Basic Writings of Nietzsche Quotes

“Knowledge kills action; action requires the veils of illusion: that is the doctrine of Hamlet, not that cheap wisdom of Jack the Dreamer who reflects too much and, as it were, from an excess of possibilities does not get around to action. Not reflection, no—true knowledge, an insight into the horrible truth, outweighs any motive for action, both in Hamlet and in the Dionysian man.”
― Friedrich Nietzsche, Basic Writings of Nietzsche

“Independence is for the very few; it is a privilege of the strong. And whoever attempts it even with the best right but without inner constraint proves that he is probably not only strong, but also daring to the point of recklessness.”
― Friedrich Nietzsche, Basic Writings of Nietzsche

“No victor believes in chance.”
― Friedrich Nietzsche, Basic Writings of Nietzsche

“In fact, however, Nietzsche’s very first book, The Birth, constitutes a declaration of independence from Schopenhauer: while Nietzsche admires him for honestly facing up to the terrors of existence, Nietzsche himself celebrates Greek tragedy as a superior alternative to Schopenhauer’s “Buddhistic negation of the will.” From tragedy Nietzsche learns that one can affirm life as sublime, beautiful, and joyous in spite of all suffering and cruelty.”
― Friedrich Nietzsche, Basic Writings of Nietzsche

“How malicious philosophers can be! I know of nothing more venomous than the joke Epicurus permitted himself against Plato and the Platonists; he called them Dionysiokolakes. That means literally—and this is the foreground meaning—“flatterers of Dionysius,” in other words, tyrant’s baggage and lickspittles; but in addition to this he also wants to say, “they are all actors, there is nothing genuine about them” (for Dionysokolax was a popular name for an actor).8 And the latter is really the malice that Epicurus aimed at Plato: he was peeved by the grandiose manner, the mise en scène9 at which Plato and his disciples were so expert—at which Epicurus was not an expert—he, that old schoolmaster from Samos, who sat, hidden away, in his little garden at Athens and wrote three hundred books—who knows? perhaps from rage and ambition against Plato? It took a hundred years until Greece found out who this garden god, Epicurus, had been.—Did they find out?— 8”
― Friedrich Nietzsche, Basic Writings of Nietzsche

“Punishment.—A strange thing, our punishment! It does not cleanse the criminal, it is no atonement; on the contrary, it pollutes worse than the crime does. The”
― Friedrich Nietzsche, Basic Writings of Nietzsche

“From the practice of wise men.—To become wise, one must wish to have certain experiences and run, as it were, into their gaping jaws. This, of course, is very dangerous; many a wise guy has been swallowed. 301”
― Friedrich Nietzsche, Basic Writings of Nietzsche

“Virtue is knowledge; man sins only from ignorance; he who is virtuous is happy.” In these three basic forms of optimism lies the death of tragedy.”
― Friedrich Nietzsche, Basic Writings of Nietzsche

“Raise up your hearts, my brothers, high, higher! And don’t forget your legs! Raise up your legs, too, good dancers; and still better: stand on your heads!”
― Friedrich Nietzsche, Basic Writings of Nietzsche

“In the end one has to do everything oneself in order to know a few things oneself: that is, one has a lot to do. But a curiosity of my type remains after all the most agreeable of all vices—sorry, I meant to say: the love of truth has its reward in heaven and even on earth.—”
― Friedrich Nietzsche, Basic Writings of Nietzsche

“After such a cheerful commencement, a serious word would like to be heard; it appeals to the most serious. Take care, philosophers and friends, of knowledge, and beware of martyrdom! Of suffering “for the truth’s sake”! Even of defending yourselves! It spoils all the innocence and fine neutrality of your conscience; it makes you headstrong against objections and red rags; it stupefies, animalizes, and brutalizes when in the struggle with danger, slander, suspicion, expulsion, and even worse consequences of hostility, you have to pose as protectors of truth upon earth—as though “the truth” were such an innocuous and incompetent creature as to require protectors!”
― Friedrich Nietzsche, Basic Writings of Nietzsche

“Way to equality.—A few hours of mountain climbing turn a villain and a saint into two rather equal creatures. Exhaustion is the shortest way to equality and fraternity—and liberty is added eventually by sleep. 297”
― Friedrich Nietzsche, Basic Writings of Nietzsche

“I shall say another word for the most select ears: what I really want from music. That it be cheerful and profound like an afternoon in October. That it be individual, frolicsome, tender, a sweet small woman full of beastliness and charm. I”
― Friedrich Nietzsche, Basic Writings of Nietzsche

“God’s only excuse is that he does not exist.”
― Friedrich Nietzsche, Basic Writings of Nietzsche

“When one is young, one venerates and despises without that art of nuances which constitutes the best gain of life, and it is only fair that one has to pay dearly for having assaulted men and things in this manner with Yes and No.”
― Friedrich Nietzsche, Basic Writings of Nietzsche

