Quotes by Friedrich Nietzsche

And as long as you are in any way ashamed before yourself, you do not yet belong with us.

Be careful when you cast out your demons that you don’t throw away the best of yourself.

It is the business of the very few to be independent; it is a privilege of the strong. And whoever attempts it, even with the best right, but without being OBLIGED to do so, proves that he is probably not only strong, but also daring beyond measure. He enters into a labyrinth, he multiplies a thousandfold the dangers which life in itself already brings with it; not the least of which is that no one can see how and where he loses his way, becomes isolated, and is torn piecemeal by some minotaur of conscience. Supposing such a one comes to grief, it is so far from the comprehension of men that they neither feel it, nor sympathize with it. And he cannot any longer go back! He cannot even go back again to the sympathy of men!

It is the evening that questions thus from within me.

No one can build you the bridge on which you, and only you, must cross the river of life. There may be countless trails and bridges and demigods who would gladly carry you across; but only at the price of pawning and forgoing yourself. There is one path in the world that none can walk but you. Where does it lead? Don’t ask, walk!

Around the hero, everything becomes a tragedy.Around God, everything becomes what? a world?

Admiration for a quality or an art can be so strong that it deters us from striving to possess it.

What does our great historical hunger signify, our clutching about us of countless cultures, our consuming desire for knowledge, if not the loss of myth, of a mythic home, the mythic womb?

Perhaps no one has yet been truthful enough about what truthfulness is.

Even on this level, it is at bottom not deception [men] hate but the dire, inimical consequences of certain kinds of deception

A thing can only live through a pious illusion.

Invisible threads are the strongest ties.

Every kind of contempt for sex, every impurification of it by means of the concept impure, is the crime par excellence against life--is the real sin against the holy spirit of life

Visiting the sick is an orgasm of superiority in the contemplation of our neighbors helplessness

What? A great man? I only ever see the ape of his own ideal.

Anarchists are mouthpieces of a declining stratum of society; when they work themselves into a state of righteous indignation demanding rights, justice, equal rights, they are just acting under the pressure of their own lack of culture, which has no way of grasping why they really suffer, or what they lack in life.

There is an innocence in admiration: it occurs in one who has not yet realized that they might one day be admired.

To vigorous men intimacy is a matter of shame--and something precious.

With hard men intimacy is a thing of shame- and something precious.

It is certainly not the least charm of a theory that it is refutable; it is precisely thereby that it attracts the more subtle minds. It seems that the hundred-times-refuted theory of the free will owes its persistence to this charm alone; some one is always appearing who feels himself strong enough to refute it.