The Complete Works of Nietzsche Quotes

“Thus the nature of noble soul wills it: they want nothing for free”
― Friedrich Nietzsche, The Complete Works of Nietzsche: including Thus Spake Zarathustra, Beyond Good and Evil, Human All Too Human, The Birth of Tragedy, and many more

“whatever cannot obey itself will be commanded.”
― Friedrich Nietzsche, The Complete Works of Nietzsche: including Thus Spake Zarathustra, Beyond Good and Evil, Human All Too Human, The Birth of Tragedy, and many more

“And everyone who desires fame must take leave of honor in good time and practice the difficult art of — leaving at the right time.”
― Friedrich Nietzsche, The Complete Works of Nietzsche: including Thus Spake Zarathustra, Beyond Good and Evil, Human All Too Human, The Birth of Tragedy, and many more

“Alas, there are so many great thoughts that do no more than a bellows: they inflate and make emptier.”
― Friedrich Nietzsche, The Complete Works of Nietzsche: including Thus Spake Zarathustra, Beyond Good and Evil, Human All Too Human, The Birth of Tragedy, and many more

“Man first implanted values in things in order to maintain his standing, —”
― Friedrich Nietzsche, The Complete Works of Nietzsche: including Thus Spake Zarathustra, Beyond Good and Evil, Human All Too Human, The Birth of Tragedy, and many more

“State I call it, where all are poison drinkers, good and bad: state, where all lose themselves, good and bad: state, where the slow suicide of all — is called “life.”
― Friedrich Nietzsche, The Complete Works of Nietzsche: including Thus Spake Zarathustra, Beyond Good and Evil, Human All Too Human, The Birth of Tragedy, and many more

“Somewhere there are still peoples and herds, but not by us: here there are states.”
― Friedrich Nietzsche, The Complete Works of Nietzsche: including Thus Spake Zarathustra, Beyond Good and Evil, Human All Too Human, The Birth of Tragedy, and many more

“I would only believe in a God who knew how to dance.”
― Friedrich Nietzsche, The Complete Works of Nietzsche: including Thus Spake Zarathustra, Beyond Good and Evil, Human All Too Human, The Birth of Tragedy, and many more

“He who writes in blood and aphorisms does not want to be read but to be learned by heart. In the mountains the shortest path is from peak to peak: but for that you have to have long legs. Aphorisms should be peaks: and those to whom they speak, tall and lofty.”
― Friedrich Nietzsche, The Complete Works of Nietzsche: including Thus Spake Zarathustra, Beyond Good and Evil, Human All Too Human, The Birth of Tragedy, and many more

“The body is a great reason, a multiplicity with one meaning, a war and a peace, a herd and a shepherd.”
― Friedrich Nietzsche, The Complete Works of Nietzsche: including Thus Spake Zarathustra, Beyond Good and Evil, Human All Too Human, The Birth of Tragedy, and many more

“I have spoken to you of three metamorphoses of the spirit: how the spirit becomes a camel, the camel a lion and finally, the lion a child. —”
― Friedrich Nietzsche, The Complete Works of Nietzsche: including Thus Spake Zarathustra, Beyond Good and Evil, Human All Too Human, The Birth of Tragedy, and many more

“I love him who is of a free spirit and a free heart: thus his head is only the innards of his heart; his heart, however, drives him to his downgoing.”
― Friedrich Nietzsche, The Complete Works of Nietzsche: including Thus Spake Zarathustra, Beyond Good and Evil, Human All Too Human, The Birth of Tragedy, and many more

“fanaticism is the only “strength of the will” that even the weak and insecure can be brought to attain, being a sort of hypnotism of the whole system of the senses and the intellect for the benefit of an excessive nourishment (hypertrophy) of a single point of view”
― Friedrich Nietzsche, The Complete Works of Nietzsche: including Thus Spake Zarathustra, Beyond Good and Evil, Human All Too Human, The Birth of Tragedy, and many more

