Friedrich Nietzsche Quotes

A friend should be a master at guessing and keeping still: you must not want to see everything.

A great value of antiquity lies in the fact that its writings are the only ones that modern men still read with exactness. 

 

A pair of powerful spectacles has sometimes sufficed to cure a person in love.

 

All things are subject to interpretation whichever interpretation prevails at a given time is a function of power and not truth.

 

All truly great thoughts are conceived by walking.

 

And if you gaze for long into an abyss, the abyss gazes also into you.

Arrogance on the part of the meritorious is even more offensive to us than the arrogance of those without merit: for merit itself is offensive.

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

Before the effect one believes in different causes than one does after the effect.

Behind all their personal vanity, women themselves always have an impersonal contempt for woman.

Blessed are the forgetful: for they get the better even of their blunders.

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

Convictions are more dangerous foes of truth than lies.

Every church is a stone on the grave of a god-man: it does not want him to rise up again under any circumstances.

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

Glance into the world just as though time were gone: and everything crooked will become straight to you.

Go up close to your friend, but do not go over to him! We should also respect the enemy in our friend.

Great indebtedness does not make men grateful, but vengeful; and if a little charity is not forgotten, it turns into a gnawing worm.

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?

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

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.

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

Idleness is the parent of psychology. 

In Christianity neither morality nor religion come into contact with reality at any point.

In every real man a child is hidden that wants to play.

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

In large states public education will always be mediocre, for the same reason that in large kitchens the cooking is usually bad.

It is good to express a thing twice right at the outset and so to give it a right foot and also a left one. Truth can surely stand on one leg, but with two it will be able to walk and get around.

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

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

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

It is not when truth is dirty, but when it is shallow, that the lover of knowledge is reluctant to step into its waters.

Many a man fails as an original thinker simply because his memory it too good.

Many are stubborn in pursuit of the path they have chosen, few in pursuit of the goal.

Mystical explanations are thought to be deep; the truth is that they are not even shallow.

Necessity is not an established fact, but an interpretation.

No one lies so boldly as the man who is indignant.

Not necessity, not desire - no, the love of power is the demon of men. Let them have everything - health, food, a place to live, entertainment - they are and remain unhappy and low-spirited: for the demon waits and waits and will be satisfied.

Nothing has been purchased more dearly than the little bit of reason and sense of freedom which now constitutes our pride.

Nothing is beautiful, only man: on this piece of naivete rests all aesthetics, it is the first truth of aesthetics. Let us immediately add its second: nothing is ugly but degenerate man - the domain of aesthetic judgment is therewith defined.

Of all that is written, I love only what a person has written with his own blood.

Stupid as a man, say the women: cowardly as a woman, say the men. Stupidity in a woman is unwomanly.

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

The doer alone learneth.

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.

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.

There are horrible people who, instead of solving a problem, tangle it up and make it harder to solve for anyone who wants to deal with it. Whoever does not know how to hit the nail on the head should be asked not to hit it at all.

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

Two great European narcotics, alcohol and Christianity.

Christianity was from the beginning, essentially and fundamentally, life's nausea and disgust with life, merely concealed behind, masked by, dressed up as, faith in "another" or "better" life.

As soon as a religion comes to dominate it has as its opponents all those who would have been its first disciples.

Today as always, men fall into two groups: slaves and free men. Whoever does not have two-thirds of his day for himself, is a slave, whatever he may be: a statesman, a businessman, an official, or a scholar.

Every true faith is infallible. It performs what the believing person hopes to find in it. But it does not offer the least support for the establishing of an objective truth. Here the ways of men divide. If you want to achieve peace of mind and happiness, have faith. If you want to be a disciple of truth, then search.

Of all that is written, I love only what a person hath written with his blood. Write with blood, and thou wilt find that blood is spirit.
It is no easy task to understand unfamiliar blood; I hate the reading idlers.
He who knoweth the reader, doeth nothing more for the reader. Another century of readers--and spirit itself will stink.
Every one being allowed to learn to read, ruineth in the long run not only writing but also thinking.
Once spirit was God, then it became man, and now it even becometh populace.
He that writeth in blood and proverbs doth not want to be read, but learnt by heart.
In the mountains the shortest way is from peak to peak, but for that route thou must have long legs. Proverbs should be peaks, and those spoken to should be big and tall.
The atmosphere rare and pure, danger near and the spirit full of a joyful wickedness: thus are things well matched.
I want to have goblins about me, for I am courageous. The courage which scareth away ghosts, createth for itself goblins--it wanteth to laugh.

