Happy birthday, Friedrich Nietzsche! Here are some quotes from the philosopher:
“Is it better to out-monster the monster or to be quietly devoured?”
“The value of many [people] and books rests solely on their faculty for compelling all to speak out the most hidden and intimate things.”
“Some are born posthumously.”
“Without music, life would be a mistake.”
“Art is the supreme task and the truly metaphysical activity in this life…”
“God is dead; but given the way of men, there may still be caves for thousands of years in which his shadow will be shown. And we—we still have to vanquish his shadow, too.”
“Good prose is written only face to face with poetry.”
“Without art we would be nothing but foreground and live entirely in the spell of that perspective which makes what is closest at hand and most vulgar appear as if it were vast, and reality itself.”
“People who live in an age of corruption are witty and slanderous; they know that there are other kinds of murder than by dagger or assault; they also know that whatever is well said is believed…”
“We often contradict an opinion for no other reason than that we do not like the tone in which it is expressed.”
“One will rarely err if extreme actions be ascribed to vanity, ordinary actions to habit, and mean actions to fear.”
“In reality, hope is the worst of all evils, because it prolongs man’s torments.”
“Underneath this reality in which we live and have our being, another and altogether different reality lies concealed…”
“Haste is universal because everyone is in flight from himself.”
“No one can construct for you the bridge upon which precisely you must cross the stream of life, no one but you yourself alone.”
“If it is true to say of the lazy that they kill time, then it is greatly to be feared that an era which sees its salvation in public opinion, this is to say private laziness, is a time that really will be killed: I mean that it will be struck out of the history of the true liberation of life. How reluctant later generations will be to have anything to do with the relics of an era ruled, not by living men, but by pseudo-men dominated by public opinion.”
“There exists no more repulsive and desolate creature in the world than the man who has evaded his genius and who now looks furtively to left and right, behind him and all about him. In the end, such a man becomes impossible to get hold of, since he is wholly exterior, without kernel: a tattered, painted bag of clothes; a decked-out ghost that cannot inspire even fear and certainly not pity.”
“The man who does not wish to belong to the mass needs only to cease taking himself easily; let him follow his conscience, which calls to him: ‘Be your self! All you are now doing, thinking, desiring, is not you yourself.’”
“Are designations congruent with things? Is language the adequate expression of all realities?”
“Style ought to prove that one believes in an idea; not only that one thinks it but also feels it.”
“Against that positivism which stops before phenomena, saying ‘there are only facts,’ I should say: no, it is precisely facts that do not exist, only interpretations…”
“What does man actually know about himself? Is he, indeed, ever able to perceive himself completely, as if laid out in a lighted display case? Does nature not conceal most things from him—even concerning his own body—in order to confine and lock him within a proud, deceptive consciousness, aloof from the coils of the bowels, the rapid flow of the blood stream, and the intricate quivering of the fibers! She threw away the key.”
“Deception, flattering, lying, deluding, talking behind the back, putting up a false front, living in borrowed splendor, wearing a mask, hiding behind convention, playing a role for others and for oneself—in short, a continuous fluttering around the solitary flame of vanity—is so much the rule and the law among men that there is almost nothing which is less comprehensible than how an honest and pure drive for truth could have arisen among them. They are deeply immersed in illusions and in dream images; their eyes merely glide over the surface of things and see ‘forms.'”
“[F]or your true nature lies not concealed deep within you but immeasurably high above you, or at least above that which you usually take yourself to be. Your true educators and formative teachers reveal to you what the true basic material of your being is, something in itself ineducable and in any case difficult of access, bound and paralyzed: your educators can be only your liberators.”
“Thus the man who is responsive to artistic stimuli reacts to the reality of dreams as does the philosopher to the reality of existence; he observes closely, and he enjoys his observation: for it is out of these images that he interprets life, out of these processes that he trains himself for life. It is not only pleasant and agreeable images that he experiences with such universal understanding: the serious, the gloomy, the sad and the profound, the sudden restraints, the mockeries of chance, fearful expectations, in short the whole ‘divine comedy’ of life, the Inferno included, passes before him, not only as a shadow-play—for he too lives and suffers through these scenes—and yet also not without that fleeting sense of illusion; and perhaps many, like myself, can remember calling out to themselves in encouragement, amid the perils and terrors of the dream, and with success: ‘It is a dream! I want to dream on!’ Just as I have often been told of people who have been able to continue one and the same dream over three and more successive nights: facts which clearly show that our innermost being, our common foundation, experiences dreams with profound pleasure and joyful necessity.”
