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Browse by: Friedrich Nietzsche (Biography) (0.19 seconds)
 
 
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A casual stroll through the lunatic asylum shows that faith does not prove anything.
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A great value of antiquity lies in the fact that its writings are the only ones that modern men still read with exactness.
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A letter is an unannounced visit, the postman the agent of rude surprises. One ought to reserve an hour a week for receiving letters and afterwards take a bath.
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A pair of powerful spectacles has sometimes sufficed to cure a person in love.
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A subject for a great poet would be God's boredom after the seventh day of creation.
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A woman may very well form a friendship with a man, but for this to endure, it must be assisted by a little physical antipathy.
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After coming into contact with a religious man I always feel I must wash my hands.
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Ah, women. They make the highs higher and the lows more frequent.
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All credibility, all good conscience, all evidence of truth come only from the senses.
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All in all, punishment hardens and renders people more insensible; it concentrates; it increases the feeling of estrangement; it strengthens the power of resistance.
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All of life is a dispute over taste and tasting.
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All sciences are now under the obligation to prepare the ground for the future task of the philosopher, which is to solve the problem of value, to determine the true hierarchy of values.
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All things are subject to interpretation whichever interpretation prevails at a given time is a function of power and not truth.
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All truly great thoughts are conceived by walking.
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All truth is simple... is that not doubly a lie?
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Altered opinions do not alter a man's character (or do so very little); but they do illuminate individual aspects of the constellation of his personality which with a different constellation of opinions had hitherto remained dark and unrecognizable.
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Although the most acute judges of the witches and even the witches themselves, were convinced of the guilt of witchery, the guilt nevertheless was non-existent. It is thus with all guilt.
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An artist has no home in Europe except in Paris.
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And be on they guard against the good and the just! They would fain curcify those who devise their own virtue - they hate the lonesome ones.
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And if you gaze for long into an abyss, the abyss gazes also into you.
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And we should consider every day lost on which we have not danced at least once. And we should call every truth false which was not accompanied by at least one laugh.
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Arrogance on the part of the meritorious is even more offensive to us than the arrogance of those without merit: for merit itself is offensive.
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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.
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Art is the proper task of life.
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Art raises its head where creeds relax.
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At bottom every man knows well enough that he is a unique being, only once on this earth; and by no extraordinary chance will such a marvelously picturesque piece of diversity in unity as he is, ever be put together a second time.
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At times one remains faithful to a cause only because its opponents do not cease to be insipid.
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Believe me! The secret of reaping the greatest fruitfulness and the greatest enjoyment from life is to live dangerously!
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Blessed are the forgetful: for they get the better even of their blunders.
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Can an ass be tragic? To perish under a burden one can neither bear nor throw off? The case of the philosopher.
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Character is determined more by the lack of certain experiences than by those one has had.
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Christianity gave Eros poison to drink; he did not die of it but degenerated into vice.
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Convictions are more dangerous foes of truth than lies.
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Courageous, untroubled, mocking and violent-that is what Wisdom wants us to be. Wisdom is a woman, and loves only a warrior.
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Distrust everyone in whom the impulse to punish is powerful!
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Does wisdom perhaps appear on the earth as a raven which is inspired by the smell of carrion?
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Egoism is the very essence of a noble soul.
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Enduring habits I hate... Yes, at the very bottom of my soul I feel grateful to all my misery and bouts of sickness and everything about me that is imperfect, because this sort of thing leaves me with a hundred backdoors through which I can escape from enduring habits.
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'Evil men have no songs.' How is it that the Russians have songs?
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Existence really is an imperfect tense that never becomes a present.
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Experience, as a desire for experience, does not come off. We must not study ourselves while having an experience.
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Extreme positions are not succeeded by moderate ones, but by contrary extreme positions.
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Faith: not wanting to know what is true.
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Fanatics are picturesque, mankind would rather see gestures than listen to reasons.
