Quotes from Friedrich Nietzsche

That lies should be necessary to life is part and parcel of the terrible and questionable character of existence.

A Dionysian life task needs the hardness of the hammer and one of its first essentials is without doubt the joy to be found even in destruction.

Every philosophy is the philosophy of some stage of life.

Nothing in life possesses value except the degree of power--assuming that life itself is the will to power.

To have to fight the instincts - that is the definition of decadence: as long as life is ascending, happiness equals instinct.

Idleness is the parent of psychology.

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.

Like tourists huffing and puffing to reach the peak we forget the view on the way up.

The strongest have their moments of fatigue.

What is more harmful than any vice? Practical sympathy and pity for all the failures and all the weak : Christianity.

What really arouses indignation against suffering is not suffering as such but the senselessness of suffering...

Only great pain is, as the teacher of great suspicion, the ultimate liberator of the spirit...I doubt whether such pain improves us-but I do know it deepens us.

History belongs above all to the man...who needs models, teachers, comforters and cannot find them among his contemporaries.

You say that I should be your teacher! See to it that I am your pinion and not your brake.

Nothing can be done about it: every master has but a single pupil--and he will not stay loyal to him--for he is also destined to become a master.

The press, the machine, the railway, the telegraph are premises whose thousand-year conclusion no one has yet dared to draw.

All contempt for the sexual life, all denigration under the concept 'impure" is the essential crime against Life- against the Holy Spirit of Life".

What is life? A continuous praise and blame.

The living is a species of the dead; and not a very attractive one.

Thus the will to power strives towards oppositions, towards displeasure. There is a will to suffering at the foundation of all organic life (contrary to "happiness" as "goal").

Underneath the reality in which we live and have our being, another altogether different reality lies concealed.

I have not come to know atheism as a result of logical reasoning and still less as an event in my life: in me it is a matter of instinct.

Full is the earth of the superfluous; marred is life by the many-too-many. May they be decoyed out of this life by the "life eternal"!

All prejudices may be traced back to the intestines. A sedentary life is the real sin against the Holy Ghost.