“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.”
“He who fights with monsters should look to it that he himself does not become a monster. And if you gaze long into an abyss, the abyss also gazes into you.”
“State is the name of the coldest of all cold monsters. Coldly it lies; and this lie slips from its mouth: ‘I, the state, am the people.’”
“Everything the State says is a lie, and everything it has it has stolen.”
“This independence is glorified as ‘academic freedom’ […] except that in the background, a discreet distance away, stands the state watching with a certain supervisory look on its face, making sure to remind everybody from time to time that it is the aim, the purpose, the essence of this whole strange process.”
“I now myself live, in every detail, striving for wisdom, while I formerly merely worshiped and idolized the wise.”
“Here the ways of men part: if you wish to strive for peace of soul and pleasure, then believe; if you wish to be a devotee of truth, then inquire.”
“The pride connected with knowing and sensing lies like a blinding fog over the eyes and senses of men, thus deceiving them concerning the value of existence. For this pride contains within itself the most flattering estimation of the value of knowing. Deception is the most general effect of such pride, but even its most particular effects contain within themselves something of the same deceitful character.”
“There exists no more repulsive and desolate creature in the world than the man who has evaded his genius and who now looks furtively to left and right, behind him and all about him. In the end, such a man becomes impossible to get hold of, since he is wholly exterior, without kernel: a tattered, painted bag of clothes.”
“It is only by means of forgetfulness that man can ever reach the point of fancying himself to possess a ‘truth’ of the grade just indicated. If he will not be satisfied with truth in the form of tautology, that is to say, if he will not be content with empty husks, then he will always exchange truths for illusions.”
“We believe that we know something about the things themselves when we speak of trees, colors, snow, and flowers; and yet we possess nothing but metaphors for things—metaphors which correspond in no way to the original entities.”
“Every word instantly becomes a concept precisely insofar as it is not supposed to serve as a reminder of the unique and entirely individual original experience to which it owes its origin; but rather, a word becomes a concept insofar as it simultaneously has to fit countless more or less similar cases—which means, purely and simply, cases which are never equal and thus altogether unequal. Every concept arises from the equation of unequal things. Just as it is certain that one leaf is never totally the same as another, so it is certain that the concept ‘leaf’ is formed by arbitrarily discarding these individual differences and by forgetting the distinguishing aspects.”
“What then is truth? A movable host of metaphors, metonymies, and anthropomorphisms: in short, a sum of human relations which have been poetically and rhetorically intensified, transferred, and embellished, and which, after long usage, seem to a people to be fixed, canonical, and binding. Truths are illusions which we have forgotten are illusions—they are metaphors that have become worn out and have been drained of sensuous force, coins which have lost their embossing and are now considered as metal and no longer as coins.”
“Man could not live without accepting logical fictions, without measuring reality by the purely invented world of the unconditional […] that to give up false judgements would be to give up life, to deny life. Admitting untruth as a condition of life: that means to resist familiar values in a dangerous way; and a philosophy that dares this has already placed itself beyond good and evil.”
“Little by little I came to understand what every great philosophy to date has been: the personal confession of its author, a kind of unintended and unwitting memoir.”
“Young people, with their characteristic anger and awe, seem to find no peace until they have neatly falsified people and things, so that they can vent their feelings on them.”
“It is therefore the modern, noisy, time-consuming, self-congratulatory, stupidly proud work ethic more than anything else that trains and prepares us for a ‘lack of faith.'”
“And who knows whether the same process has not occurred in all the great cases: the crowd adored a god—and the ‘god’ was only a poor sacrificial animal! Success has always been the greatest liar—and the ‘work’ itself is a success; a great statesman, a conqueror, an explorer is disguised to the point of unrecognizability by his creations.”