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Fear is the mother of morality.
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For art to exist, for any sort of aesthetic activity to exist, a certain physiological precondition is indispensable: intoxication.
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For the woman, the man is a means: the end is always the child.
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God is a thought who makes crooked all that is straight.
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Great indebtedness does not make men grateful, but vengeful; and if a little charity is not forgotten, it turns into a gnawing worm.
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He that humbleth himself wishes to be exalted.
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He who cannot give anything away cannot feel anything either.
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He who fights with monsters might take care lest he thereby become a monster. Is not life a hundred times too short for us to bore ourselves?
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He who has a strong enough why can bear almost any how.
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He who has a why to live can bear almost any how.
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He who laughs best today, will also laughs last.
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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.
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Hope in reality is the worst of all evils because it prolongs the torments of man.
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I assess the power of a will by how much resistance, pain, torture it endures and knows how to turn to its advantage.
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I cannot believe in a God who wants to be praised all the time.
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I do not know what the spirit of a philosopher could more wish to be than a good dancer. For the dance is his ideal, also his fine art, finally also the only kind of piety he knows, his "divine service."
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I love those who do not know how to live for today.
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I wish to be at any time hereafter only a yea-sayer!
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I would believe only in a God that knows how to Dance.
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Idleness is the parent of psychology.
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If a woman possesses manly virtues one should run away from her; and if she does not possess them she runs away from herself.
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If there is something to pardon in everything, there is also something to condemn.
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If you gaze long into an abyss, the abyss will gaze back into you.
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In Christianity neither morality nor religion come into contact with reality at any point.
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In every real man a child is hidden that wants to play.
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In heaven, all the interesting people are missing.
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In individuals, insanity is rare; but in groups, parties, nations and epochs, it is the rule.
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In large states public education will always be mediocre, for the same reason that in large kitchens the cooking is usually bad.
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In music the passions enjoy themselves.
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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.
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Insanity in individuals is something rare - but in groups, parties, nations and epochs, it is the rule.
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Is life not a thousand times too short for us to bore ourselves?
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Is man one of God's blunders? Or is God one of man's blunders?
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It is always consoling to think of suicide: in that way one gets through many a bad night.
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It is hard enough to remember my opinions, without also remembering my reasons for them!
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It is my ambition to say in ten sentences what others say in a whole book.
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It is not a lack of love, but a lack of friendship that makes unhappy marriages.
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It says nothing against the ripeness of a spirit that it has a few worms.
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Judgments, value judgments concerning life, for or against, can in the last resort never be true: they possess value only as symptoms, they come into consideration only as symptoms - in themselves such judgments are stupidities.
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Let us beware of saying that death is the opposite of life. The living being is only a species of the dead, and a very rare species.
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Love is blind; friendship closes its eyes.
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Love matches, so called, have illusion for their father and need for their mother.
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Madness is rare in individuals - but in groups, parties, nations, and ages it is the rule.
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Many a man fails as an original thinker simply because his memory it too good.
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Many are stubborn in pursuit of the path they have chosen, few in pursuit of the goal.
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Morality is the herd-instinct in the individual.
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Necessity is not an established fact, but an interpretation.
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No one lies so boldly as the man who is indignant.
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Not by wrath does one kill, but by laughter.
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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.
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Not when truth is dirty, but when it is shallow, does the enlightened man dislike to wade into its waters.
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Nothing has been purchased more dearly than the little bit of reason and sense of freedom which now constitutes our pride.
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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.
