Quotes from Friedrich Nietzsche

We talk so abstractly about poetry because all of us are usually bad poets.

Women are considered deep - why? Because one can never discover any bottom to them. Women are not even shallow.

Ultimately no one can hear in things?books included?more than he already knows. If you have no access to something from experience, you will have no ear for it.

All credibility, all good conscience, all evidence of truth come only from the senses.

Whoever knows he is deep, strives for clarity; whoever would like to appear deep to the crowd, strives for obscurity. For the crowd considers anything deep if only it cannot see to the bottom: the crowd is so timid and afraid of going into the water.

One has to know the size of one's stomach.

Try for once to justify the meaning of your existence as it were a posteriori by setting yourself an aim, a goal... an exalted and noble 'to this end.' Perish in pursuit of this and only this

And as long as you are in any way ashamed before yourself, you do not yet belong with us.

The consequences of our actions take hold of us, quite indifferent to our claim that meanwhile we have 'improved.

Do you want to go along with others? or go on ahead? or go off on your own?...you must know what you want and that you want. Fourth question for the conscience.

Human history would be nothing but a record of stupidity save for the cunning contributions of the weak

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

To get up in the morning, in the fullness of youth, and open a book--now that's what I call vicious!

In letting God sit in judgment they judge themselves; in glorifying God they glorify themselves.

Something unappeased, unappeasable, is within me.

I fear that, with our current veneration for the natural and the real, we have arrived at the opposite pole to all idealism, and have landed in the region of the waxworks.

He is called a free spirit who thinks differently from what, on the basis of his origin, environment, his class and profession, or on the basis of the dominant views of the age, would have been expected of him

Reason in language - oh, what an old deceptive female she is! I am afraid we are not rid of God because we still have faith in grammar.

Almost everything we call higher culture is based on the spiritualization of cruelty.

There is a point in every philosophy at which the conviction of the philosopher appears on the scene; or, to put it in the words of an ancient mystery: adventavit asinus, / pulcher et fortissimus. (Translation: The ass arrives, beautiful and most brave.)

Weariness that wants to reach the ultimate with one leap, with one fatal leap, a poor ignorant weariness that does not want to want any more: this created all gods and afterworlds.

Not he is great who can alter matter, but he who can alter my state of mind.

What does our great historical hunger signify, our clutching about us of countless cultures, our consuming desire for knowledge, if not the loss of myth, of a mythic home, the mythic womb?

No one can draw more out of things, books included, than he already knows. A man has no ears for that to which experience has given him no access.