Friedrich Nietzsche Quotes

German philosopher (1844–1900)

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Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche (15 October 1844 – 25 August 1900) was a German philosopher, cultural critic, composer, poet, writer, and philologist whose work has exerted a profound influence on modern intellectual history. His critiques of contemporary culture, religion, and philosophy centered on a basic question regarding the foundation of values and morality.

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Alternative Names: Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche • Nietzsche

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Distrust all in whom the impulse to punish is powerful.

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.

One must give value to their existence by behaving as if ones very existence were a work of art.

If you know the why, you can live any how.

It is my ambition to say in ten sentences what others say in a whole book.

But 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 earthword, downword, into the dark, the deep - into evil.

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.

True, we love life, not because we are used to living, but because we are used to loving. There is always some madness in love, but there is also always some reason in madness.

Whenever I climb I am followed by a dog called 'Ego'.

I assess the power of a will by how much resistance, pain, torture it endures and knows how to turn to its advantage

Remorse. — Never yield to remorse, but at once tell yourself: remorse would simply mean adding to the first act of stupidity a second.

He who fights with monsters should look to it that he himself does not become a monster . . . when you gaze long into the abyss the abyss also gazes into you

Convictions are more dangerous foes of truth than lies.

For art to exist, for any sort of aesthetic activity or perception to exist, a certain physiological precondition is indispensable: intoxication.

To those human beings who are of any concern to me I wish suffering, desolation, sickness, ill-treatment, indignities — I wish that they should not remain unfamiliar with profound self-contempt, the torture of self-mistrust, the wretchedness of the vanquished: I have no pity for them, because I wish them the only thing that can prove today whether one is worth anything or not — that one endures.