything breaks, everything is joined anew; eternally the same House of Being is built. Everything parts, everything greets every other thing again; eternally the ring of being remains faithful to itself. In every Now, being begins; round every Here rolls the sphere There. The center is everywhere. Bent is the path of eternity.” - Friedrich Nietzsche

31. “This kind of renunciation, in fact, has often been the strength, born of necessity, of the world's disinherited, of those who do not fit in with their surroundings or with their own body or with their own race or tradition and who hope, by means of renunciation, to assure for themselves a future world where, to use a Nietzschean expression, the inversion of all values will occur.” - Julius Evola

32. “But is eternity an alternative to life? Isn't it, on the contrary, the case that it is when one wants everything to be eternal that one most loves life and the world.” - Alexander Nehamas

33. “The consequences of our actions take hold of us, quite indifferent to our claim that meanwhile we have 'improved.” - Friedrich Nietzsche

34. “Nietzsche’s point is that the world does not present itself as an indifferent array of inert facts. The world tempts and repulses, threatens and charms; certain features impress themselves upon us, others recede into the perphery, unnoticed. Our experience of the world is fundamentally value-laden.” - Paul Katsafanas

35. “If you stare at someone long enough, they'll eventually look back at you.” - Cory Doctorow

36. “The priest invents and encourages every kind of suffering and distress so that man may not have the opportunity to become scientific, which requires a considerable degree of free time, health, and an outlook of confident positivism. Thus, the religious authorities work hard to make and keep people feeling sinful, unworthy, and unhappy.” - Robert Sheaffer

37. “And as long as you are in any way ashamed before yourself, you do not yet belong with us.” - Friedrich Nietzsche

38. “Love of one is a piece of barbarism: for it is practised at the expense of all others. Love of God likewise.” - Friedrich Nietzsche

39. “Herkes aynı yemeği yemekten bıkar. Her güzel kadının olduğu yerde, bir de onu düzmekten bıkmış zavallı bir erkek vardır!” - Irvin D. Yalom

40. “Socialism, Puritanism, Philistinism, Christianity—he saw them all as allotropic forms of democracy, as variations upon the endless struggle of quantity against quality, of the weak and timorous against the strong and enterprising, of the botched against the fit.” - H.L. Mencken

41. “Almighty God, I am sorry I am now an atheist, but have You read Nietzsche?” - John Fante

42. “It has gradually become clear to me what every great philosophy up till now has consisted of – namely, the confession of its originator, and a species of involuntary and unconscious autobiography; and moreover that the moral (or immoral) purpose in every philosophy has constituted the true vital germ out of which the entire plant has always grown.” - Friedrich Nietzsche

43. “What Pascal overlooked was the hair-raising possibility that God might out-Luther Luther. A special area in hell might be reserved for those who go to mass. Or God might punish those whose faith is prompted by prudence. Perhaps God prefers the abstinent to those who whore around with some denomination he despises. Perhaps he reserves special rewards for those who deny themselves the comfort of belief. Perhaps the intellectual ascetic will win all while those who compromised their intellectual integrity lose everything.There are many other possibilities. There might be many gods, including one who favors people like Pascal; but the other gods might overpower or outvote him, à la Homer. Nietzsche might well have applied to Pascal his cutting remark about Kant: when he wagered on God, the great mathematician 'became an idiot.” - Walter Kaufmann

44. “Croire qu’il lui appartient de dépasser sa condition et de s’orienter vers celle de surhomme, c’est oublier qu’il a du mal à tenir le coup en tant qu’homme, et qu’il n’y parvient qu’à force de tendre sa volonté, son ressort, au maximum.” - Emil Cioran

45. “Life was indeed cruel; but it was better to glorify the Will than deny it.” - john gray

46. “For your Bildung you should choose the most difficult and splendid problem, but as subject for a dissertation choose no more than a very limited and remote corner.” - Friedrich Nietzsche