Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche (1844–1900) was a German philosopher, scholar, and writer. His brilliant, unconventional works, often aphoristic or poetical in form, have secured him an immense, if cultish, influence in contemporary intellectual history.
Born in Röcken, Saxony, Prussia, to a clergyman, Nietzsche studied Greek and Latin at Bonn and Leipzig. In 1869, he was appointed to the chair of classical philology at Basel but resigned after nine years of deteriorating bouts of psychosomatic illnesses. He spent the next ten years at resorts in France, Italy, and Switzerland writing and trying to recuperate.
In 1879, Nietzsche abandoned philology for philosophy and, over the next decade, worked out his philosophy on the freedom of the individual. The core of Nietzsche’s work was to find meaning and morality in the absence of God. He contended that the Christian system of faith and worship was not only incorrect but also detrimental to society because it allowed the weak to rule the strong. In other words, Christian philosophy repressed the will to power, which was the driving force of human character.
In his most celebrated work, Thus Spake Zarathustra (German: Also Sprach Zarathustra: Ein Buch für Alle und Keinen; 1893–91,) Nietzsche presented his conception of the Übermensch (‘Superman,’) who transcends slavish Christianity and rises above the restrictions of ordinary morality through his creative “will to power.” The Nazi party misappropriated this concept of the idealized man who is strong, positive, and able to impose his wishes upon the weak and worthless.
Nietzsche’s other renowned works include Beyond Good and Evil (Jenseits von Gut und Böse; 1886) and On the Genealogy of Morality (Zur Genealogie der Moral; 1887.) His autobiography, Ecce Homo: How One Becomes What One Is (Ecce homo: Wie man wird, was man ist) was completed in 1888, but withheld by his sister and published only in 1908.
In 1889, Nietzsche had a complete mental and physical breakdown. He was nursed for the next 12 years by his mother and his sister but never recovered his sanity.
More: Wikipedia • READ: Works by Friedrich Nietzsche
Not when truth is dirty, but when it is shallow, does the enlightened man dislike to wade into its waters.
—Friedrich Nietzsche
Topics: Swearing, Profanity, Vulgarity
The historian looks backward. In the end he also believes backward.
—Friedrich Nietzsche
Topics: The Past, Past
Where does one not find that bland degeneration which beer produces in the spirit!
—Friedrich Nietzsche
Topics: Alcoholism, Alcohol
A man who is very busy seldom changes his opinions.
—Friedrich Nietzsche
Topics: Busy
Contentment preserves one from catching cold. Has a woman who knew that she was well dressed ever caught a cold? No, not even when she had scarcely a rag on her back.
—Friedrich Nietzsche
Topics: Contentment, Praise
You may have enemies whom you hate, but not enemies whom you despise. You must be proud of your enemy: then the success of your enemy shall be your success too.
—Friedrich Nietzsche
Topics: Hate
I know my fate. One day there will be associated with my name the recollection of something frightful—of a crisis like no other before on earth, of the profoundest collision of conscience, of a decision evoked against everything that until then had been believed in, demanded, sanctified. I am not a man I am dynamite.
—Friedrich Nietzsche
Topics: Prophecy, Vision
He who lives by fighting with an enemy has an interest in the preservation of the enemy’s life.
—Friedrich Nietzsche
Topics: Enemy, Enemies
Cynicism is the only form in which base souls approach honesty.
—Friedrich Nietzsche
Topics: Cynicism, Honesty
I teach you the Overman. Man is something that shall be overcome. What have you done to overcome him? … The time has come for man to set himself a goal. The time has come to plant the seed to his highest hope.
—Friedrich Nietzsche
Topics: Humanity, Humankind, Growth, Courage
Strong hope is a much greater stimulant of life than any single realized joy could be.
—Friedrich Nietzsche
Topics: Aspirations, Hope
Once spirit was God, then it became man, and now it is even becoming mob.
—Friedrich Nietzsche
Topics: Spirit, Spirituality
Growth in wisdom may be exactly measured by decrease in bitterness
—Friedrich Nietzsche
Topics: Bitterness
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.
—Friedrich Nietzsche
This is my way; where is yours?—Thus I answered those who asked me “the way”. For the way—that does not exist.
—Friedrich Nietzsche
Better know nothing than half-know many things.
—Friedrich Nietzsche
Topics: Knowledge
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.
—Friedrich Nietzsche
Topics: Death
The man loves danger and sport. That is why he loves woman, the most dangerous of all sports.
—Friedrich Nietzsche
Topics: Sports
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.
—Friedrich Nietzsche
Topics: Identity
What is Genius?- To aspire to a lofty aim and to will the means to that aim.
—Friedrich Nietzsche
Topics: Vision
The “kingdom of Heaven” is a condition of the heart—not something that comes “upon the earth” or “after death.”
—Friedrich Nietzsche
Topics: Heaven
Morality in Europe today is herd-morality
—Friedrich Nietzsche
A politician divides mankind into two classes; tools and enemies.
—Friedrich Nietzsche
Topics: Politics, Politicians
Mathematics would certainly have not come into existence if one had known from the beginning that there was in nature no exactly straight line, no actual circle, no absolute magnitude.
—Friedrich Nietzsche
Topics: Science, Mathematics
Two great European narcotics, alcohol and Christianity.
—Friedrich Nietzsche
Topics: Christianity, Christians, Religion
The most perfidious way of harming a cause consists of defending it deliberately with faulty arguments.
—Friedrich Nietzsche
Topics: Arguments
We would not let ourselves be burned to death for our opinions: we are not sure enough of them for that. But perhaps for the right to have our opinions and to change them.
—Friedrich Nietzsche
Topics: Opinion, Opinions
Man is no longer an artist, he has become a work of art.
—Friedrich Nietzsche
Topics: Humanity, Humankind
And as for our future, one will hardly find us again on the paths of those Egyptian youths who endanger temples by night, embrace statues, and want by all means to unveil, uncover, and put into a bright light whatever is kept concealed for good reasons. No, this bad taste, this will to truth, to truth at any price, this youthful madness in the love of truth, have lost their charm for us: for that we are too experienced, too serious, too gay, too burned, too deep. We no longer believe that truth remains truth when the veils are withdrawn; we have lived enough not to believe this. Today we consider it a matter of decency not to wish to see everything naked, or to be present at everything, or to understand and know everything. Tout comprendre
—Friedrich Nietzsche
Topics: Truth
I fear we are not getting rid of God because we still believe in grammar.
—Friedrich Nietzsche
Topics: God, Religion
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