Quotes by Friedrich Nietzsche

hitherto we have been permitted to seek beauty only in the morally good - a fact which sufficiently accounts for our having found so little of it and having had to seek about for imaginary beauties without backbone! - As surely as the wicked enjoy a hundred kinds of happiness of which the virtuous have no inkling, so too they possess a hundred kinds of beauty: and many of them have not yet been discovered.

Is the world really beautified by the fact that man thinks it beautiful? He has humanized it, that is all.

In Christianity neither morality nor religion come into contact with reality at any point.

The word Christianity is already a misunderstanding; in reality there has been only one Christian, and he died on the cross.

Dangerous Helpfulness. There are people who want to make mens lives more difficult for no other reason than afterwards to offer them their prescriptions for making life easier -- their Christianity, for example.

Christianity gave Eros poison to drink; he did not die of it, certainly, but degenerated to Vice.

There have been two great narcotics in European civilisation: Christianity and alcohol.

Whoever fights monsters should see to it that in the process he does not become a monster. And if you gaze long enough into an abyss, the abyss will gaze back into you.

What is happening to me happens to all fruits that grow ripe. It is the honey in my veins that makes my blood thicker, and my soul quieter.

Besides this I place another equally obvious confirmation of my view that opera is based on the same principles as our Alexandrian culture. Opera is the birth of the theoretical man, the critical layman, not of the artist: one of the most surprising facts in the history of all the arts. It was the demand of throughly unmusical hearers that before everything else the words must be understood, so that according to them a rebirth of music is to be expected only when some mode of singing has been discovered in which textword lords it over counterpoint like master over servant: For the words, it is argued, are as much nobler than the accompanying harmonic system as the soul is nobler than the body.

Our way is upward, from the species across to the super-species. But the degenerate mind which says ‘All for me’ is a horror to us.

Who art thou then, O my soul! (and here [Zarathustra] became frightened, for a sunbeam shot down from heaven upon his face.O heaven above me, said he sighing, and sat upright, thou gazest at me? Thou hearkenest unto my strange soul?When wilt thou drink this drop of dew that fell down upon all earthly things—when wilt thou drink this strange soul——When, thou well of eternity! thou joyous, awful, noontide abyss! when wilt thou drink my soul back into thee?

You must have chaos within you to give birth to a dancing star.

We have art in order not to die of the truth.

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

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

Art is essentially the affirmation, the blessing, and the deification of existence.

That is an artist as I love artists, modest in his needs: he really wants only two things, his bread and his art - panem et Circen.

[N]othing is more easily corrupted than an artist.

Art as the single superior counter-force against all will to negation of life, art as the anti-Christian, anti-Buddhist, anti-Nihilist par excellence.