Quotes from Friedrich Nietzsche

What is the greatest thing ye can experience? It is the hour of great contempt. The hour in which even your happiness becometh loathsome unto you, and so also your reason and virtue.

Evolution does not make happiness its goal; it aims simply at evolution and nothing else.

Oh great star! What would your happiness be if you did not have us to shine for?

Digressions, objections, delight in mockery, carefree mistrust are signs of health.

Why is it that wellnesses are not as contagious as illnesses--generally speaking, but also especially regarding taste? Or are there epidemics of health?

A little health now and again is the ailing person's best remedy.

Only strong personalities can endure history, the weak are extinguished by it.

The thirst for equality can express itself either as a desire to draw everyone down to one's level, or to raise oneself and everyone else up.

The more abstract the truth you wish to teach, the more must you allure the senses to it.

Through searching out origins, one becomes a crab. The historian looks backwards, and finally he also believes backwards.

A lack of the historical sense is the hereditary fault of all philosophers.

It is not conflict of opinions that has made history so violent but conflict of belief in opinions, that is to say conflict of convictions.

History is nothing more than the belief in the senses, the belief in falsehood.

To think historically is almost the same thing now as if in all ages history had been made according to theory.

The historian looks backward. In the end he also believes backward.

Cynicism is the only form in which base souls approach honesty.

The view that honesty is something, and even a virtue, belongs, it is true, to those private opinions which are forbidden in this age of public opinions.

Hope in reality is the worst of all evils because it prolongs the torments of man.

What makes us heroic?--Confronting simultaneously our supreme suffering and our supreme hope.

Everyone who has ever built anywhere a "new heaven" first found the power thereto in his own hell.

I conjure you, my brethren, to remain faithful to earth, and do not believe those who speak unto you of super terrestrial hopes! Poisoners they are, whether they know it or not.

Follow in the footsteps of your fathers' virtue! How could you hope to climb high unless your fathers' will climbs with you?

In a seriously intended intellectual emancipation a person's mute passions and cravings also hope to find their advantage.

One who has given up any hope of winning a fight or has clearly lost it wants his style in fighting to be admired all the more.