Friedrich Nietzsche

“Without music, life would be a mistake.”

“It is not a lack of love, but a lack of friendship that makes unhappy marriages.”

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

“The man of knowledge must be able not only to love his enemies but also to hate his friends.”

“I cannot believe in a God who wants to be praised all the time.”

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

“There is always some madness in love. But there is also always some reason in madness.”

“I'm not upset that you lied to me, I'm upset that from now on I can't believe you.”

“There are no facts, only interpretations.”

“And those who were seen dancing were thought to be insane by those who could not hear the music.”

“He who has a why to live for can bear almost any how.”

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

“Love, too, has to be learned.”

“One ought to hold on to one's heart; for if one lets it go, one soon loses control of the head too.”

“In some remote corner of the universe, poured out and glittering among innumerable solar systems, there once was a star on which clever animals invented knowledge.”

“Sometimes people don't want to hear the truth because they don't want their illusions destroyed.”

“In heaven, all the interesting people are missing.”

“That which does not kill us makes us stronger.”

“In individuals, insanity is rare; but in groups, parties, nations and epochs, it is the rule.”

“The snake which cannot cast its skin has to die. As well the minds which are prevented from changing their opinions; they cease to be mind.”

“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.”

“Is man merely a mistake of God's? Or God merely a mistake of man?”

“Ultimately, it is the desire, not the desired, that we love.”

“The individual has always had to struggle to keep from being overwhelmed by the tribe. If you try it, you will be lonely often, and sometimes frightened. But no price is too high to pay for the privilege of owning yourself.”

“God is dead. God remains dead. And we have killed him. Yet his shadow still looms. How shall we comfort ourselves, the murderers of all murderers? What was holiest and mightiest of all that the world has yet owned has bled to death under our knives; who will wipe this blood off us? What water is the...”

“Necessity is not an established fact, but an interpretation.”

“No one can construct for you the bridge upon which precisely you must cross the stream of life, no one but you yourself alone.”

“I consist of body and soul - in the worlds of a child. And why shouldn't we speak like children? But the enlightened, the knowledgealbe would say: I am body through and through, nothing more; and the soul is just a word for something on the body.”

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

“What then is truth? A movable host of metaphors, metonymies, and anthropomorphisms: in short, a sum of human relations which have been poetically and rhetorically intensified, transferred, and embellished, and which, after long usage, seem to a people to be fixed, canonical, and binding. Truths are...”

“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?”

“One has to take a somewhat bold and dangerous line with this existence: especially as, whatever happens, we are bound to lose it.”

“What, if some day or night a demon were to steal after you into your loneliest loneliness and say to you: 'This life as you now live it and have lived it, you will have to live once more and innumerable times more' ... Would you not throw yourself down and gnash your teeth and curse the demon who sp...”

“Perhaps I know best why it is man alone who laughs; he alone suffers so deeply that he had to invent laughter.”

“Is life not a thousand times too short for us to bore ourselves?”

“To live is to suffer, to survive is to find some meaning in the suffering.”

“Better know nothing than half-know many things.”

“For every man there exists a bait which he cannot resist swallowing.”

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

“You say, it's dark. And in truth, I did place a cloud before your sun. But do you not see how the edges of the cloud are already glowing and turning light.”

“The advantage of a bad memory is that one enjoys several times the same good things for the first time.”

“He who would learn to fly one day must first learn to stand and walk and run and climb and dance; one cannot fly into flying.”

“Because we have for millenia made moral, aesthetic, religious demands on the world, looked upon it with blind desire, passion or fear, and abandoned ourselves to the bad habits of illogical thinking, this world has gradually become so marvelously variegated, frightful, meaningful, soulful, it has ac...”

“Man is the cruelest animal.”

“When one has not had a good father, one must create one.”

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

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

“The spiritualization of sensuality is called love: it is a great triumph over Christianity.”

“I have forgotten my umbrella.”

“Amor Fati – “Love Your Fate”, which is in fact your life.”

“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.”

“Twofold misjudgement. - The misfortune suffered by clear-minded and easily understood writers is that they are taken for shallow and thus little effort is expended on reading them: and the good fortune that attends the obscure is that the reader toils at them and ascribes to them the pleasure he has...”

“Shared joys make a friend, not shared sufferings.”

“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.”

“The recipe for becoming a good novelist, for example is easy to give but to carry it out presupposes qualities one is accustomed to overlook when one says 'I do not have enough talent'. One has only to make a hundred or so sketches for novels, none longer than two pages but of such distinctness that...”

“Those who know that they are profound strive for clarity. Those who would like to seem profound to the crowd strive for obscurity. For the crowd believes that if it cannot see to the bottom of something it must be profound. It is so timid and dislikes going into the water.”

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

“The greatest danger that always hovered over humanity, and still hovers over it, is the eruption of madness— which means the eruption of arbitrariness in feeling, seeing, and hearing, the enjoyment of the mind's lack of discipline, the joy in human unreason.”

“You look up when you wish to be exalted. And I look down because I am exalted.”

“But I need solitude--which is to say, recovery, return to myself, the breath of a free, light, playful air.”

“one does not only wish to be understood when one writes; one wishes just as surely not to be understood.”

“It is my ambition to say in ten sentences what others say in a whole book.”

“What does not destroy me, makes me strong.”

“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.”

“Hope in reality is the worst of all evils because it prolongs the torments of man.”

“The final reward of the dead - to die no more”

“It is night: now do all leaping fountains speak louder. And my soul too is a leaping fountain. It is night: only now do all songs of lovers awaken. And my soul too is the song of a lover. Something unquenched, unquenchable, is in me, that wants to speak out. A craving for love is in me, that itself...”

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

“The surest way to corrupt a youth is to instruct him to hold in higher esteem those who think alike than those who think differently.”

“A good writer possesses not only his own spirit but also the spirit of his friends.”

“The tragedy is that we cannot believe the dogmas of religion and metaphysics if we have the strict methods of truth in heart and head, but on the other hand, we have become through the development of humanity so tenderly suffering that we need the highest kind of means of salvation and consolation:...”

“Morality is just a fiction used by the herd of inferior human beings to hold back the few superior men.”