Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche was a German philosopher. He began his career as a classical philologist before turning to philosophy.
He became the youngest person to hold the Chair of Classical Philology at the University of Basel in 1869 at the age of 24, but resigned in 1879 due to health problems that plagued him most of his life; he completed much of his core writing in the following decade. In 1889, at age 44, he suffered a collapse and afterward a complete loss of his mental faculties, with paralysis and probably vascular dementia.
He lived his remaining years in the care of his mother until her death in 1897 and then with his sister Elisabeth Förster-Nietzsche. Nietzsche died in 1900, after experiencing pneumonia and multiple strokes.
Nietzsche’s work spans philosophical polemics, poetry, cultural criticism, and fiction while displaying a fondness for aphorism and irony.
Quotes
| Human, all too human. |
| Woman was God’s second mistake. |
| Art is the proper task of life. |
| Only sick music makes money today. |
| Love is not consolation. It is light. |
| Without music, life would be a mistake. |
| In music the passions enjoy themselves. |
| There are no facts, only interpretations. |
| Love is blind; friendship closes its eyes. |
| We have art in order not to die of the truth. |
| Faith: not wanting to know what the truth is. |
| What is evil?-Whatever springs from weakness. |
| An artist has no home in Europe except in Paris. |
| In heaven, all the interesting people are missing. |
| I love those who do not know how to live for today. |
| In the mountains of truth, you never climb in vain. |
| Men submit from habit to everything that seeks power. |
| There is an old illusion. It is called good and evil. |
| I would believe only in a God that knows how to Dance. |
| Convictions are more dangerous foes of truth than lies. |
| Distrust all in whom the impulse to punish is powerful. |
| In revenge and in love, woman is more barbarous than man. |
| There are no eternal facts, as there are no absolute truths. |
| He who cannot give anything away cannot feel anything either. |
| Whatever is done for love always occurs beyond good and evil. |
| Is man one of God’s blunders? Or is God one of man’s blunders? |
| The essence of all beautiful art, all great art, is gratitude. |
| Poets are shameless with their experiences: they exploit them. |
| I cannot believe in a God who wants to be praised all the time. |
| In truth,there was only one christian and he died on the cross. |
| A nation that still believes in itself holds fast to its own god. |
| Is man merely a mistake of God’s? Or God merely a mistake of man? |
| What is done out of love always takes place beyond good and evil. |
| Sleeping is no mean art: for its sake one must stay awake all day. |
| Is it better to out-monster the monster or to be quietly devoured? |
| The demand to be loved is the greatest of all arrogant presumptions. |
| No power can be maintained when it is only represented by hypocrites. |
| How good music and bad reasons sound when one marches against an enemy. |
| Once spirit was God, then it became man, and now it is even becoming mob. |
| We should consider every day lost on which we have not danced at least once. |
| The bad gains respect through imitation, the good loses it especially in art. |
| Thoughts are the shadows of our feelings – always darker, emptier and simpler. |
| A pair of powerful spectacles has sometimes sufficed to cure a person in love. |
| It is not a lack of love, but a lack of friendship that makes unhappy marriages. |
| One must still have chaos in oneself to be able to give birth to a dancing star. |
| Of all that is written, I love only what a person has written with his own blood. |
| We love life, not because we are used to living but because we are used to loving. |
| I’m not upset that you lied to me, I’m upset that from now on I can’t believe you. |
| After coming into contact with a religious man I always feel I must wash my hands. |
| Without music, life would be an error. The German imagines even God singing songs. |
| If there is something to pardon in everything, there is also something to condemn. |
| Hope in reality is the worst of all evils because it prolongs the torments of man. |
| Just look at the faces of the great Christians! They are the faces of great haters. |
| Art is essentially the affirmation, the blessing, and the deification of existence. |
| A subject for a great poet would be God’s boredom after the seventh day of creation. |
| A casual stroll through the lunatic asylum shows that faith does not prove anything. |
| And we should call every truth false which was not accompanied by at least one laugh. |
| Jesus died too soon. If he had lived to my age he would have repudiated his doctrine. |
| There is always some madness in love. But there is also always some reason in madness. |
| There cannot be a God because if there were one, I could not believe that I was not He. |
| Belief in the truth commences with the doubting of all those “truths” we once believed. |
| The Christian resolution to find the world ugly and bad has made the world ugly and bad. |
| Be generous in nature and thought; for this wins respect and gives confidence and power. |
| Life is an instinct for growth, for survival, for the accumulation of forces, for power. |
| In Christianity neither morality nor religion come into contact with reality at any point. |
| Madness is rare in individuals – but in groups, parties, nations, and ages it is the rule. |
| This is the hardest of all: to close the open hand out of love, and keep modest as a giver. |
| Everything good is the transmutation of something evil: every god has a devil for a father. |
| The man of knowledge must be able not only to love his enemies but also to hate his friends. |
| Away from God and gods did this will lure me: what would there be to create if gods existed? |
| Without music, life would be a mistake… I would only believe in a God who knew how to dance. |
| Marriage: that I call the will of two to create the one who is more than those who created it. |
| A man’s maturity: that is to have rediscovered the seriousness he possessed as a child at play. |
| Sometimes people don’t want to hear the truth because they don’t want their illusions destroyed. |
| And those who were seen dancing were thought to be insane by those who could not hear the music. |
| One must give value to their existence by behaving as if ones very existence were a work of art. |
| Admiration for a quality or an art can be so strong that it deters us from striving to possess it. |
| There is not enough love and goodness in the world to permit giving any of it away to imaginary beings. |
| The great epochs of our life come when we gain the courage to rechristen our evil as what is best in us. |
| The more abstract the truth you want to teach, the more thoroughly you must seduce the senses to accept it. |
| Every church is a stone on the grave of a god-man: it does not want him to rise up again under any circumstances. |
| …throw roses into the abyss and say: ‘here is my thanks to the monster who didn’t succeed in swallowing me alive. |
| In every ascetic morality man worships a part of himself as God and for that he needs to diabolize the other part. |
| Do not paint a picture either of God or the devil on your walls: this will ruin both your walls and the atmosphere. |
| The world itself is the will to power – and nothing else! And you yourself are the will to power – and nothing else! |
| I assess the power of a will by how much resistance, pain, torture it endures and knows how to turn to its advantage. |
| It is not when truth is dirty, but when it is shallow, that the lover of knowledge is reluctant to step into its waters. |
| Around the hero everything turns into a tragedy, around the demigod, a satyr-play, and around God–what? perhaps a “world”? |
| All things are subject to interpretation whichever interpretation prevails at a given time is a function of power and not truth. |
| All things are subject to interpretation. Whichever interpretation prevails at a given time is a function of power and not truth. |
| If you have an enemy, do not requite him evil with good, for that would put him to shame. Rather prove that he did you some good. |
| What else is love but understanding and rejoicing in the fact that another person lives acts and experiences otherwise than we do? |
| Today I love myself as I love my god: who could charge me with a sin today? I know only sins against my god; but who knows my god? |
| Digressions, objections, delight in mockery, carefree mistrust are signs of health; everything unconditional belongs in pathology. |
| 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. |
| That God became man indicates only this: that man should not seek his salvation in eternity, but rather establish his heaven on earth. |
| There is one thing one has to have either a soul that is cheerful by nature, or a soul made cheerful by work, love, art, and knowledge…. |
| God is dead, but considering the state the species man is in, there will perhaps be caves, for ages yet, in which his shadow will be shown. |
| In short, then, the religious cult is based upon the representations of sorcery between man and man, and the sorcerer is older than the priest. |
| 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. |