Philosopher, scholar, poet, unifier of opposites and courageous critic of Western Civilization, Nietzsche proclaimed that “God is Dead,” that Christianity is “one great curse, one great intrinsic depravity,” and then started a “campaign against morality.” With a deep appreciation for Buddhism and rejecting external authorities like a “God” or a Church, he extolled the ability for people to discover their own morality grounded in reality rather than following herd-based ethics and beliefs. With a dedication to the sense over the words, people as diverse as D. H. Lawrence, Mishima, Rilke, Jack London, Hermann Hesse, Martin Heidegger, Carl Jung and many others described him as a most important influence on themselves personally as well on as society and the evolution of consciousness.
Human All Too Human - A Book for Free Spirits
Beyond Good and Evil
Der Fall Wagner (1888)
Natural History of Morals
The Antichrist (1888)
The Gay Science (1882)
The Portable Nietzsche, 1954
“But the worst enemy you can meet will always be yourself.”
Chapters:
63. Easy as Hard
69. No Enemy
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“He who cannot lie, doth not know what truth is.”
Chapters:
40. Returning
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“He who climbs upon the highest mountains laughs at all tragedies, real or imaginary.”
Chapters:
78. Water
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“He who obeys, does not listen to himself!”
Chapters:
38. Fruit Over Flowers
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“How lovely it is that there are words and sounds. Are not words and sounds rainbows and illusive bridges between things which are eternally apart?”
Chapters:
64. Ordinary Mind
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“I would only believe in a god who could dance.”
Chapters:
56. One with the Dust
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“Man is a rope, tied between beast and overman - a rope over an abyss. What is great in man is that he is a bridge and not an end.”
Chapters:
54. Planting Well
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“The higher we soar the smaller we appear to those who cannot fly.”
Chapters:
41. Distilled Life
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“you must be ready to burn yourself in your own flame; how could you rise anew if you have not first become ashes?”
Chapters:
27. No Trace
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“Your thoughts are not your experiences, they are an echo and after-effect of your experiences: as when your room trembles when a carriage goes past.”
Chapters:
81. Journey Without Goal
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“I call Christianity the one great curse, the one great intrinsic depravity, the one great instinct for revenge for which no expedient is sufficiently poisonous, secret, subterranean, petty — I call it the one immortal blemish of mankind…”
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“One repays a teacher badly if one always remains nothing but a pupil.”
Chapters:
38. Fruit Over Flowers
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“Become who you are!”
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“Are you a slave? Then you cannot be a friend. Are you a tyrant? Then you cannot have friends.”
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“Wherever progress is to evolve, deviating natures are of greatest importance.”
from Human All Too Human - A Book for Free Spirits
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“Every progress of the whole must be preceded by a partial weakening.”
from Human All Too Human - A Book for Free Spirits
Chapters:
42. Children of the Way
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“There is rarely a degeneration, a truncation, or even a vice or any physical or moral loss without an advantage somewhere else.”
from Human All Too Human - A Book for Free Spirits
Chapters:
76. The Soft and Flexible
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“The strongest natures retain the type, the weaker ones help to advance it.”
from Human All Too Human - A Book for Free Spirits
Chapters:
3. Weak Wishes, Strong Bones
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“One is fruitful only at the cost of being rich in contradictions.”
Chapters:
40. Returning
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“It is precisely the weaker nature, as the more delicate and free, that makes progress possible at all.”
Chapters:
26. The Still Rule the Restless
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“the will to a system is a lack of integrity”
Chapters:
21. Following Empty Heart
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“If we possess a why of life we can put up with almost any how.”
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“Which is it? Is man only a blunder of God? Or is God only a blunder of man?”
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“Out of life's school of war: What does not destroy me, makes me stronger.”
Chapters:
18. The Sick Society
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“It is not a lack of love, but a lack of friendship that makes unhappy marriages.”
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“Socialism itself can hope to exist only for brief periods here and there, and then only through the exercise of the extremest terrorism.”
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“Art is the highest task and the proper metaphysical activity of this life.”
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“The time for petty politics is past; the next century will bring the struggle for the domination of the world.”
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“There is not enough love and goodness in the world to permit giving any of it away to imaginary beings.”
from Human All Too Human - A Book for Free Spirits
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“Most people are far too much occupied with themselves to be malicious.”
from Human All Too Human - A Book for Free Spirits
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“And so, onwards... along a path of wisdom, with a hearty tread, a hearty confidence… be your own source of experience., throw off your discontent, forgive yourself, merge everything you have lived through.”
from Human All Too Human - A Book for Free Spirits
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“Marriage as a long conversation. When marrying you should ask yourself if you are going to enjoy talking with this woman into your old age? Everything else in a marriage is transitory.”
from Human All Too Human - A Book for Free Spirits
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“Our crime against criminals lies in the fact that we treat them like scoundrels.”
from Human All Too Human - A Book for Free Spirits
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“He is called a free spirit who thinks differently from what, on the basis of his origin, environment, his class and profession, or on the basis of the dominant views of the age, would have been expected of him.”
from Human All Too Human - A Book for Free Spirits
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“The spiritual power of a woman is best demonstrated by her sacrificing her own spirit to that of a man out of love of him and of his spirit but then, despite this sacrifice, immediately evolving a new spirit within the new domain, originally alien to her nature, to which the man's disposition impels her.”
from Human All Too Human - A Book for Free Spirits
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“Be careful lest in casting out the devils you cast out the best that's in you.”