“Life is a flat circle.”
― Nietzsche, Basic Writings of Nietzsche

“a poet is a poet only insofar as he sees himself surrounded by figures who live and act before him and into whose inmost nature he can see.”
― Friedrich Nietzsche, Basic Writings of Nietzsche

“Tourists.— They climb mountains like animals, stupid and sweating; one has forgotten to tell them that there are beautiful views on the way up.”
― Friedrich Nietzsche, Basic Writings of Nietzsche

“How little the world would look moral without forgetfulness! A poet might say that God made forgetfulness the guard he placed at the threshold of human dignity.”
― Friedrich Nietzsche, Basic Writings of Nietzsche

“The body of knowledge keeps increasing at incredible speed, but the literature of nonknowledge grows even faster.”
― Friedrich Nietzsche, Basic Writings of Nietzsche

“French philosopher whom professional philosophers generally accord highest honors is Descartes. Montaigne and Pascal, Voltaire and Rousseau, Bergson and Sartre do not enjoy their greatest vogue among philosophers, and of these only Rousseau has had any considerable influence on the history of philosophy (through Kant and Hegel).”
― Friedrich Nietzsche, Basic Writings of Nietzsche

“Kaufmann was nothing if not thorough. He exposed in detail the machinations of Nietzsche’s sister Elisabeth to manipulate her brother’s texts, and to enlist him in the very causes that he had consistently denounced. Her crude prejudices, including a heavy dose of anti-Semitism, had nothing in common with her brother’s philosophy.”
― Friedrich Nietzsche, Basic Writings of Nietzsche

“In the Dionysian dithyramb man is incited to the greatest exaltation of all his symbolic faculties; something never before experienced struggles for utterance—the annihilation of the veil of māyā, oneness as the soul of the race and of nature itself.”
― Friedrich Nietzsche, Basic Writings of Nietzsche

“And science itself, our science—indeed, what is the significance of all science, viewed as a symptom of life? For what—worse yet, whence—all science? How now? Is the resolve to be so scientific about everything perhaps a kind of fear of, an escape from, pessimism? A subtle last resort against—truth? And, morally speaking, a sort of cowardice and falseness? Amorally speaking, a ruse? O Socrates, Socrates, was that perhaps your secret? O enigmatic ironist, was that perhaps your—irony?”
― Friedrich Nietzsche, Basic Writings of Nietzsche

“Our art reveals this universal distress: in vain does one depend imitatively on all the great productive periods and natures; in vain does one accumulate the entire “world-literature” around modern man for his comfort; in vain does one place oneself in the midst of the art styles and artists of all ages, so that one may give names to them as Adam did to the beasts: one still remains eternally hungry, the “critic” without joy and energy, the Alexandrian man, who is at bottom a librarian and corrector of proofs, and wretchedly goes blind from the dust of books and from printers’ errors.”
― Friedrich Nietzsche, Basic Writings of Nietzsche

“The Platonic dialogue was, as it were, the barge on which the shipwrecked ancient poetry saved herself with all her children: crowded into a narrow space and timidly submitting to the single pilot, Socrates, they now sailed into a new world, which never tired of looking at the fantastic spectacle of this procession.”
― Friedrich Nietzsche, Basic Writings of Nietzsche

“There is no other way: the feelings of devotion, self-sacrifice for one’s neighbor, the whole morality of self-denial must be questioned mercilessly and taken to court—no less than the aesthetics of “contemplation devoid of all interest” which is used today as a seductive guise for the emasculation of art, to give it a good conscience. There is too much charm and sugar in these feelings of “for others,” “not for myself,” for us not to need to become doubly suspicious at this point and to ask: “are these not perhaps—seductions?” That they please—those who have them and those who enjoy their fruits, and also the mere spectator—this does not yet constitute an argument in their favor but rather invites caution. So let us be cautious.”
― Friedrich Nietzsche, Basic Writings of Nietzsche

“real eyes realize real lies...so never change your vibe <3”
― Friedrich Nietzsche, Basic Writings of Nietzsche

“image and the concept, but merely endures them as accompaniments. The poems of the lyrist can express nothing that did not already lie hidden in that vast universality and absoluteness in the music that compelled him to figurative speech. Language can never adequately render the cosmic symbolism of music, because music stands in symbolic relation to the primordial contradiction and primordial pain in the heart of the primal unity, and therefore symbolizes a sphere which is beyond and prior to all phenomena. Rather, all phenomena, compared with it, are merely symbols: hence language, as the organ and symbol of phenomena, can never by any means disclose the innermost heart of music; language, in its attempt to imitate it, can only be in superficial contact with music; while all the eloquence of lyric poetry cannot bring the deepest significance of the latter one step nearer to us.”
― Friedrich Nietzsche, Basic Writings of Nietzsche

“gratification of the primordial unity. The noblest clay, the most costly marble, man, is here kneaded and cut, and to the sound of the chisel strokes of the Dionysian world-artist rings out the cry of the Eleusinian mysteries: “Do you prostrate yourselves, millions? Do you sense your Maker,”
― Friedrich Nietzsche, Basic Writings of Nietzsche