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
The anarchist and the Christian have a common origin.
—Friedrich Nietzsche
There is one thing one has to have: either a soul that is cheerful by nature, or a soul made cheerful by work, love, art, and knowledge.
—Friedrich Nietzsche
Topics: Knowledge
Talking much about oneself can also be a means to conceal oneself.
—Friedrich Nietzsche
Topics: Humility
Only sick music makes money today.
—Friedrich Nietzsche
Topics: The Past, Music
Women are quite able to make friends with a man; but to preserve such a friendship – that no doubt requires the assistance of a slight physical antipathy most probably helps.
—Friedrich Nietzsche
Topics: Friendship, Women
Courage is the best slayer – courage which attacketh, for in every attack there is the sound of triumph.
—Friedrich Nietzsche
Topics: Courage
There is more wisdom in your body than in your deepest philosophy.
—Friedrich Nietzsche
Topics: Wisdom
Beggars should be entirely abolished! Truly, it is annoying to give to them and annoying not to give to them.
—Friedrich Nietzsche
Topics: Charity
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.
—Friedrich Nietzsche
Topics: Existence
Battle not with monsters, lest ye become a monster
—Friedrich Nietzsche
Topics: Battle
Early in the morning, at break of day, in all the freshness and dawn of one’s strength, to read a book—I call that vicious!
—Friedrich Nietzsche
Topics: Reading, Books
Actual philosophers… are commanders and law-givers: they say “thus it shall be!”, it is they who determine the Wherefore and Whither of mankind, and they possess for this task the preliminary work of all the philosophical laborers, of all those who have subdued the past—they reach for the future with creative hand, and everything that is or has been becomes for them a means, an instrument, a hammer. Their “knowing” is creating, their creating is a law giving, their will to truth is—will to power. Are their such philosophers today? Have there been such philosophers? Must there not be such philosophers?
—Friedrich Nietzsche
Topics: Philosophy
Jesus died too soon. He would have repudiated His doctrine if He had lived to my age.
—Friedrich Nietzsche
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.
—Friedrich Nietzsche
Topics: Virtue
In architecture the pride of man, his triumph over gravitation, his will to power, assume visible form. Architecture is a sort of oratory of power by means of form.
—Friedrich Nietzsche
Topics: Architecture
If a man wishes to rid himself of a feeling of unbearable oppression, he may have to take hashish.
—Friedrich Nietzsche
Topics: Oppression
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.
—Friedrich Nietzsche
Topics: Creativity
It is very noble hypocrisy not to talk of one’s self.
—Friedrich Nietzsche
Topics: Deception
If there is something to pardon in everything, there is also something to condemn.
—Friedrich Nietzsche
Topics: Forgiveness
One has to pay dearly for immortality; one has to die several times while one is still alive.
—Friedrich Nietzsche
Topics: Death
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.
—Friedrich Nietzsche
Topics: Artists, Arts, Art
The most common lie is that which one lies to himself; lying to others is relatively an exception.
—Friedrich Nietzsche
Topics: Lies, Deception/Lying
After coming into contact with a religious man I always feel I must wash my hands.
—Friedrich Nietzsche
Topics: Atheism, Religion
In reality, hope is the worst of all evils, because it prolongs man’s torments.
—Friedrich Nietzsche
Topics: Hope
The press, the machine, the railway, the telegraph are premises whose thousand-year conclusion no one has yet dared to draw.
—Friedrich Nietzsche
Topics: Science, Technology
Love is not consolation. It is light.
—Friedrich Nietzsche
Topics: Light, Love
Distrust everyone in whom the impulse to punish is powerful!
—Friedrich Nietzsche
Topics: Punishment
The lie is a condition of life.
—Friedrich Nietzsche
Topics: Lies
He who cannot command himself should obey. And many can command themselves, but much is still lacking before they can obey themselves.
—Friedrich Nietzsche
Topics: Action
For the woman, the man is a means: the end is always the child.
—Friedrich Nietzsche
Topics: Men and Women, Men, Men & Women, Women
The great epochs of our life come when we gain the courage to rechristen our evil as what is best in us.
—Friedrich Nietzsche
Topics: Courage, Life, Growth
Poets treat their experiences shamelessly; they exploit them
—Friedrich Nietzsche
Topics: Experience
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.
—Friedrich Nietzsche
Topics: War
The most spiritual men, as the strongest, find their happiness where others would find their destruction: in the labyrinth, in hardness against themselves and others, in experiments. Their joy is self-conquest. Difficult tasks are a privilege to them; to play with burdens that crush others, a recreation. They are the most venerable kind of man: that does not preclude their being the most cheerful and the kindliest.
—Friedrich Nietzsche
Topics: Character
All truly great thoughts are conceived by walking.
—Friedrich Nietzsche
Topics: Walking
The lonely one offers his hand too quickly to whomever he encounters.
—Friedrich Nietzsche
Topics: Friendship
Men have hitherto treated women like birds which have strayed down to them from the heights; as something more delicate, more fragile, more savage, stranger, sweeter, soulful—but as something which has to be caged up so that it shall not fly away.
—Friedrich Nietzsche
Topics: Women
The great man fights the elements in his time that hinder his own greatness, in other words his own freedom and sincerity.
—Friedrich Nietzsche
Topics: Sincerity
What does not kill me makes me stronger.
—Friedrich Nietzsche
Topics: Strength
What is the vanity of the vainest man compared with the vanity which the most modest possesses when, in the midst of nature and the world, he feels himself to be “man”!
—Friedrich Nietzsche
Topics: Vanity
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