Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche Quotes

"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."

"When one does away with oneself one does the most estimable thing possible: one thereby almost deserves to live."

"Perhaps I know best why it is man alone who laughs; he alone suffers so deeply that he had to invent laughter."

"To forget one's purpose is the commonest form of stupidity."

"When a hundred men stand together, each of them loses his mind and gets another one."

"Plato was a bore."

"Fanatics are picturesque, mankind would rather see gestures than listen to reasons."

"For the woman, the man is a means: the end is always the child."

"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."

"For art to exist, for any sort of aesthetic activity to exist, a certain physiological precondition is indispensable: intoxication."

"Genteel women suppose that those things do not really exist about which it is impossible to talk in polite company."

"Glance into the world just as though time were gone: and everything crooked will become straight to you."

"Great indebtedness does not make men grateful, but vengeful; and if a little charity is not forgotten, it turns into a gnawing worm."

"It is the most sensual men who need to flee women and torment their bodies."

"Some are made modest by great praise, others insolent."

"There is nothing we like to communicate to others as much as the seal of secrecy together with what lies under it."

"Today I love myself as I love my god: who could charge me with a sin today? I know only sins against my god; but who knows my god?"

"Words are but symbols for the relations of things to one another and to us; nowhere do they touch upon absolute truth."

"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."

"This is what is hardest: to close the open hand because one loves."