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Of all that is written, I love only what a person has written with his own blood.
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On the mountains of truth you can never climb in vain: either you will reach a point higher up today, or you will be training your powers so that you will be able to climb higher tomorrow.
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Once spirit was God, then it became man, and now it is even becoming mob.
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One has to pay dearly for immortality; one has to die several times while one is still alive.
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One may sometimes tell a lie, but the grimace that accompanies it tells the truth.
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One must still have chaos in oneself to be able to give birth to a dancing star.
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One often contradicts an opinion when what is uncongenial is really the tone in which it was conveyed.
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One should die proudly when it is no longer possible to live proudly.
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Only sick music makes money today.
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Our treasure lies in the beehive of our knowledge. We are perpetually on the way thither, being by nature winged insects and honey gatherers of the mind.
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Out of damp and gloomy days, out of solitude, out of loveless words directed at us, conclusions grow up in us like fungus: one morning they are there, we know not how, and they gaze upon us, morose and gray. Woe to the thinker who is not the gardener but only the soil of the plants that grow in him.
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People who have given us their complete confidence believe that they have a right to ours. The inference is false, a gift confers no rights.
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Perhaps I know best why it is man alone who laughs; he alone suffers so deeply that he had to invent laughter.
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Perhaps I know why it is man alone who laughs: He alone suffers so deeply that he had to invent laughter.
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Plato was a bore.
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Precisely the least, the softest, lightest, a lizard's rustling, a breath, a flash, a moment - a little makes the way of the best happiness.
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Shared joys make a friend, not shared sufferings.
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Sleeping is no mean art: for its sake one must stay awake all day.
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Success has always been a great liar.
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Talking much about oneself can also be a means to conceal oneself.
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That which does not kill us makes us stronger.
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The "kingdom of Heaven" is a condition of the heart - not something that comes "upon the earth" or "after death."
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The aphorism in which I am the first master among Germans, are the forms of "eternity"; my ambition is to say in ten sentences what everyone else says in a book - what everyone else does not say in a book.
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The best weapon against an enemy is another enemy.
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The Christian resolution to find the world ugly and bad has made the world ugly and bad.
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The desire to create continually is vulgar and betrays jealousy, envy, ambition. If one is something one really does not need to make anything --and one nonetheless does very much. There exists above the "productive" man a yet higher species.
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The doer alone learneth.
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The essence of all beautiful art, all great art, is gratitude.
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The future influences the present just as much as the past.
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The growth of wisdom may be gauged exactly by the diminution of ill temper.
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The individual has always had to struggle to keep from being overwhelmed by the tribe. If you try it, you will be lonely often, and sometimes frightened. But no price is too high to pay for the privilege of owning yourself.
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The irrationality of a thing is no argument against its existence, rather a condition of it.
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The lie is a condition of life.
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The man of knowledge must be able not only to love his enemies but also to hate his friends.
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The most common lie is that which one lies to himself; lying to others is relatively an exception.
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The most spiritual human beings, assuming they are the most courageous, also experience by far the most painful tragedies: but it is precisely for this reason that they honor life, because it brings against them its most formidable weapons.
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The newspaper reader says: this party will ruin itself if it makes errors like this. My higher politics says: a party which makes errors like this is already finished - it is no longer secure in its instincts.
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The press, the machine, the railway, the telegraph are premises whose thousand-year conclusion no one has yet dared to draw.
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The surest way to corrupt a youth is to instruct him to hold in higher esteem those who think alike than those who think differently.
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The true man wants two things: danger and play. For that reason he wants woman, as the most dangerous plaything.
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The word "Christianity" is already a misunderstanding - in reality there has been only one Christian, and he died on the Cross.
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There are no eternal facts, as there are no absolute truths.
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There are no facts, only interpretations.
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There cannot be a God because if there were one, I could not believe that I was not He.
