Friedrich Nietzsche

That which does not kill us makes us stronger.

God is dead! God remains dead! And we have killed him.

He who fights with monsters should look to it that he himself does not become a monster.

There are no facts, only interpretations.

When you look into an abyss, the abyss also looks into you.

Without music, life would be a mistake.

In individuals, insanity is rare; but in groups, parties, nations and epochs, it is the rule.

I cannot believe in a God who wants to be praised all the time.

The advantage of a bad memory is that one enjoys several times the same good things for the first time.

We should consider every day lost on which we have not danced at least once.

There is always some madness in love. But there is also always some reason in madness.

The higher we soar, the smaller we appear to those who cannot fly.

And those who were seen dancing were thought to be insane by those who could not hear the music.

He who would learn to fly one day must first learn to stand and walk and run and climb and dance.

The thought of suicide is a great consolation: by means of it one gets through many a dark night.

In truth, there was only one Christian, and he died on the cross.

What is done out of love always takes place beyond good and evil.

The snake which cannot cast its skin has to die.

One should hear a little music, read a little poetry, and see a fine picture every day.

It is not a lack of love, but a lack of friendship that makes unhappy marriages.

In heaven, all the interesting people are missing.

The essence of all beautiful art, all great art, is gratitude.

To live is to suffer, to survive is to find some meaning in the suffering.

There are horrible people who, instead of solving a problem, tangle it up and make it harder to solve.

Sometimes people don't want to hear the truth because they don't want their illusions destroyed.

The most spiritual human beings, assuming they are the most courageous, also experience by far the most painful tragedies.

No one can construct for you the bridge upon which precisely you must cross the stream of life.

The individual has always had to struggle to keep from being overwhelmed by the tribe.

What does your conscience say? — 'You shall become the person you are.'

Man is something that shall be overcome.

All truly great thoughts are conceived while walking.

There are no beautiful surfaces without a terrible depth.

A good writer possesses not only his own spirit but also the spirit of his friends.

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.

Is man merely a mistake of God's? Or God merely a mistake of man?

One repays a teacher badly if one always remains nothing but a pupil.

The most perfidious way of harming a cause consists of defending it deliberately with faulty arguments.

Hope in reality is the worst of all evils because it prolongs the torments of man.

A thinker sees his own actions as experiments and questions.

The secret for harvesting from existence the greatest fruitfulness and the greatest enjoyment is: to live dangerously!

What is great in man is that he is a bridge and not a goal.

One should part from life as Odysseus parted from Nausicaa—blessing it rather than in love with it.

The strength of a person's spirit would then be measured by how much 'truth' he could tolerate.

Every profound spirit needs a mask.

All great things must first wear terrifying and monstrous masks in order to inscribe themselves on the hearts of humanity.

The value of marriage lies not in the fact that healthy individuals are produced by it, but that it brings about a higher conception of the idea of humanity.

The doer alone learneth.

The worst enemy you can meet will always be yourself.

In praise there is more obtrusiveness than in blame.

Against boredom even gods struggle in vain.

Every word is a prejudice.

What is the seal of liberation? No longer being ashamed in front of oneself.

“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.”

“The Thought of Death. It gives me a melancholy happiness to live in the midst of this confusion of streets, of necessities, of voices: how much enjoyment, impatience and desire, how much thirsty life and drunkenness of life comes to light here every moment! And yet it will soon be so still for all these shouting, lively, life- loving people! How everyone's shadow, his gloomy travelling companion stands behind him! It is always as in the last moment before the departure of an emigrant- ship: people have more than ever to say to one another, the hour presses, the ocean with its lonely silence waits impatiently behind all the noise-so greedy, so certain of its prey! And all, all, suppose that the past has been nothing, or a small matter, that the near future is everything: hence this haste, this crying, this self-deafening and self-overreaching! Everyone wants to be foremost in this future-and yet death and the stillness of death are the only things certain and common to all in this future! How strange that this sole thing that is certain and common to all, exercises almost no influence on men, and that they are the furthest from regarding themselves as the brotherhood of death! It makes me happy to see that men do not want to think at all of the idea of death! I would fain do something to make the idea of life to us to be more than friends in the sense of that sublime possibility. And so we will believe in our even a hundred times more worthy of their attention.”

“Just as in the second part of a verse bad poets seek a thought to fit their rhyme, so in the second half of their lives people tend to become more anxious about finding actions, positions, relationships that fit those of their earlier lives, so that everything harmonizes quite well on the surface: but their lives are no longer ruled by a strong thought, and instead, in its place, comes the intention of finding a rhyme.”

“What, if some day or night a demon were to steal after you into your loneliest loneliness and say to you: 'This life as you now live it and have lived it, you will have to live once more and innumerable times more' ... Would you not throw yourself down and gnash your teeth and curse the demon who spoke thus? Or have you once experienced a tremendous moment when you would have answered him: 'You are a god and never have I heard anything more divine.”

“Success has always been the greatest liar - and the "work" itself is a success; the great statesman, the conqueror, the discoverer is disguised by his creations, often beyond recognition; the "work," whether of the artist or the philosopher, invents the man who has created it, who is supposed to have create it; "great men," as they are venerated, are subsequent pieces of wretched minor fiction”

“Love brings to light a lover's noble and hidden qualities-his rare and exceptional traits: it is thus liable to be deceptive of his normal qualities.”

“Deeds need time, even after they are done, in order to be seen or heard.”

“We talk so abstractly about poetry because all of us are usually bad poets.”

“How much truth does a spirit endure, how much truth does it dare?”

“There is a certain right by which we many deprive a man of life, but none by which we may deprive him of death; this is mere cruelty.”

“love as a passion—it is our European specialty—must absolutely be of noble origin; as is well known, its invention is due to the Provencal poet-cavaliers, those brilliant, ingenious men of the "gai saber," to whom Europe owes so much, and almost owes itself.”

“Amor Fati – “Love Your Fate”, which is in fact your life.”

“The spiritualization of sensuality is called love: it is a great triumph over Christianity.”

“What good is all this free-thinking, modernity, and turncoat flexibility if at some gut level you are still a Christian, a Catholic, and even a priest!”

“None of the people have any real interest in a science, who only begin to be enthusiastic about it when they themselves have made discoveries in it.”

“Glance into the world just as though time were gone: and everything crooked will become straight to you.”

“One ought to hold on to one's heart; for if one lets it go, one soon loses control of the head too.”

“Let us beware of saying that death is the opposite of life. The living being is only a species of the dead, and a very rare species.”

“Man does not strive for happiness; only the Englishman does that.”

“Sensuality often hastens the "Growth of Love" so much that the roots remain weak and are easily torn up.”

“The man of knowledge must be able not only to love his enemies but also to hate his friends.”

“Happiness: being able to forget or, to express in a more learned fashion.”

“No one dies of fatal truths nowadays: there are too many antidotes.”

“Belief means not wanting to know what is true.”

“The most perfidious way of harming a cause consists of defending it deliberately with faulty arguments.”

“There is no pre-established harmony between the furtherance of truth and the well-being of mankind.”

“Ultimately, it is the desire, not the desired, that we love.”

“One thing a man must have: either a naturally light disposition or a disposition lightened by art and knowledge.”

“Sometimes it is harder to accede to a thing than it is to see its truth.”

“The advantage of a bad memory is that one enjoys several times the same good things for the first time.”

“But I need solitude--which is to say, recovery, return to myself, the breath of a free, light, playful air.”

“There are no facts, only interpretations.”

“Poets are shameless with their experiences: they exploit them.”