“Yes, my friends, regarding all the moral chatter of some about others it is time to feel nauseous. Sitting in moral judgment should offend our taste. Let us leave such chatter and such bad taste to those who have nothing else to do but drag the past a few steps further through time and who never live in the present—which is to say the many, the great majority. We, however, want to become those we are66”
― Friedrich Nietzsche, The Complete Works of Nietzsche: including Thus Spake Zarathustra, Beyond Good and Evil, Human All Too Human, The Birth of Tragedy, and many more

“the style and spirit of letters will always be the true “sign of the times.”
― Friedrich Nietzsche, The Complete Works of Nietzsche: including Thus Spake Zarathustra, Beyond Good and Evil, Human All Too Human, The Birth of Tragedy, and many more

“Let us beware of thinking that the world is a living being. Where should it expand? On what should it feed? How could it grow and multiply? We have some notion of the nature of the organic; and we should not reinterpret the exceedingly derivative, late, rare, accidental, that we perceive only on the crust of the earth and make of it something essential, universal, and eternal, which is what those people do who call the universe an organism. This nauseates me.

Let us even beware of believing that the universe is a machine: it is certainly not constructed for one purpose, and calling it a 'machine' does it far too much honor.

Let us beware of positing generally and everywhere anything as elegant as the cyclical movements of our neighboring stars; even a glance into the Milky Way raises doubts whether there are not far coarser and more contradictory movements there, as well as stars with eternally linear paths, etc. The astral order in which we live is an exception; this order and the relative duration that depends on it have again made possible an exception of exceptions: the formation of the organic.

The total character of the world, however, is in all eternity chaos—in the sense not of a lack of necessity but of a lack of order, arrangement, form, beauty, wisdom, and whatever other names there are for our aesthetic anthropomorphisms. Judged from the point of view of our reason, unsuccessful attempts are by all odds the rule, the exceptions are not the secret aim, and the whole musical box repeats eternally its tune which may never be called a melody—and ultimately even the phrase 'unsuccessful attempt' is too anthropomorphic and reproachful. But how could we reproach or praise the universe?

Let us beware of attributing to it heartlessness and unreason or their opposites: it is neither perfect nor beautiful, nor noble, nor does it wish to become any of these things; it does not by any means strive to imitate man. None of our aesthetic and moral judgments apply to it. Nor does it have any instinct for self-preservation or any other instinct; and it does not observe any laws either.

Let us beware of saying that there are laws in nature. There are only necessities: there is nobody who commands, nobody who obeys, nobody who trespasses. Once you know that there are no purposes, you also know that there is no accident; for it is only beside a world of purposes that the word 'accident' has meaning.

Let us beware of saying that death is the opposite of life. The living are merely a species of the dead, and a very rare species.

Let us beware of thinking that the world eternally creates new things. There are no eternally enduring substances; matter is as much of an error as the God of the Eleatics. But when shall we ever be done with our caution and care? When will all these shadows of God cease to darken our minds? When will we complete our de-deification of nature? When may we begin to 'naturalize' humanity in terms of a pure, newly discovered, newly redeemed nature?”
― Friedrich Nietzsche, The Complete Works of Nietzsche: including Thus Spake Zarathustra, Beyond Good and Evil, Human All Too Human, The Birth of Tragedy, and many more

“Life as a means to knowledge”—with this principle in one’s heart one can live not only boldly but even gaily, and laugh gaily, too.”
― Friedrich Nietzsche, The Complete Works of Nietzsche: including Thus Spake Zarathustra, Beyond Good and Evil, Human All Too Human, The Birth of Tragedy, and many more

“Let us rather see to it that our own influence on all that is yet to come balances and outweighs his influence. Let us not contend in a direct fight—and that is what all reproaching, punishing, and attempts to improve others amount to. Let us rather raise ourselves that much higher. Let us color our own example ever more brilliantly. Let our brilliance make them look dark. No, let us not become darker ourselves on their account, like ail those who punish others and feel dissatisfied.”
― Friedrich Nietzsche, The Complete Works of Nietzsche: including Thus Spake Zarathustra, Beyond Good and Evil, Human All Too Human, The Birth of Tragedy, and many more