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There is always some madness in love. But there is also always some reason in madness.
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There is in general good reason to suppose that in several respects the gods could all benefit from instruction by us human beings. We humans are - more humane.
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There is more wisdom in your body than in your deepest philosophy.
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This is the hardest of all: to close the open hand out of love, and keep modest as a giver.
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This is what is hardest: to close the open hand because one loves.
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This secret spoke Life herself unto me: "Behold," said she, "I am that which must ever surpass itself."
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Thoughts are the shadows of our sensations - always darker, emptier, simpler than these.
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To die proudly when it is no longer possible to live proudly. Death of one's own free choice, death at the proper time, with a clear head and with joyfulness, consummated in the midst of children and witnesses: so that an actual leave-taking is possible while he who is leaving is still there.
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To exercise power costs effort and demands courage. That is why so many fail to assert rights to which they are perfectly entitled - because a right is a kind of power but they are too lazy or too cowardly to exercise it. The virtues which cloak these faults are called patience and forbearance.
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To forget one's purpose is the commonest form of stupidity.
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"To give style" to one's character - a great and rare art! He exercises it who surveys all that his nature presents in strength and weakness and then moulds it to an artistic plan until everything appears as art and reason, and even the weaknesses delight the eye.
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To use the same words is not a sufficient guarantee of understanding; one must use the same words for the same genus of inward experience; ultimately one must have one's experiences in common.
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Two great European narcotics, alcohol and Christianity.
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Undeserved praise causes more pangs of conscience later than undeserved blame, but probably only for this reason, that our power of judgment are more completely exposed by being over praised than by being unjustly underestimated.
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War has always been the grand sagacity of every spirit which has grown too inward and too profound; its curative power lies even in the wounds one receives.
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We have art in order not to die of the truth.
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We love life, not because we are used to living but because we are used to loving.
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We must be physicists in order to be creative since so far codes of values and ideals have been constructed in ignorance of physics or even in contradiction to physics.
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We should consider every day lost on which we have not danced at least once. And we should call every truth false which was not accompanied by at least one laugh.
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What does not destroy me, makes me stronger.
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What doesn't kill us makes us stronger.
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What is good? All that heightens the feeling of power, the will to power, power itself in man.
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What really raises one's indignation against suffering is not suffering intrinsically, but the senselessness of suffering.
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What someone is, begins to be revealed when his talent abates, when he stops showing us what he can do.
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What then in the last resort are the truths of mankind? They are the irrefutable errors of mankind.
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When a hundred men stand together, each of them loses his mind and gets another one.
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When marrying, ask yourself this question: Do you believe that you will be able to converse well with this person into your old age? Everything else in marriage is transitory.
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When one does away with oneself one does the most estimable thing possible: one thereby almost deserves to live.
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When one has a great deal to put into it a day has a hundred pockets.
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When one has finished building one's house, one suddenly realizes that in the process one has learned something that one really needed to know in the worst way - before one began.
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When one has not had a good father, one must create one.
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When you look into an abyss, the abyss also looks into you.
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Whenever I climb I am followed by a dog called 'Ego'.
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Whoever battles with monsters had better see that it does not turn him into a monster. And if you gaze long into an abyss, the abyss will gaze back into you.
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Whoever fights monsters should see to it that in the process he does not become a monster. And if you gaze long enough into an abyss, the abyss will gaze back into you.
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Wit is the epitaph of an emotion.
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Without music, life would be a mistake.
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Woman was God's second mistake.
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Women are considered deep - why? Because one can never discover any bottom to them. Women are not even shallow.
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Women can form a friendship with a man very well; but to preserve it - to that end a slight physical antipathy must probably help.
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You have your way. I have my way. As for the right way, the correct way, and the only way, it does not exist.
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You must have chaos within you to give birth to a dancing star.