“The discipline of suffering, great suffering—don’t you know that this discipline alone has created all human greatness to date? The tension of soul of unhappiness which cultivates its strength…”
“Almost everything that we call ‘high culture’ is based on the deepening and spiritualizing of cruelty—that is my tenet…”
“Books for the masses are always bad-smelling books: the odor of little people clings to them. There is usually a stink wherever the common people eat and drink and even in their places of reverence.”
“The greatest person should be the one who can be most lonely, most hidden, most deviant, the man beyond good and evil, the master of his virtues, abundantly rich in will.”
“For it seems to be the rule that higher people come to ruin, that souls that are constituted differently are destroyed.”
“Thus the man who is responsive to artistic stimuli reacts to the reality of dreams as does the philosopher to the reality of existence; he observes closely, and he enjoys his observation: for it is out of these images that he interprets life, out of these processes that he trains himself for life. It is not only pleasant and agreeable images that he experiences with such universal understanding: the serious, the gloomy, the sad and the profound, the sudden restraints, the mockeries of chance, fearful expectations, in short the whole ‘divine comedy’ of life, the Inferno included, passes before him, not only as a shadow-play—for he too lives and suffers through these scenes — and yet also not without that fleeting sense of illusion; and perhaps many, like myself, can remember calling out to themselves in encouragement, amid the perils and terrors of the dream, and with success: ‘It is a dream! I want to dream on!’ Just as I have often been told of people who have been able to continue one and the same dream over three and more successive nights: facts which clearly show that our innermost being, our common foundation, experiences dreams with profound pleasure and joyful necessity.”
“Esteeming humble truths. It is the sign of a higher culture to esteem more highly the little, humble truths, those discovered by a strict method, rather than the gladdening and dazzling errors that originate in metaphysical and artistic ages and men. At first, one has scorn on his lips for humble truths. But truths that are hard won, certain, enduring, and therefore still of consequence for all further knowledge are the higher…”
“All belief is based on the feeling of pleasure or pain in relation to the feeling subject. A new, third feeling as the result of two preceding feelings is judgement in its lowest form.”
“One crucial disadvantage about the end of metaphysical views is that the individual looks his own short life span too squarely in the eye and feels no strong incentive to build on enduring institutions, designed for the ages.”
“Error has made man so deep, delicate, inventive as to bring forth such blossoms as religion and arts. Pure knowledge would never have been capable of it.”
“The brevity of human life misleads us to many an erroneous assertion about the qualities of man’s feelings.”
“One can promise actions, but not feelings, for the latter are involuntary. He who promises to love forever or hate forever or be forever faithful to someone is promising something that is not in his power.”
“[P]erhaps the great majority of men find it necessary, in order to maintain their self-respect and a certain effectiveness in their actions, to lower and belittle the image they form of everyone they know.”
“If looks could kill, we would long ago have been done for.”
“When virtue has slept, it will arise refreshed.”
“We praise or find fault, depending on which of the two provides more opportunity for our powers of judgement to shine.”
“Without blind disciples, no man or his work has ever gained great influence.”
“There is not enough love and kindness in the world to permit us to give any of it away to imaginary beings.”
“In each ascetic morality, man prays to one part of himself as a god and also finds it necessary to diabolify the rest.”
“What do we long for when we see beauty? To be beautiful. We think much happiness must be connected with it. But that is an error.”
“Art renders the sight of life bearable by laying over it the gauze of impure thinking.”
“Every writer is surprised anew when a book, as soon as it has been separated from him, begins to take on a life of its own … it goes about finding its readers, kindles life, pleases, horrifies, fathers new works, becomes the soul of others’ resolutions and behavior. In short, it lives like a being fitted out with a mind and soul—yet it is nevertheless not human.”
“I descended into the lowest depths, I searched to the bottom, I examined and pried into an old faith on which, for thousands of years, philosophers had built as upon a secure foundation. The old structures came tumbling down about me.”
“Every individual action, every individual mode of thought arouses dread; it is impossible to compute what precisely the rarer, choicer, more original spirits in the whole course of history have had to suffer through being felt as evil and dangerous, indeed through feeling themselves to be so. Under the dominion of the morality of custom, originality of every kind has acquired a bad conscience.”
