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Friedrich Nietzsche

Friedrich Nietzsche Quotes

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Famous Friedrich Nietzsche Quotes

“On the whole, scientific methods are at least as important results of investigation as any other results, for the scientific spirit is based upon a knowledge of method, and if the methods were lost, all the results of science could not prevent the renewed prevalence of superstition and absurdity. Clever people may learn as much as they like of the results of science, but one still notices in their conversation, and especially in the hypotheses they make, that they lack the scientific spirit; they have not the instinctive distrust of the devious courses of thinking which, in consequence of long training, has taken root in the soul of every scientific man. It is enough for them to find any kind of hypothesis on a subject, they are then all on fire for it, and imagine the matter is thereby settled. To have an opinion is with them equivalent to immediately becoming fanatical for it, and finally taking it to heart as a conviction. In the case of an unexplained matter they become heated for the first idea that comes into their head which has any resemblance to an explanation—a course from which the worst results constantly follow, especially in the field of politics. On that account everybody should nowadays have become thoroughly acquainted with at least one science, for then surely he knows what is meant by method, and how necessary is the extremest carefulness.”

TruthSciencePoliticsConvictionFanaticismScientific MethodConvictions
Book:Human, All Too Human: A Book for Free Spirits
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“Indeed, on close inspection one sees that by far the greater number of educated people still desire convictions from a thinker and nothing but convictions, and that only a small minority want certainty. The former want to be forcibly carried away in order thereby to obtain an increase of strength; the latter few have the real interest which disregards personal advantages and the increase of strength also. The former class, who greatly predominate, are always reckoned upon when the thinker comports himself and labels himself as a genius, and thus views himself as a higher being to whom authority belongs. In so far as genius of this kind upholds the ardour of convictions, and arouses distrust of the cautious and modest spirit of science, it is an enemy of truth, however much it may think itself the wooer thereof.”

TruthSciencePoliticsConvictionCertaintyUncertaintyScientific MethodConvictions
Book:Human, All Too Human: A Book for Free Spirits
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“Beware of those who attach great value to being credited with moral tact and subtlety in making moral distinctions. They never forgive us once they have made a mistake in front of us (or, worse, against us): inevitably they become our instinctive slanderers and detractors, even if they should still remain our “friends.” Blessed are the forgetful: for they get over their stupidities, too.”

MoralityForgivenessMistakesForgetfulness
Book:Beyond Good and Evil
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“I beseech you, my brothers, remain faithful to the earth, and do not believe those who speak to you of otherworldly hopes! Poison-mixers are they, whether they know it or not. Despisers of life are they, decaying and poisoned themselves, of whom the earth is weary: so let them go. Once the sin against God was the greatest sin; but God died, and these sinners died with him. To sin against the earth is now the most dreadful thing, and to esteem the entrails of the unknowable higher than the meaning of the earth... What is the greatest experience you can have? It is the hour of the great contempt. The hour when your happiness, too, arouses your disgust, and even your reason and your virtue.”

Heaven
Book:Thus Spoke Zarathustra
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“Who art thou then, O my soul!" (and here [Zarathustra] became frightened, for a sunbeam shot down from heaven upon his face." "O heaven above me," said he sighing, and sat upright, "thou gazest at me? Thou hearkenest unto my strange soul? When wilt thou drink this drop of dew that fell down upon all earthly things—when wilt thou drink this strange soul— —When, thou well of eternity! thou joyous, awful, noontide abyss! when wilt thou drink my soul back into thee?”

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Book:Thus Spoke Zarathustra
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“I should still, paradoxical as it may sound, like to maintain the opposite valuation of the dream in relation to the mysterious foundation of our being, whose phenomena we are. The more aware I become of these omnipotent art impulses in nature, and find in them an ardent longing for illusion and for redemption by illusion, the more I feel compelled to make the metaphysical assumption that the truly existent, the primal Oneness, eternally suffering and contradictory, also needs the delightful vision, the pleasurable illusion for its constant redemption: an illusion that we, utterly caught up in it and consisting of it—as a continuous becoming in time, space and causality, in other words—are required to see as empirical reality.”

ArtDreamRealityBecomingIllusionMetaphysicsPrimal Oneness
Book:The Birth of Tragedy
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“Here and there on earth there is probably a kind of continuation of love; in which this greedy desire of two people for each other gives way to a new desire and greed, a shared higher thirst for an ideal above them. But who knows such love? who has experienced it? Its true name is friendship”

LoveFriendshipGreedIdeal
Book:The Gay Science: With a Prelude in Rhymes and an Appendix of Songs
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“With the unknown, one is confronted with danger, discomfort, and care; the first instinct is to abolish these painful states. First principle: any explanation is better than none. . . . The causal instinct is thus conditional upon, and excited by, the feeling of fear. The "why?" shall, if at all possible, not give the cause for its own sake so much as for a particular kind of cause -- a cause that is comforting, liberating, and relieving.”

IfsGivingFirstsKindStatesFeelingsCareCausesPrinciplesDangerParticularInstinctSakePainfulExcitedExplanationComfortingLiberatingDiscomfortAbolishConditional
Book:The Portable Nietzsche
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“We do not belong to those who only get their thought from books, or at the prompting of books, -- it is our custom to think in the open air, walking, leaping, climbing, or dancing on lonesome mountains by preference, or close to the sea, where even the paths become thoughtful.”

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Book:Delphi Complete Works of Friedrich Nietzsche (Illustrated): Friedrich Nietzsche
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“No, life has not disappointed me. On the contrary, I find it truer, more desirable and mysterious every year -- ever since the day when the great liberator came to me: the idea that life could be an experiment of the seeker for knowledge -- and not a duty, not a calamity, not trickery.”

YearsIdeasDutyContraryExperimentsMysteriousDisappointedDesirableSeekersCalamityTrickeryLiberators
Book:The Gay Science: With a Prelude in Rhymes and an Appendix of Songs
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“When one gives up the Christian faith, one pulls the right to Christian morality out from under one's feet. This morality is by no means self-evident. Christianity is a system, a whole view of things thought out together. By breaking one main concept out of it, the faith in God, one breaks the whole. It stands or falls with faith in God.”

GivingMeanSelfWholeChristianTogetherFallViewsChristianityBreakFeetMoralityGiving UpConceptsFaith In GodEvidentChristian FaithChristian Morality
Book:Twilight of the Idols
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