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Friedrich Nietzsche

Friedrich Nietzsche Quotes

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Famous Friedrich Nietzsche Quotes

“Not without deep pain do we admit to ourselves that the artists of all ages have in their highest flights carried to heavenly transfiguration precisely those conceptions that we now recognize as false: they are the glorifiers of the religious and philosophical errors of humanity, and they could not have done this without their belief in the absolute truth of these errors. Now if the belief in such truth generally diminishes, if the rainbow colors at the outermost ends of human knowing and imagining fade: then the species of art that, like the Divina commedia, Raphael's pictures, Michelangelo's frescoes, the Gothic cathedrals, presupposes not only a cosmic, but also a metaphysical significance for art objects can never blossom again. A touching tale will come of this, that there was once such an art, such belief by artists.”

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Book:Human, All Too Human: A Book for Free Spirits
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“they would be astonished to discover the seriously German problem that we are dealing with, a vortex and a turning-point at the very centre of German hopes. But perhaps those same people will find it distasteful to see an aesthetic problem taken so seriously, if they can see art as nothing more than an entertaining irrelevance, an easily dispensable tinkle of bells next to the 'seriousness of life': as if no one was aware what this contrast with the 'seriousness of life' amounted to. Let these serious people know that I am convinced that art is the supreme task and the truly metaphysical activity of this life in the sense of that man, my noble champion on that path, to whom I dedicate this book.”

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Book:The Birth of Tragedy
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“Every great phenomenon is followed by degeneration, particularly in the realm of art. The model of the great man stimulates vainer natures to imitate him outwardly or to surpass him; in addition, all great talents have the fateful quality of stifling many weaker forces and needs, and seem to devastate the nature around them. The most fortunate instance in the development of art is when several geniuses reciprocally keep each other in check; in this kind of a struggle, weaker and gentle natures are generally also allowed air and light.”

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Book:Human, All Too Human: A Book for Free Spirits
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“He who can command, he who is a ‘master’ by nature, he who is forceful in deed and gesture – what has he to do with contracts! Such beings violate our every assumption: they come unexpectedly, without cause, reason, notice, excuse; they appear as suddenly as lightning, and are too terrible, too sudden, too convincing, too ‘different’ even to be hated. Their work is the instinctive creation and imposition of forms; of all artists, their work is the most instinctive, unconscious – in connection with appearance there arises something new, a system of governance which is alive , in which the functions and parts are defined and related to one another, in which above all no part finds a place unless it has some ‘function’ in connection with the whole. These instinctive organizers, they know nothing of guilt, responsibility, consideration; they are subject to that terrible artist-egoism which gleams like brass, and which sees itself justified to all eternity, in its work, even as a mother sees in her child.”

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Book:On the Genealogy of Morals
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“Das Drama, das in so innerlich erleuchteter Deutlichkeit aller Bewegungen und Gestalten, mit Hülfe der Musik, sich vor uns ausbreitet, als ob wir das Gewebe am Webstuhl im Auf - und Niederzucken entstehen sehen - erreicht als Ganzes eine Wirkung, die jenseits aller apollinischen Kunstwirkungen liegt. In der Gesammtwirkung der Tragödie erlangt das Dionysische wieder das Uebergewicht; sie schliesst mit einem Klange, der niemals von dem Reiche der apollinischen Kunst her tönen könnte. Und damit erweist sich die apollinische Täuschung als das, was sie ist, als die während der Dauer der Tragödie anhaltende Umschleierung der eigentlichen dionysischen Wirkung: die doch so mächtig ist, am Schluss das apollinische Drama selbst in eine Sphäre zu drängen, wo es mit dionysischer Weisheit zu reden beginnt und wo es sich selbst und seine apollinische Sichtbarkeit verneint. So wäre wirklich das schwierige Verhältniss des Apollinischen und des Dionysischen in der Tragödie durch einen Bruderbund beider Gottheiten zu symbolisiren: Dionysus redet die Sprache des Apollo, Apollo aber schliesslich die Sprache des Dionysus: womit das höchste Ziel der Tragödie und der Kunst überhaupt erreicht ist.”

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Book:Die Geburt der Tragödie. Unzeitgemäße Betrachtungen I - IV. Nachgelassene Schriften 1870 - 1873
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“Während der Kritiker in Theater und Concert, der Journalist in der Schule, die Presse in der Gesellschaft zur Herrschaft gekommen war, entartete die Kunst zu einem Unterhaltungsobject der niedrigsten Art, und die aesthetische Kritik wurde als das Bindemittel einer eiteln, zerstreuten, selbstsüchtigen und überdies ärmlich - unoriginalen Geselligkeit benutzt, deren Sinn jene Schopenhauerische Parabel von den Stachelschweinen zu verstehen giebt; so dass zu keiner Zeit so viel über Kunst geschwatzt und so wenig von der Kunst gehalten worden ist. Kann man aber mit einem Menschen noch verkehren, der im Stande ist, sich über Beethoven und Shakespeare zu unterhalten? Mag Jeder nach seinem Gefühl diese Frage beantworten: er wird mit der Antwort jedenfalls beweisen, was er sich unter „Bildung“ vorstellt, vorausgesetzt dass er die Frage überhaupt zu beantworten sucht und nicht vor Ueberraschung bereits verstummt ist. Dagegen dürfte mancher edler und zarter von der Natur Befähigte, ob er gleich in der geschilderten Weise allmählich zum kritischen Barbaren geworden war, von einer eben so unerwarteten als gänzlich unverständlichen Wirkung zu erzählen haben, die etwa eine glücklich gelungene Lohengrinaufführung auf ihn ausübte: nur dass ihm vielleicht jede Hand fehlte, die ihn mahnend und deutend anfasste, so dass auch jene unbegreiflich verschiedenartige und durchaus unvergleichliche Empfindung, die ihn damals erschütterte, vereinzelt blieb und wie ein räthselhaftes Gestirn nach kurzem Leuchten erlosch. Damals hatte er geahnt, was der aesthetische Zuhörer ist.”