The most spiritual men, as the strongest, find their happiness where others would find their destruction: in the labyrinth, in hardness against themselves and others, in experiments. Their joy is self-conquest: asceticism becomes in them nature, need, and instinct. Difficult tasks are a privilege to them; to play with burdens that crush others, a recreation. Knowledge-a form of asceticism. They are the most venerable kind of man: that does not preclude their being the most cheerful and the kindliest.

They're so cold, these scholars!
May lightning strike their food
so that their mouths learn how
to eat fire!

One must learn to love.— This is what happens to us in music: first one has to learn to hear a figure and melody at all, to detect and distinguish it, to isolate it and delimit it as a separate life; then it requires some exertion and good will to tolerate it in spite of its strangeness, to be patient with its appearance and expression, and kindhearted about its oddity:—finally there comes a moment when we are used to it, when we wait for it, when we sense that we should miss it if it were missing: and now it continues to compel and enchant us relentlessly until we have become its humble and enraptured lovers who desire nothing better from the world than it and only it.

But that is what happens to us not only in music: that is how we have learned to love all things that we now love. In the end we are always rewarded for our good will, our patience, fairmindedness, and gentleness with what is strange; gradually, it sheds its veil and turns out to be a new and indescribable beauty:—that is its thanks for our hospitality. Even those who love themselves will have learned it in this way: for there is no other way. Love, too, has to be learned.

Man is the cruelest animal," says Zarathustra. "When gazing at tragedies, bull-fights, crucifixations he hath hitherto felt happier than at any other time on Earth. And when he invented Hell...lo, Hell was his Heaven on Earth"; he could put up with suffering now, by contemplating the eternal punishment of his oppressors in the other world.

The Great Man... is colder, harder, less hesitating, and without fear of 'opinion'; he lacks the virtues that accompany respect and 'respectability,' and altogether everything that is the 'virtue of the herd.' If he cannot lead, he goes alone... He knows he is incommunicable: he finds it tasteless to be familiar... When not speaking to himself, he wears a mask. There is a solitude within him that is inaccessible to praise or blame.

It was only Christianity, with resentment against life in its foundations, which made sexuality something impure: it threw filth on the beginning, on the prerequisite of our life.

It is not their love for men, rather it is the impotence of their love that hinders Christians of today from burning us.

This eternal accusation against Christianity I shall write upon all walls, wherever walls are to be found--I have letters that even the blind will be able to see. . . . I call Christianity the one great curse, the one great intrinsic depravity, the one great instinct of revenge, for which no means are venomous enough, or secret, subterranean and small enough,--I call it the one immortal blemish upon the human race...

Mark Twain Quotes

A man cannot be comfortable without his own approval.

A man is never more truthful than when he acknowledges himself a liar.

A man's character may be learned from the adjectives which he habitually uses in conversation.

A person who won't read has no advantage over one who can't read.

A round man cannot be expected to fit in a square hole right away. He must have time to modify his shape.

Action speaks louder than words but not nearly as often.

Against the assault of laughter nothing can stand.Age is an issue of mind over matter. If you don't mind, it doesn't matter.

Always do right. This will gratify some people and astonish the rest.

Anger is an acid that can do more harm to the vessel in which it is stored than to anything on which it is poured.

Be careful about reading health books. You may die of a misprint.

Better to remain silent and be thought a fool than to speak out and remove all doubt.

Biographies are but the clothes and buttons of the man. The biography of the man himself cannot be written.

But who prays for Satan? Who, in eighteen centuries, has had the common humanity to pray for the one sinner that needed it most?

Cauliflower is nothing but cabbage with a college education.

Civilization is the limitless multiplication of unnecessary necessities.

Clothes make the man. Naked people have little or no influence on society.

Courage is resistance to fear, mastery of fear, not absence of fear.Do the thing you fear most and the death of fear is certain.

Rebecca West Quotes

A strong hatred is the best lamp to bear in our hands as we go over the dark places of life, cutting away the dead things men tell us to revere.

Any authentic work of art must start an argument between the artist and his audience.

Because hypocrisy stinks in the nostrils one is likely to rate it as a more powerful agent for destruction than it is.

But there are other things than dissipation that thicken the features. Tears, for example.

Did St. Francis preach to the birds? Whatever for? If he really liked birds he would have done better to preach to the cats.Everyone realizes that one can believe little of what people say about each other. But it is not so widely realized that even less can one trust what people say about themselves.

Great music is in a sense serene; it is certain of the values it asserts.

I myself have never been able to find out precisely what feminism is: I only know that people call me a feminist whenever I express sentiments that differentiate me from a doormat.

I only know that people call me a feminist whenever I express sentiments that differentiate me from a doormat or a prostitute.

It is always one's virtues and not one's vices that precipitate one into disaster.

It is sometimes very hard to tell the difference between history and the smell of skunk.