Last Updated on 21 June 2024

Quotes from Friedrich Nietzsche (1844-1900)

• The best friend is likely to acquire the best wife, because a good marriage is based on the talent for friendship.
• Distrust all in whom the impulse to punish is powerful.
• Even the most beautiful scenery is no longer assured of our love after we have lived in it for three months and some distant coast attracts our avarice: possessions are generally diminished by possession.
• 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.
• Faith means not wanting to know what is true.
• The growth of wisdom may be gauged accurately by the decline of ill temper.
• He who fights with monsters might take care lest he thereby become a monster. And if you gaze for long into an abyss, the abyss gazes also into you.
• He who thinks a great deal is not suited to be a party man: he thinks his way through the party and out the other side too soon.
• In the mountains of truth you never climb in vain.
• Learning from one’s enemies is the best way to love them, for it puts one into a grateful mood toward them.
• Life is an instinct for growth, for survival, for the accumulation of forces, for power.
• A man who is very busy seldom changes his opinions.
• Many are stubborn in pursuit of the path they have chosen, few in pursuit of the goal.
• Morality is herd instinct in the individual.
• The most common sort of lie is that by which a man deceives himself: the deception of others is a relatively rare offense.
• No one can construct for you the bridge upon which precisely you must cross the stream of life, no one but you yourself alone.
• The noble soul has reverence for itself.
• One will not go far wrong if one attributes extreme actions to vanity, average ones to habit, and petty ones to fear.
• The surest way to corrupt a young man is to teach him to esteem more highly those who think alike than those who think differently.
• This independence is glorified as “academic freedom,” … except that in the background, a discreet distance away, stands the state watching with a certain supervisory look on its face, making sure to remind everybody from time to time that it is the aim, the purpose, the essence of this whole strange process.
• We often contradict an opinion for no other reason than that we do not like the tone in which it is expressed.
• What really makes one indignant about suffering isn’t the thing itself but the senselessness of it.