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“People don't want to hear the truth because they don't want their illusions destroyed.”
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“A thinker sees his own actions as experiments and questions--as attempts to find out something. Success and failure are for him answers above all.”
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“One's belief in truth begins with a doubt of all the truths one has believed before.”
from Human All Too Human - A Book for Free Spirits
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“You say that a good cause will even sanctify war! I tell you, it is the good war that sanctifies every cause!”
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“The Christian resolve to find the world evil and ugly has made the world evil and ugly.”
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“Convictions are more dangerous enemies of truth than lies.”
from The Portable Nietzsche, 1954
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“Dostoevsky, the only psychologist from whom I've anything to learn.”
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“Madness is something rare in individuals — but in groups, parties, peoples, and ages, it is the rule.”
from Beyond Good and Evil
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“By searching out origins, one becomes a crab. The historian looks backward; eventually he also believes backward”
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“Maintaining cheerfulness in the midst of a gloomy task, fraught with immeasurable responsibility, is no small feat; and yet what is needed more than cheerfulness? Nothing succeeds if prankishness has no part in it.”
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“Wisdom requires moderation in knowledge as in other things.”
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“About life, the wisest men of all ages have come to the same conclusion: it is no good.”
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“I, the last disciple of the philosopher Dionysus — I, the teacher of the eternal recurrence... I think of myself as the scrawl which an unknown power scribbles across a sheet of paper, to try out a new pen.”
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“Why so soft, so pliant and yielding? Why is there so much denial, self denial, in your hearts? So little destiny in your eyes?… For all creators are hard. And it must seem blessedness to you to impress your hand on millennia as on wax.”
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“What is it that we combat in Christianity? That it aims at destroying the strong, at breaking their spirit, at exploiting their moments of weariness.. until the strong perish through their excessive self-contempt of which Pascal is the most famous example.”
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“Rousseau, this first modern man, idealist and rabble in one person — one who needed moral 'dignity' to be able to stand his own sight, sick with unbridled vanity and unbridled self-contempt. This miscarriage, couched on the threshold of modern times, also wanted a 'return to nature'—to what did he really want to return?... what I hate is the Rousseauan morality — the so-called 'truths' of the Revolution through which it still works and attracts everything shallow and mediocre.”
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“A woman is a riddle whose solution is a child.”
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“Not infrequently, noble-minded and ambitious men have to endure their harshest struggle in childhood, perhaps by having to assert their characters against a low-minded father, who is devoted to pretense and mendacity, or by living, like Lord Byron, in continual struggle with a childish and wrathful mother. If one has experienced such struggles, for the rest of his life he will never get over knowing who has been in reality his greatest and most dangerous enemy.”
from Human All Too Human - A Book for Free Spirits
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“The Jews performed a miracle by inverting traditional values—'poor' became a synonym for 'saint,' 'rich' for 'evil' and 'violent.' In this they brought about and began a slave insurrection in morals and this is where their significance as a people can be found.”
from Beyond Good and Evil
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“Napoleon: the synthesis of brute and Superman.”
from Natural History of Morals
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“Should not the giver be thankful that the receiver received? Is not giving a need? Is not receiving, mercy?”
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“They are far from being free spirits: for they still have faith in truth.”
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“The Greek philosophers went through life feeling secretly that there were far more slaves than one might think—meaning that everybody who was not a philosopher was a slave. Their pride overflowed at the thought that even the most powerful men on earth belong among their slaves.”
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“Schopenhauer, though a pessimist, one who denies God and the world—who affirms morality and plays the flute—is that really a pessimist?”
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“everything that elevates an individual above the herd and intimidates the neighbor is henceforth called evil; the submissive, modest, conforming mentality, the mediocrity of desires attains honors.”
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“The means employed by the lust for power have changed, but the same volcano continues to glow... what one formerly did 'for the sake of God' one now does for the sake of money—that which now gives the highest feeling of power and good conscience.”
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“'Love of the neighbor' is always something secondary, partly convential and arbitrary-illusion in relation to fear of the neighbor.”
