ThursdayFeb 05, 2026
Quotes: 53419 Authors: 9969
And we should consider every day lost on which we have not danced at least once. And we should call every truth false which was not accompanied by at least one laugh.
When Zarathustra was alone ... he said to his heart: 'Could it be possible! This old saint in the forest hath not yet heard of it, that God is dead!'
My doctrine is: Live that thou mayest desire to live again that is thy duty for in any case thou wilt live again!
Of all that is written, I love only what a person hath written with his blood.
Ah, women. They make the highs higher and the lows more frequent.
Man wishes woman to be peaceable, but in fact she is essentially warlike, like the cat.
In revenge and in love, woman is more barbarous than man.
The growth of wisdom may be gauged accurately by the decline of ill-temper.
He who has a why to live can bear with almost any how.
How good bad music and bad reasons sound when we march against an enemy.
All truly great thoughts are conceived while walking.
On the mountains of truth you can never climb in vain: either you will reach a point higher up today, or you will be training your powers so that you will be able to climb higher tomorrow.
I want to teach men the sense of their existence, which is the Superman, the lightning out of the dark cloud man.
If ye would go up high, then use your own legs! Do not get yourselves carried aloft; do not seat yourselves on other people's backs and heads!
The thought of suicide is a great consolation: by means of it one gets successfully through many a bad night.
What if a demon were to creep after you one night, in your loneliest loneness, and say, 'This life which you live must be lived by you once again and innumerable times more; and every pain and joy and thought and sigh must come again to you, all in the same sequence. The eternal hourglass will again and again be turnedand you with it, dust of the dust!' Would you throw yourself down and gnash your teeth and curse that demon? Or would you answer, 'Never have I heard anything more divine?'
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.
One does not know cannot know the best that is in one.
And if you gaze for long into an abyss, the abyss gazes also into you.
Talking much about oneself can also be a means to conceal oneself.
Strong hope is a much greater stimulant of life than any realized joy could be.
Once spirit was God, then it became man, and now it is even becoming mob.
He who despises himself nevertheless esteems himself as a self-despiser.
He who cannot obey himself will be commanded. That is the nature of living creatures.
Righteousness exalteth a nation.
There cannot be a God because if there were one, I could not believe that I was not He.
In large states public education will always be mediocre, for the same reason that in large kitchens the cooking is usually bad.
Madness is rare in individuals but in groups, parties, nations, and ages it is the rule.
Nothing has been purchased more dearly than the little bit of reason and sense of freedom which now constitutes our pride.
All prejudices may be traced back to the intestines. A sedentary life is the real sin against the Holy Ghost.
What is good? All that elevates the feeling of power, the will to power, the power itself in man.
Physician, help yourself: thus help your patient too. Let this be his best help that he may behold with his eyes the man who heals himself.
Nothing on earth consumes a man more quickly than the passion of resentment.
It is hard enough to remember my opinions, without also remembering my reasons for them!
One often contradicts an opinion when what is uncongenial is really the tone in which it was conveyed.
To forget one's purpose is the commonest form of stupidity.
One must separate from anything that forces one to repeat No again and again.
Necessity is not an established fact, but an interpretation.
In music the passions enjoy themselves.
Only sick music makes money today.
Without music life would be a mistake.
Mozart, the last chord of a centuries-old great European taste.
The masters have been done away with; the morality of the common man has triumphed.
Morality is the herd-instinct in the individual.
He who fights with monsters might take care lest he thereby become a monster.
There are two things a real man likes danger and play. And he likes women because she is the most dangerous of playthings.
Many a man fails as an original thinker simply because his memory is too good.
Perhaps I know best why it is man alone who laughs; he alone suffers so deeply that he had to invent laughter.
Love matches, so called, have illusion for their father and need for their mother.
Love is the state in which man sees things Most widely different from what they are.
One should die proudly when it is no longer possible to live proudly.
Live in danger. Build your cities on the slopes of Vesuvius.
Where is the lightning to lick you with its tongue? Where is the madness with which you should be cleansed? Behold, I show you the Superman. He is this lightning, he is this madness.
Life always gets harder toward the summit the cold increases, responsibility increases.
The most common lie is that which one lies to himself; lying to others is relatively an exception.
Liberal institutions straightway cease from being liberal the moment they are soundly established: once this is attained no more grievous and more thorough enemies of freedom exist than liberal institutions.
Whoever battles with monsters had better see that it does not turn him into a monster. And if you gaze long into an abyss, the abyss will gaze back into you.
Where there is the tree of knowledge, there is always Paradise: so say the most ancient and most modern serpents.
Every extension of knowledge arises from making the conscious the unconscious.
In order to acquire intellect one must need it. One loses it when it is no longer necessary.
In individuals, insanity is rare; but in groups, parties, nations, and epochs it is the rule.
Egoism is the very essence of a noble soul.
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.
No one is such a liar as the indignant man.
The patient. The pine tree seems to listen, the fir tree to wait: and both without impatience: they give no thought to the little people beneath them devoured by their impatience and their curiosity.
