Quotes by Friedrich Nietzsche

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

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

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

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

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

“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.”

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

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

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

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

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

“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.”

“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.”

“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.”

“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 everyones 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.”

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