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“Among helpful and charitable people, one almost regularly encounters that clumsy ruse that first doctors the person to be helped... With these fancies they dispose of the needy as of possessions... One finds them jealous if one crosses or anticipates them when they want to help.”
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“The greatest recent event—that 'God is dead,' that the belief in the Christian god has become unbelievable—is already beginning to cast its first shadows... far too great, too distant, too remote for the multitude's capacity for comprehension, much less may one suppose that many people know as yet what this event really means, how much must collapse now... for example, the whole of our morality.”
from The Gay Science (1882)
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“To dream of equal rights, equal training, equal claims and obligations: that is a typical sign of shallow-mindedness.”
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“I experience the character of Epicurus quite differently... Such happiness could be invented only by a man who was suffering continually.”
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“I myself do not believe that anybody ever looked into the world with a distrust as deep as mine... a constant, subtle, incitement to an overturning of habitual opinions and of approved customs.”
from Human All Too Human - A Book for Free Spirits
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“The Jews, however, are beyond all doubt the strongest, toughest, and purest race at present living in Europe; they know how to succeed even under the worst conditions (in fact better than under favorable ones) by means of virtues of some sort, which one would like nowadays to label as vices-owing above all to a resolute faith which does not need to be ashamed before 'modern ideas'”
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“Success has always been a great liar.”
from Beyond Good and Evil
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“I have seen thoughts rising on my horizon, the like of which I have never seen before... crying tears of joy... Six thousand feet above men and Time... Calm and peace spread over the mountains and the forests.”
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“Europe has never produced anything finer or more complicated in matters of moral subtlety... In his experiences of life, Gracian shows a wisdom and perspicacity that cannot be compared with anything today.”
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“Is Wagner a human being at all? Is he not rather a disease? He contaminates everything he touches — he has made music sick."--”
from Der Fall Wagner (1888)
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“He who laughs best today, will also laugh last.”
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“To produce music is also in a sense to produce children... Without music, life would be a mistake.”
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“One often contradicts an opinion when it is really only the tone in which it has been presented that is unsympathetic.”
from Human All Too Human - A Book for Free Spirits
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“Wherever I found a living creature, there I found the will to power.”
from Human All Too Human - A Book for Free Spirits
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“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.”
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“One has to pay dearly for immortality; one has to die several times while one is still alive.”
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“The advantage of a bad memory is that one enjoys several times the same good thing for the first time.”
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“The most common sort of lie is the one uttered to one's self.”
from The Antichrist (1888)
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“It does not occur to Nietzsche as possible that a man should genuinely feel universal love, obviously because he himself feels almost universal hatred and fear... it never occurred to him that the lust for power, with which he endows his superman, is itself an outcome of fear.”
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“[Nietzsche] had more penetrating knowledge of himself than any other man who ever lived or ever was likely to live.”
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“Nietzsche had lost the ground under his feat because he possessed nothing more than the inner world of his thoughts—which incidentally possessed him more than he it. He was uprooted and hovered above the earth, and therefore he succumbed to exaggeration and irreality.”
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“If we think of Kierkegaard, of Nietzsche, of Hölderlin, we see them standing alone, outside of history. They are spotlighted by their intensity, and the background is all darkness. They intersect history, but are not a part of it. There is something anti-history about such men; they are not subject to time, accident and death, but their intensity is a protest against it.”
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“The 20th century is the age of Nietzsche, as he predicted it would be: the age of dictators unmoved by any moral tradition, of wars made more deadly and devastating by the progress of science; the age of the 'death of God' for those who lead the parade in thought and power.”
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“I, the last disciple of the philosopher Dionysus — I, the teacher of the eternal recurrence... I think of myself as the scrawl which an unknown power scribbles across a sheet of paper, to try out a new pen.”
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“Nietzsche had been on my program for some time, but I hesitated to begin reading him because I felt insufficiently prepared... I was held back by a secret fear that I might perhaps be like him... In spite of these trepidations, I finally resolved to read him and I was carried away by enthusiasm... He was moved by the childish hope of finding people who would be able to share his ecstasies... But he found only educated Philistines. That was the reason for the bombastic language—all a vain attempt to catch the ear of a world which had sold its soul for a mass of disconnected facts.”
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“Very few people, living or dead, have aided my struggle... Nietzsche enriched me with new anguishes and instructed me how to transform misfortune, bitterness, and uncertainty into pride.”
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“Nietzsche’s writings, full of revolutionary opinions, were fired with a fearless iconoclasm which surpassed the wildest dreams of contemporary free thought.”
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“[Nietzsche's] personal feelings initiate him into those of the criminal ... in general all creative originality, all artist nature in the broadest sense of the word, does the same... an artist must approach his work in the spirit of the criminal about to commit a crime.”
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“Nietzsche was, in short, a religious mystic... Nietzsche understood that society is a hall of distorting mirrors.”
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