Quotes by Friedrich Nietzsche

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

One must still have chaos in oneself to be able to give birth to a dancing star.

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?

Convictions are prisons.

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.

Arrogance on the part of the meritorious is even more offensive to us than the arrogance of those without merit: for merit itself is offensive.

It is hard enough to remember my opinions, without also remembering my reasons for them!

A joke is an epigram on the death of a feeling.

When we are tired, we are attacked by ideas we conquered long ago.

I would believe only in a God that knows how to dance.

The true man wants two things: danger and play. For that reason he wants woman, as the most dangerous plaything.

Doubt as sin. — Christianity has done its utmost to close the circle and declared even doubt to be sin. One is supposed to be cast into belief without reason, by a miracle, and from then on to swim in it as in the brightest and least ambiguous of elements: even a glance towards land, even the thought that one perhaps exists for something else as well as swimming, even the slightest impulse of our amphibious nature — is sin! And notice that all this means that the foundation of belief and all reflection on its origin is likewise excluded as sinful. What is wanted are blindness and intoxication and an eternal song over the waves in which reason has drowned.

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

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

Madness is something rare in individuals — but in groups, parties, peoples, and ages, it is the rule.

I am one thing, my writings are another.

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

If a man has character, he has also his typical experience, which always recurs.

Plato was a bore.

It is a self-deception of philosophers and moralists to imagine that they escape decadence by opposing it. That is beyond their will; and, however little they acknowledge it, one later discovers that they were among the most powerful promoters of decadence.