Nothing seems to me to be rarer today then genuine hypocrisy. I greatly suspect that this plant finds the mild atmosphere of our culture unendurable. Hypocrisy has its place in the ages of strong belief: in which even when one is compelled to exhibit a different belief one does not abandon the belief one already has.
Be careful in casting out your devil 'lest you cast out the best thing about you.
In heaven all the interesting people are missing.
This is the hardest of all: to close the open hand out of love, and keep modest as a giver.
Believe me! The secret of reaping the greatest fruitfulness and the greatest enjoyment from life is to live dangerously!
The sick are the greatest danger for the healthy; it is not from the strongest that harm comes to the strong, but from the weakest.
What is evil? Whatever springs from weakness.
Is man one of God's blunders or is God one of man's blunders?
Wherever Germany extends her sway, she ruins culture.
Speaking of Georges Bizet: His music has the tang of sunny climates, their bracing air, their clearness. It voices a sensibility hitherto unknown to us.
A man of genius is unbearable, unless he possesses at least two things besides: gratitude and purity.
The great man fights the elements in his time that hinder his own greatness, in other words his own freedom and sincerity.
The Germans are like women, you can scarcely ever fathom their depths they haven't any.
If a man have a strong faith he can indulge in the luxury of skepticism.
There are few pains so grievous as to have seen, divined, or experienced how an exceptional man has missed his way and deteriorated.
There are no facts, only interpretations.
There are no eternal facts as there are no absolute myths.
The melancholia of everything completed!
Even a thought, even a possibility, can shatter us and transform us.
Two great European narcotics, alcohol and Christianity.
Remain true to the earth.
I conjure you, my brethren, to remain faithful to earth, and do not believe those who speak unto you of super terrestrial hopes! Poisoners they are, whether they know it or not.
It is not the strengths, but the durations of great sentiments that make great men.
The doer alone learneth.
Out of life's school of war: What does not destroy me, makes me stronger.
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.
We ought to learn from the kine one thing: ruminating.
Convictions are more dangerous enemies of the truth than lies.
Contentment preserves one from catching cold. Has a woman who knew that she was well dressed ever caught a cold? No, not even when she had scarcely a rag on her back.
People who have given us their complete confidence believe that they have a right to ours. The inference is false, a gift confers no rights.
It is certainly not the least charm of a theory that it is refutable.
I tell you: one must have chaos in one to give birth to a dancing star. I tell you: you still have chaos in you.
Before the effect one believes in different causes than one does afterward.
Wisdom sets bounds even to knowledge.
My time has not yet come either; some are born posthumously.
Is not life a hundred times too short for us to bore ourselves?
Against boredom, even the gods struggle in vain.
Blessed are the forgetful: for they get the better even of their blunders.
Man is a rope stretched between the animal and the Superman a rope over an abyss.
I cannot believe in a God who wants to be praised all the time.
In the beautiful, man sets himself up as the standard of perfection; in select cases he worships himself in it.... Man believes that the world itself is filled with beauty he forgets that it is he who has created it. He alone has bestowed beauty upon the world alas! only a very human, an all too human, beauty.
As an artist, a man has no home in Europe save in Paris.
One must still have chaos in oneself to be able to give birth to a dancing star.
I teach you the Superman. Man is something that is to be surpassed. What have ye done to surpass man?
Art is the proper task of life.
It is my ambition to say in ten sentences what others say in a whole book.
In the mountains the shortest way is from peak to peak: but for that, one must have long legs. Aphorisms should be peaks.
What does not destroy me, makes me strong.
One will rarely err if extreme actions be ascribed to vanity, ordinary actions to habit, and mean actions to fear.
When we begin to understand we grow polite, happy, ingenuous.
There is not even enough religion in the world to destroy the world's religions.
The future influences the present just as much as the past.
Not every end is a goal. The end of a melody is not its goal; however, if the melody has not reached its end, it would also not have reached its goal. A parable.
Ascetic: one who makes a necessity of virtue.
In the mountains of truth, you never climb in vain.
Distrust all in whom the impulse to punish is powerful.
Many a man fails to become a thinker for the sole reason that his memory is too good.
Better know nothing than half-know many things.
I teach you the superman. Man is something to be surpassed.
My time has not yet come either: some are born posthumously.
To die proudly when it is no longer possible to live proudly. Death of one's own free choice, death at the proper time, with a clear head and with joyfulness, consummated in the midst of children and witnesses: so that an actual leave-taking is possible while he who is leaving is still there.
The essence of all beautiful art, all great art, is gratitude.
When marrying, ask yourself this question: Do you believe that you will be able to converse well with this person into your old age? Everything else in marriage is transitory.
A casual stroll through the lunatic asylum shows that faith does not prove anything.
A woman may very well form a friendship with a man, but for this to endure, it must be assisted by a little physical antipathy.
Woman was God's second mistake.
Plato was a bore.
We have art to save ourselves from the truth.
Whenever I climb I am followed by a dog called 'Ego'.
Terms of use and copyrights