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Book:Die Geburt der Tragödie. Unzeitgemäße Betrachtungen I - IV. Nachgelassene Schriften 1870 - 1873
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“There are some who, from obtuseness or lack of experience, turn away from such phenomena as from 'folk-diseases,' with contempt or pity born of the consciousness of their own 'healthy- mindedness.' But of course such poor wretches have no idea how corpselike and ghostly their so-called 'healthy-mindedness' looks when the glowing life of the Dionysian revelers roars past them.”

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Book:The Birth of Tragedy
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“The whole morality of the Sermon on the Mount belongs here; man takes a truly voluptuous pleasure in violating himself by exaggerated demands and then deifying this something in his soul that is so tyrannically taxing. In each ascetic morality, man prays to one part of himself as god and also finds its necessary to diabolify the rest.”

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Book:Human, All Too Human: A Book for Free Spirits
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“Masks. - There are women who, however you may search them, prove to have no content but are purely masks. The man who associates with such almost spectral, necessarily unsatisfied beings is to be commiserated with, yet it is precisely they who are able to arouse the desire of the man most strongly: he seeks for her soul - and goes on seeking.”

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Book:Human, All Too Human: A Book for Free Spirits
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“All beings so far have created something beyond themselves; and do you want to be the ebb of this great flood and even go back to the beasts rather than overcome man? What is the ape to man? A laughingstock or a painful embarrassment. And man shall be just that for the overman: a laughingstock or a painful embarrassment… (…) Man is a rope, tied between beast and overman—a rope over an abyss… What is great in man is that he is a bridge and not an end: what can be loved in man is that he is an overture and a going under…”

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Book:Thus Spoke Zarathustra
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“Man has been reared by his errors: first he never saw himself other than imperfectly, second he attributed to himself imaginary qualities, third he felt himself in a false order of rank with animal and nature, fourth he continually invented new tables of values and for a time took each of them to be eternal and unconditional...If one deducts the effect of these four errors, one has also deducted away humanity, humaneness, and 'human dignity'.”

HumanityHuman Error
Book:A Nietzsche Reader
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“This agitation is becoming so great that the higher culture can no longer allow its fruits to ripen; it is as if the seasons were following to quickly from one another. From lack of rest, our civilization is ending in a new barbarism. Never have the active, which is to say the restless, people been prized more. Therefore, one of the necessary correctives that must be applied to the character of humanity is a massive strengthening of the contemplative element.”

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Book:Human, All Too Human: A Book for Free Spirits
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“Without the errors which are active in every psychical pleasure and displeasrue a humanity would never have come into existence--whose fundamental feeling is and remains that man is the free being in a world of unfreedom, the external miracle worker whether he does good or ill, the astonishing exception, the superbeast and almost-god, the meaning of creation which cannot be thought away, the solution of the cosmic riddle, the mighty ruler over nature and the despiser of it, the creature which calls its history world history!--Vanitas vanitatum homo.”

HumanityVanity
Book:A Nietzsche Reader
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“I fail to remember ever having made an effort — no trace of struggle is detectable in my life, I am the opposite of a heroic nature. To “want” something, to “strive” for something, to have an “end,” a “desire” in mind — I know none of this from my experience. Even at this moment I look out upon my future — a broad future! — as upon a smooth sea: no desire ripples upon it. Not in the least do I want anything to be different from what it is; I myself do not want to be any different ... But thus I have always lived.”

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Book:Ecce Homo
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“If we have just partaken of a philosopher's wisdom, we go through the streets feeling as if we had been transformed and had become great; for we encounter only people who do not know this wisdom, and thus we have to deliver a new, unheard-of judgement about everything; because we have acknowledged a book of laws, we also think we now have to act like judges”

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Book:Human, All Too Human: A Book for Free Spirits
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“Living in a constant chase after gain compels people to expend their spirit to the point of exhaustion in continual pretense and overreaching and anticipating other. Virtue has come to consist of doing something in less time that someone else. Hours in which honesty is permitted have become rare, and when they arrive one is tired and does not only want to "let oneself go" but actually wishes to stretch out as long and wide and ungainly as one happens to be... Soon we may well reach the point where people can no longer give in to the desire for a vita contemplativa (that is, taking a walk with ideas and friends) without self-contempt and a bad conscience.”

Living
Book:The Gay Science
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“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.”

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Book:On Truth and Lies in a Nonmoral Sense
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“Nothing is needed more than truth, and in relation to it everything else has only second-rate value." This unconditional will to truth—what is it? Is it the will not to allow oneself to be deceived? Or is it the will not to deceive? For the will to truth could be interpreted in the second way, too—if only the special case "I do not want to deceive myself" is subsumed under the generalization "I do not want to deceive." But why not deceive? But why not allow oneself to be deceived? Note that the reasons for the former principle belong to an altogether different realm from those for the second. One does not want to allow oneself to be deceived because one assumes that it is harmful, dangerous, calamitous to be deceived. In this sense, science would be a long-range prudence, a caution, a utility; but one could object in all fairness: How is that? Is wanting not to allow oneself to be deceived really less harmful, less dangerous, less calamitous? What do you know in advance of the character of existence to be able to decide whether the greater advantage is on the side of the unconditionally mistrustful or of the unconditionally trusting?”

TruthScienceCriticism Of Substance
Book:The Gay Science: With a Prelude in Rhymes and an Appendix of Songs
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