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O man! Take heed!
What saith deep midnight's voice indeed?
I slept my sleep--,
From deepest dream I've woke, and plead:
The world is deep,
And deeper than the day could read.
Deep is its woe--,
Joy--deeper still than grief can be:
Woe saith: Hence! Go!
But joys all want eternity,
Want deep, profound eternity!
-Friedrich Nietzsche, The Drunken Song Thus Spake Zarathustra by Friedrich Nietzsche: Part 4 Chapter 79
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Absurdity
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In the consciousness of the truth he has perceived, man now sees everywhere only the awfulness or the absurdity of existence and loathing seizes him.
-Friedrich Nietzsche
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The irrationality of a thing is no argument against its existence, rather a condition of it.
-Friedrich Nietzsche
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Action(s)
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A sedentary life is the real sin against the Holy Spirit. Only those thoughts that come by walking have any value.
-Friedrich Nietzsche
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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.
-Friedrich Nietzsche
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Adversity
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What doesn't kill us makes us stronger.
-Friedrich Nietzsche
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Age
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How people keep correcting us when we are young! There is always some bad habit or other they tell us we ought to get over. Yet most bad habits are tools to help us through life.
-Friedrich Nietzsche
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Alcohol/Alcoholism
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For art to exist, for any sort of aesthetic activity or perception to exist, a certain physiological precondition is indispensable: intoxication.
-Friedrich Nietzsche
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Where does one not find that bland degeneration which beer produces in the spirit!
-Friedrich Nietzsche
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Anarchy
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The anarchist and the Christian have a common origin.
-Friedrich Nietzsche
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Animals
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I fear animals regard man as a creature of their own kind which has in a highly dangerous fashion lost its healthy animal reason -- as the mad animal, as the laughing animal, as the weeping animal, as the unhappy animal.
-Friedrich Nietzsche
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Appearance
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Reckoned physiologically, everything ugly weakens and afflicts man. It recalls decay, danger, impotence; he actually suffers a loss of energy in its presence. The effect of the ugly can be measured with a dynamometer. Whenever man feels in any way depressed, he senses the proximity of something ugly. His feeling of power, his will to power, his courage, his pride -- they decline with the ugly, they increase with the beautiful.
-Friedrich Nietzsche
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Architecture
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The architect represents neither a Dionysian nor an Apollinian condition: here it is the mighty act of will, the will which moves mountains, the intoxication of the strong will, which demands artistic expression. The most powerful men have always inspired the architects; the architect has always been influenced by power.
-Friedrich Nietzsche
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Art
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Art raises its head where creeds relax.
-Friedrich Nietzsche
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Art is not merely an imitation of the reality of nature, but in truth a metaphysical supplement to the reality of nature, placed alongside thereof for its conquest.
-Friedrich Nietzsche
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We have art in order not to die of the truth.
-Friedrich Nietzsche
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Very early in my life I took the question of the relation of art to truth seriously: even now I stand in holy dread in the face of this discordance. My first book was devoted to it. The Birth of Tragedy believes in art on the background of another belief
-Friedrich Nietzsche
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The essence of all beautiful art, all great art, is gratitude.
-Friedrich Nietzsche
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Authors & Writing
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I have used these weeks to revalue values. Do you understand this expression? When you come right down to it, the alchemist is the most praiseworthy of men: I mean the one who changes something negligible or contemptible into something of value, even gold. He alone enriches, the others merely exchange. My task is quite singular this time: I have asked myself what mankind has always hated, feared, and despised the most
-Friedrich Nietzsche, Letter to Georg Brandes, May 23, 1888
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Beauty
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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.
-Friedrich Nietzsche
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Belief
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A belief, however necessary it may be for the preservation of a species, has nothing to do with truth. The falseness of a judgment is not for us necessarily an objection to a judgment. The question is to what extent it is life-promoting, life-preserving, species preserving, perhaps even species cultivating. To recognize untruth as a condition of life--that certainly means resisting accustomed value feelings in a dangerous way; and a philosophy that risks this would by that token alone place itself beyond good and evil.
-Friedrich Nietzsche
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Have you heard of that madman who lit a lantern in the bright morning hours, ran to the market place, and cried incessantly, I seek God! I seek God! As many of those who do not believe in God were standing around just then, he provoked much laughter...
Whither is God, he cried. I shall tell you. We have killed him - you and I. All of us are murderers.... God is dead. God remains dead. And we have killed him...
-Friedrich Nietzsche, The Gay Science, section 126, 1882
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Boredom
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Only the most acute and active animals are capable of boredom. -- A theme for a great poet would be God's boredom on the seventh day of creation.
-Friedrich Nietzsche
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Against boredom the gods themselves fight in vain.
-Friedrich Nietzsche
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Brevity
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It is my ambition to say in ten sentences; what others say in a whole book.
-Friedrich Nietzsche
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Books by and about Friedrich Nietzsche