“Under the pressure of superstitious fear, … one spoils one’s sense of reality and one’s pleasure in it, and in the end accords reality a value only insofar as it is capable of being a symbol.”
“‘Trust your feelings!’—But feelings are nothing final or original; behind the feelings there stand judgments and evaluations. … The inspiration born of feeling is the grandchild of a judgment—and often a false judgment! And in any event not a child of your own! To trust one’s feelings means to give more obedience to one’s grandfather and grandmother and their grandparents than to the gods which are in us: our reason and our experience.”
“Is it not dreadful to make necessary and regularly recurring sensations into a source of inner misery, and in this way to want to make inner misery a necessary and regularly recurring phenomenon.”
“Our evaluations—All actions may be traced back to evaluations; all evaluations are either original or adopted—the latter being by far the most common. Why do we adopt them? From fear—that is, we consider it more advisable to pretend they are our own—and accustom ourselves to this pretense, so that at length it becomes our own nature. Original evaluation: that is to say, to assess a thing according to the extent to which it pleases or displeases us alone and no one else—something excessively rare!—But must our evaluation of another, in which there lies the motive for our generally availing ourselves of his evaluation, at least not proceed from us, be our own determination? Yes, but we arrive at it as children, and rarely learn to change our view; most of us are our while lives long the fools of the way we acquired in childhood of judging our neighbors (their minds, rank, morality, whether they are exemplary or reprehensible) and of finding it necessary to pay homage to their evaluations.”
“All our so-called consciousness is a more or less fantastic commentary on an unknown, perhaps unknowable, but felt text.”
“Woe to the thinker who is not the gardener but only the soil of the plants that grow in him.”
“It is not enough to prove something, one has also to seduce or elevate people to it. That is why the man of knowledge should learn how to speak his wisdom: and often in such a way that it sounds like folly!”
“Verily, a polluted stream is man. One must be a sea to be able to receive a polluted stream without becoming unclean.”
“What is great in man is that he is a bridge and not a goal.”
“I tell you: one must still have chaos within oneself, to give birth to a dancing star.”
“No shepherd, and one herd! Everyone wants the same, everyone is the same: whoever feels different goes willingly into the madhouse.”
“A light has dawned for me: I need companions, living ones, not dead companions and corpses which I carry with me wherever I wish. But I need living companions who follow me because they want to follow themselves—and who want to go where I want to go.”
“There is more wisdom in your body than in your deepest philosophy.”
“Of all that is written, I love only what a man has written with his own blood.”
“There is always some madness in love. But there is also always some reason in madness.”
“It is true: we love life not because we are used to living, but because we are used to loving.”
“I would only believe in a God that knows how to dance.”
“Not by wrath does one kill, but by laughter.”
“The more one seeks to rise into height and light, the more vigorously do ones roots struggle earthward, downward, into the dark, the deep—into evil.”
“The state lieth in all languages of good and evil; and whatever it saith it lieth; and whatever it hath it hath stolen. False is everything in it; with stolen teeth it biteth, the biting one. False are even its bowels. Confusion of language of good and evil; this sign I give unto you as the sign of the state. Verily, the will to death, indicateth this sign! Verily, it beckoneth unto the preachers of death!”
“Watch them clamber, these swift monkeys! They clamber over one another and thus drag one another into the mud and the depth. They all want to get to the throne: that is their madness—as if happiness sat on the throne. Often, mud sits on the throne—and often the throne also on mud. Mad they all appear to me, clambering monkeys and overardent. Foul smells their idol, the cold monster: foul, they smell to me altogether, these idolators.”
