Quotes by Friedrich Nietzsche

One loves ultimately ones desires, not the thing desired.

In the end one loves ones desire and not what is desired.

I am a forest, and a night of dark trees: but he who is not afraid of my darkness, will find banks full of roses under my cypresses.

Man is the cruelest animal.

There is an old illusion. It is called good and evil.

Was aus Liebe getan wird, geschieht immer jenseits von Gut und Böse. (What is done out of love always takes place beyond good and evil.)

When man no longer regards himself as evil he ceases to be so!

Whatever is done for love always occurs beyond good and evil.

State is the name of the coldest of all cold monsters. Coldly it lies; and this lie slips from its mouth: I, the state, am the people.

The bite of conscience is indecent.

To learn to see- to accustom the eye to calmness, to patience, and to allow things to come up to it; to defer judgment, and to acquire the habit of approaching and grasping an individual case from all sides. This is the first preparatory schooling of intellectuality. One must not respond immediately to a stimulus; one must acquire a command of the obstructing and isolating instincts.

Every Profound thinker is more afraid of being understood than of being misunderstood

But one thing is the thought, another thing is the deed, and another thing is the idea of the deed. The wheel of causality doth not roll between them.

A well-constituted human being, a ‘happy one’, must perform certain actions and instinctively shrinks from other actions, he transports the order of which he is the physiological representative into his relations with other human beings and with things. In a formula: his virtue is the consequence of his happiness…Everything good is instinct—and consequently easy, necessary, free. Effort is an objection.

The consequences of our actions take hold of us, quite indifferent to our claim that meanwhile we have improved.

A strong and well-constituted man digests his experiences (deeds and misdeeds all included) just as he digests his meats, even when he has some tough morsels to swallow.

Character is determined more by the lack of certain experiences than by those one has had.

Every word is a prejudice.

If you invest all your energy in economics, world commerce, parliamentarianism, military engagements, power and power politics, -if you take the quantum of intelligence, seriousness, will, and self-overcoming that you embody and expend it all in this one direction, there there wont be any left for the other direction. Culture and the state - let us be honest with ourselves - these are adversaries.

At the centre of all these noble races we cannot fail to see the blond beast of prey, the magnificent blond beast avidly prowling round for spoil and victory; this hidden centre needs release from time to time, the beast must out again, must return to the wild: - Roman, Arabian, Germanic, Japanese nobility, Homeric heroes, Scandinavian Vikings - in this requirement they are all alike. It was the noble races which left the concept of barbarian in their traces wherever they went; even their highest culture betrays the fact that they were conscious of this and indeed proud of it.