Biography

Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche (October 15, 1844 – August 25, 1900) was a highly influential German philosopher, philologist, and psychologist.

His life

Friedrich Nietzsche was born on October 15, 1844 in the small town of Röcken bei Lützen, near Leipzig, Saxony. He was born on the 49th birthday of King Friedrich Wilhelm IV of Prussia and was thus named after him. His father was a Lutheran pastor, who died of encephalomalacia in 1849, when Nietzsche was four years old. In 1850 Nietzsche's mother moved the family to Naumburg, where he lived for the next eight years before heading off to school. Nietzsche was now the only male in the house, living with his mother, his grandmother, two paternal aunts, and his sister Elisabeth. He was very pious as a young child. A brilliant student, he became special professor of classical philology at the University of Basel in 1869 at the age of only 24. He had already met composer Richard Wagner in November of 1868.

At Basel, Nietzsche found little satisfaction in life among his philology colleagues and he established closer intellectual ties to the historian Jakob Burckhardt, whose lectures he attended, and the theologian Franz Overbeck. His inaugural lecture at Basel was Über die Persönlichkeit Homers. He made frequent visits to the Wagners at Tribschen. When the Franco-Prussian war erupted in 1870, Nietzsche left Basel and, being disqualified for other services due to his citizenship status, volunteered as a medical orderly on active duty. His time in the military was short, but he experienced much, witnessing the traumatic effects of battle and taking close care of wounded soldiers. He soon contracted diphtheria and dysentery and subsequently experienced a painful variety of health difficulties for the remainder of his life. Upon return to Basel, instead of waiting to heal, he pushed headlong into a more fervent schedule of study than ever before. In 1870 he gave Cosima Wagner the manuscript of The Genesis of the Tragic Idea as a birthday gift. In 1872, he published his first book, The Birth of Tragedy. A biting critical reaction by the young and promising philologist Ulrich von Wilamowitz-Moellendorff, as well as its innovative views of the ancient Greeks, dampened the book's reception among scholars.

In April of 1873, Wagner incited Nietzsche to take on David Friedrich Strauß, whose book Der alte und der neue Glaube Wagner found shallow and who sided with the composer and conductor Franz Lachner who had been dismissed on account of Wagner. In 1879, Nietzsche retired from his position at Basel due to his continued poor health. From 1880 until his collapse in January 1889, Nietzsche led a wandering existence as a stateless person, writing most of his major works during this period. His fame and influence came later, despite (or because of) the interference of his sister Elisabeth, who published selections from his notebooks as The Will to Power in 1901.

Nietzsche endured periods of illness during his adult life. In 1889, after the completion of Ecce Homo, his health rapidly declined until he collapsed. At that moment, he is said to have tearfully embraced a horse in Turin because it had been beaten by its owner. He was taken back to his room and spent several days in a state of ecstasy writing letters to various friends, signing them Dionysus. He gradually became less coherent and almost entirely uncommunicative. His friend Peter Gast observed that he retained the ability to improvise beautifully on the piano for some months after his breakdown, but this too eventually left him.

The initial symptoms of Nietzsche's breakdown, as evidenced in the letters he sent to his friends in the few days of lucidity remaining to him, bear many similarities to the ecstatic writings of religious mystics. These letters remain the best evidence we have of Nietzsche's own opinion on the nature of his breakdown. Nietzsche's letters describe his experience as a religious breakthrough and he rejoices, rather than laments. Most Nietzsche commentators find the issue of Nietzsche's breakdown and "insanity" irrelevant to his work as a philosopher, though some, including Georges Bataille, have disagreed.

Nietzsche spent the last ten years of his life insane and in the care of his sister Elisabeth. He was completely unaware of the growing success of his works. The cause of Nietzsche's condition has to be regarded as undetermined. Doctors later in his life said they were not so sure about the initial diagnosis of syphilis because he lacked the typical symptoms. While the story of syphilis indeed became generally accepted in the twentieth century, recent research in the Journal of Medical Biography shows that syphilis is not consistent with Nietzsche's symptoms and that the contention that he had the disease originated in anti-Nietzschean tracts. One of the best arguments against the syphilis theory is summarized by Claudia Crawford in the book To Nietzsche: Dionysus, I Love You! Ariadne. Another speculation is that he had a brain condition similar to his father's. His handwriting in all the letters that he had written around the period of the final breakdown showed no sign of deterioration, a typical symptom of syphilis.

...(more on Wikipedia)

This article is licensed under the GNU Free Documentation License. It uses material from the Wikipedia article "Friedrich Nietzsche".
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