“The state, I call it, where all are poison-drinkers, the good and the bad: the state, where all lose themselves, the good and the bad: the state, where the slow suicide of all—is called ‘life.’ Just see these superfluous ones! They steal the works of the inventors and the treasures of the wise. Culture, they call their theft—and everything becometh sickness and trouble unto them! Just see these superfluous ones! Sick are they always; they vomit their bile and call it a newspaper. They devour one another, and cannot even digest themselves. Just see these superfluous ones! Wealth they acquire and become poorer thereby. Power they seek for, and above all, the lever of power, much money—these impotent ones! See them clamber, these nimble apes! They clamber over one another, and thus scuffle into the mud and the abyss. Towards the throne they all strive: it is their madness—as if happiness sat on the throne! Ofttimes sitteth filth on the throne. —and ofttimes also the throne on filth. Madmen they all seem to me, and clambering apes, and too eager. Badly smelleth their idol to me, the cold monster: badly they all smell to me, these idolaters.”
“Spirit is the life that itself strikes into life: through its own torment it increases its own knowledge.”
“Whence come the highest mountains? I once asked. Then I learned that they came out of the sea. The evidence is written in their rocks and in the walls of their peaks. It is out of the deepest depth that the highest must come to its height.”
“Life is a well of delight; but where the rabble also drink, there all fountains are poisoned.”
“No one is such a liar as the indignant man.”
“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 hose for emasculation of art, to give it a good conscience.”
“Love of one is a piece of barbarism: for it is practiced at the expense of all others. Love of God likewise.”
“I have done that,’ says my memory. ‘I cannot have done that,’ says my pride, and remains adamant. At last—memory yields.”
“Anyone who despises himself will still respect himself as a despiser.”
“If one trains one’s conscience it will kiss us as it bites.”
“One is punished most for one’s virtues.”
“That which an age feels to be evil is usually an untimely echo of what was formerly considered good—the atavism of an old ideal.”
“It is not enough to possess a talent: one must also possess your permission to possess it—eh, my friends?”
“What is done out of love always takes place beyond good and evil.”
“Madness is something rare in individuals—but in groups, parties, peoples, epochs it is the rule.”
“To talk about oneself a great deal can also be a means of concealing oneself.”
“Is life not a thousand times too short for us to bore ourselves?”
“Even the most courageous among us only rarely has the courage to face what he already knows.”
“If we have our own why in life, we shall get along with almost any how.”
“I mistrust all systematizers and avoid them. The will to a system is a lack of integrity.”
“Only thoughts reached by walking have value.”
“The early church, as everyone knows, certainly did wage war against the intelligent.”
“Radical and moral hostility to sensuality remains a suspicious symptom.”
“The price of fruitfulness is to be rich in internal opposition.”
“In art, man enjoys himself as perfection.”
“How does one compromise oneself today? If one is consistent. If one proceeds in a straight line. If one is not ambiguous enough to permit five conflicting interpretations. If one is genuine.”
“What is the task of all higher education? To turn men into machines. What are the means?Man must learn to be bored. How is that accomplished? By means of the concept of duty.”
“Plato is a coward before reality, consequently he flees into the ideal.”
“All becoming and growing—all that guarantees a future—involves pain.”
“Error is not blindness, error is cowardice.”
“My form of retaliation consists in this: as soon as possible to set a piece of cleverness at the heels of an act of stupidity.”
“Thanks to an acoustic delusion, people will believe that where nothing is heard there is nothing to hear.”
“To regard morality itself as a symptom of degeneration is an innovation, a unique event of the first order in the history of knowledge.”
“Life is diseased, thanks to this dehumanized piece of clockwork and mechanism, thanks to the ‘impersonality’ of the workman, and the false economy of the ‘division of labor.’ The object, which is culture, is lost sight of: modern scientific activity as a means thereto simply produces barbarism.”
“My life-task is to prepare for humanity one supreme moment in which it can come to its senses, a Great Noon in which it will turn its gaze backwards and forwards, in which it will step from under the yoke of accident and of priests, and for the first time set the question of the Why and Wherefore of, humanity as a whole—this life-task naturally follows out of the conviction that mankind does not get on the right road of its own accord, that it is by no means divinely ruled, but rather that it is precisely under the cover of its most holy valuations that the instinct of negation, of corruption, and of degeneration has held such a seductive sway.”
“I refuse to be a saint; I would rather be a clown.”
“The Christian church has left nothing untouched by its depravity. It has made of every value, a dis-value; of every truth, a lie; of every kind of integrity, a vileness of soul.”