“I know more about life because I have so often been on the verge of losing it; and precisely for that reason I get more out of life than any of you.”
― Friedrich Nietzsche, The Complete Works of Nietzsche: including Thus Spake Zarathustra, Beyond Good and Evil, Human All Too Human, The Birth of Tragedy, and many more

“How hard it is to live when one feels the opposition of many millennia all around.”
― Friedrich Nietzsche, The Complete Works of Nietzsche: including Thus Spake Zarathustra, Beyond Good and Evil, Human All Too Human, The Birth of Tragedy, and many more

“One day, and probably soon, we need some recognition of what above all is lacking in our big cities: quiet and wide, expansive places for reflection”
― Friedrich Nietzsche, The Complete Works of Nietzsche: including Thus Spake Zarathustra, Beyond Good and Evil, Human All Too Human, The Birth of Tragedy, and many more

“How shall we comfort ourselves, the murderers of all murderers? What was holiest and mightiest of all that the world has yet owned has bled to death under our knives: who will wipe this blood off us? What water is there for us to clean ourselves?”
― Friedrich Nietzsche, The Complete Works of Nietzsche: including Thus Spake Zarathustra, Beyond Good and Evil, Human All Too Human, The Birth of Tragedy, and many more

“The madman jumped into their midst and pierced them with his eyes. “Whither is God?” he cried; “I will tell you. We have killed him—you and I. All of us are his murderers.”
― Friedrich Nietzsche, The Complete Works of Nietzsche: including Thus Spake Zarathustra, Beyond Good and Evil, Human All Too Human, The Birth of Tragedy, and many more

“Pope Leo X once sang the praises of science (in his brief to Beroaldo18): he called it the most beautiful ornament and the greatest pride of our life and a noble occupation in times of happiness as well as unhappiness;”
― Friedrich Nietzsche, The Complete Works of Nietzsche: including Thus Spake Zarathustra, Beyond Good and Evil, Human All Too Human, The Birth of Tragedy, and many more

“With music one can seduce men to every error and every truth: who could refute a tone?”
― Friedrich Nietzsche, The Complete Works of Nietzsche: including Thus Spake Zarathustra, Beyond Good and Evil, Human All Too Human, The Birth of Tragedy, and many more

“But why, then, do you write? —A: Well, my friend, to be quite frank: so far, I have not discovered any other way of getting rid of my thoughts.”
― Friedrich Nietzsche, The Complete Works of Nietzsche: including Thus Spake Zarathustra, Beyond Good and Evil, Human All Too Human, The Birth of Tragedy, and many more

“The general lack of experience of pain of both kinds and the relative rarity of the sight of anyone who is suffering have an important consequence: pain is now hated much more than was the case formerly; one speaks much worse of it; indeed, one considers the existence of the mere thought of pain scarcely endurable and turns it into a reproach against the whole of existence.”
― Friedrich Nietzsche, The Complete Works of Nietzsche: including Thus Spake Zarathustra, Beyond Good and Evil, Human All Too Human, The Birth of Tragedy, and many more

“I tell you: a man must still have chaos within himself in order to give birth to a dancing star. I tell you: you still have chaos within yourselves. Alas! The day is coming when man will no longer give birth to a star. Alas! The day of the most despicable man is coming, of him who can no longer despise himself.”
― Friedrich Nietzsche, The Complete Works of Nietzsche: including Thus Spake Zarathustra, Beyond Good and Evil, Human All Too Human, The Birth of Tragedy, and many more

“I love him whose soul is deep even in the wounding, and whom a little thing can ruin: thus he gladly goes across the bridge.”
― Friedrich Nietzsche, The Complete Works of Nietzsche: including Thus Spake Zarathustra, Beyond Good and Evil, Human All Too Human, The Birth of Tragedy, and many more

“God is a thought that makes everything straight crooked and everything that stands whirl.”
― Friedrich Nietzsche, The Complete Works of Nietzsche: including Thus Spake Zarathustra, Beyond Good and Evil, Human All Too Human, The Birth of Tragedy, and many more