Friedrich Nietzsche

Remorse. Never yield to remorse, but at once tell yourself: remorse would simply mean adding to the first act of stupidity a second.

In the world of high finance the shilling of the idle rich man can buy more than that of the poor, industrious man.

Battle not with monsters lest you become one.

In affability there is no hatred of men, but for that very reason there is all too much contempt for men.

There will always be rocks in the road ahead of us. They will be stumbling blocks or stepping stones; it all depends on how you use them.

Learn to laugh at yourselves as one must laugh!

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

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

Great intellects are skeptical.

Judgments, value judgments concerning life, for or against, can in the last resort never be true: they possess value only as symptoms, they come into consideration only as symptoms - in themselves such judgments are stupidities.

Once spirit was God, then it became man, and now it is even becoming mob.

Although the most acute judges of the witches and even the witches themselves, were convinced of the guilt of witchery, the guilt nevertheless was non-existent. It is thus with all guilt.

There are no eternal facts, as there are no absolute truths.

Against boredom the gods themselves fight in vain.

It is very noble hypocrisy not to talk of one's self.

It is impossible to suffer without making someone pay for it; every complaint already contains revenge.

Family love is messy clinging and of an annoying and repetitive pattern like bad wallpaper.

The lie is a condition of life.

The earth has a skin and that skin has diseases one of its diseases is called man.

He who cannot put his thoughts on ice should not enter into the heat of dispute.

To use the same words is not a sufficient guarantee of understanding; one must use the same words for the same genus of inward experience; ultimately one must have one's experiences in common.

Every tradition grows ever more venerable the more remote its origin, the more confused that origin is. The reverence due to it increases from generation to generation. The tradition finally becomes holy and inspires awe.

Family love is messy clinging and of an annoying and repetitive pattern like bad wallpaper

One often contradicts an opinion when what is uncongenial is really the tone in which it was conveyed.

In our own presence, we all pretend to be simpler than we are: thus we take a break from our fellow human beings.

Fear is the mother of morality.

Christianity makes suffering contagious.

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.

Whoever has witnessed another's ideal becomes his inexorable judge and as it were his evil conscience.

The idealist is incorrigible: if he is thrown out of his heaven he makes an ideal of his hell.

I do not know what the spirit of a philosopher could more wish to be than a good dancer. For the dance is his ideal, also his fine art, finally also the only kind of piety he knows, his 'divine service.'

You have your way. I have my way. As for the right way the correct way and the only way it does not exist.

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

All truly great thoughts are conceived while walking.

Not doubt certainty is what drives one insane.

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.

Two great European narcotics, alcohol and Christianity.

Madness is the result not of uncertainty but certainty.

Concerning great things one should either be silent or speak loftily.

Sometimes people dont want to hear the truth because they dont want their illusions destroyed

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

Give me today for once the worst throw of your dice destiny. Today I transmute everything into gold.

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

For art to exist for any sort of aesthetic activity or perception to exist a certain physiological precondition is indispensable intoxication.

The bad gains respect through imitation, the good loses it especially in art.

He who is not a bird should not build his nest over abysses.

There are no facts, only interpretations.

Illness is a clumsy attempt to arrive at health we must come to natures aid with intellect.

Experience, as a desire for experience, does not come off. We must not study ourselves while having an experience.

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.

He who cannot give anything away cannot feel anything either.

He who fights with monsters might take care lest he thereby become a monster. Is not life a hundred times too short for us to bore ourselves?

Character is determined more by the lack of certain experiences than by those one has had.

Not to he who is offensive to us are we most unfair but to he who does not concern us at all.

It is always consoling to think of suicide: in that way one gets through many a bad night.

A casual stroll through the lunatic asylum shows that faith does not prove anything.

At times one remains faithful to a cause only because its opponents do not cease to be insipid.

Talking much about oneself can also be a means to conceal oneself.

Woman was God's second mistake.

When a hundred men stand together, each of them loses his mind and gets another one.

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

Growth in wisdom may be exactly measured by decrease in bitterness.

Some are made modest by great praise, others insolent.

No more fiction for now we calculate but that we may calculate we had to make fiction first.

The Christian resolution to find the world ugly and bad has made the world ugly and bad.

Men should learn to live with the same seriousness with which children play.

The world itself is the will to power - and nothing else! And you yourself are the will to power - and nothing else!

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

Regarding life, the wisest men of all ages have judged alike: it is worthless.

Invisible threads are the strongest ties.

Genteel women suppose that those things do not really exist about which it is impossible to talk in polite company.

War has always been the grand sagacity of every spirit which has grown too inward and too profound; its curative power lies even in the wounds one receives.

The irrationality of a thing is no argument against its existence, rather a condition of it.

There are slavish souls who carry their appreciation for favors done them so far that they strangle themselves with the rope of gratitude.

Believe me! The secret of reaping the greatest fruitfulness and the greatest enjoyment from life is to live dangerously!

To forget one's purpose is the commonest form of stupidity.

Smooth ice is paradise for those who dance with expertise.

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.

Art is the proper task of life.

Regarding life the wisest men of all ages have judged alike it is worthless.

Not when truth is dirty, but when it is shallow, does the enlightened man dislike to wade into its waters.

There is nothing we like to communicate to others as much as the seal of secrecy together with what lies under it.

Possessions are usually diminished by possession.

In truththere was only one christian and he died on the cross.

When one does away with oneself one does the most estimable thing possible: one thereby almost deserves to live.

Merchant and pirate were for a long period one and the same person. Even today mercantile morality is really nothing but a refinement of piratical morality.

It is the most sensual men who need to flee women and torment their bodies.

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.

The greatest cure for love is still that time honoured medicine love returned.

What does not destroy me makes me stronger.

Belief means not wanting to know what is true.

The believer in magic and miracles reflects on how to impose a law on nature and in brief the religious cult is the outcome of this reflection.

If there is something to pardon in everything, there is also something to condemn.

What does not destroy me, makes me stronger.

Envy and jealousy are the private parts of the human soul. Perhaps the comparison can be extended.

The most common lie is that which one lies to himself; lying to others is relatively an exception.

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

Germany is a great nation only because its people have so much Polish blood in their veins.

That which doesn't kill us makes us stronger.

I assess the power of a will by how much resistance, pain, torture it endures and knows how to turn to its advantage.