The worst readers are those who behave like plundering troops: they take away a few things they can use, dirty and confound the remainder, and revile the whole.
Human, All Too Human, Book II, Section 137
People have been recognising themselves in Nietzsche’s aphorisms for over a hundred years. Below is a personal selection of some that seem to have strong contemporary resonance. Often they contradict each other, reminding us how Nietzsche loved to provoke, calling himself the philosopher of ‘perhaps’. Their pithiness combined with the ability to mean what the reader happens to see in them (rather like Bob Dylan’s lyrics) means that many of his sayings have been disseminated into popular culture. Given that his ideas pass into the zeitgeist through a variety of different translations, the source in his writings is given in the section below, but the text is drawn eclectically from the most popular versions.
Man is a rope fastened between animal and superman – a rope over an abyss.
Thus Spoke Zarathustra, ‘Zarathustra’s Prologue’, Part I, Section 4
He who fights with monsters should look to it that he does not become a monster himself. And if you gaze long into the abyss, the abyss gazes back into you.
Beyond Good and Evil, ‘Epigrams and Entr’actes’, 146
Art is the supreme task, the truly metaphysical activity in this life.
The Birth of Tragedy, Foreword to ‘Richard Wagner’
Even gods can’t escape boredom.
The Anti-Christ, Section 48
Isn’t life a hundred times too short to be bored?
Beyond Good and Evil, ‘Our Virtues’, Section 227
The objective of all human arrangements is through distracting one’s thoughts to cease to be aware of life.
Untimely Meditations, ‘Schopenhauer as Educator’, Section 4
Haste is universal because everyone is in flight from himself.
Untimely Meditations, ‘Schopenhauer as Educator’, Section 5
Christianity is a romantic hypochondria for those unsteady on their feet.
Notebook 10, Autumn 1887, 127
The Kingdom of Heaven is a condition of the heart – not something that comes ‘upon the earth’ or ‘after death’.
The Anti-Christ, Section 34
The very word ‘Christianity’ is a misunderstanding – in truth, there was only one Christian, and he died on the cross.
The Anti-Christ, Section 39
St Luke 18 verse 14 improved – He that humbleth himself wishes to be exalted.
Human, All Too Human, ‘On the History of Moral Sensations’, Section 87
People are least related to their parents; it would be the greatest vulgarity to be related to your parents.
Ecce Homo, ‘Why I am so Wise’, Section 3
One must pay dearly for immortality; one has to die several times while one is still alive.
Ecce Homo, ‘Thus Spoke Zarathustra’, Section 5
I am not a man, I am dynamite.
Ecce Homo, ‘Why I am a Destiny’, Section 1
My formula for human greatness: amor fati, love your fate. Want nothing different, neither backwards or forwards for all eternity. Not just to tolerate necessity – but to love it …
Ecce Homo, ‘Why I am so Clever’, Section 10
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.
The Gay Science, Book III, Section 108
God is dead! God remains dead! And we have killed him. 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? What festivals of atonement, what sacred games shall we have to invent? Is not the greatness of this deed too great for us? Must we ourselves not become gods simply to appear worthy of it?
The Gay Science, Book III, Section 125
Is man God’s mistake, or is God man’s mistake?
Twilight of the Idols, ‘Epigrams and Maxims’, Section 7
Become what you are.
The Gay Science, Book III, Section 270
Man is a bridge, not a goal.
Thus Spoke Zarathustra, ‘Zarathustra’s Prologue’, Part I, Section 4
No one can construct for you the bridge on which you must cross the stream of life, no one but you alone.
Untimely Meditations, ‘Schopenhauer as Educator’, Section 1
Life itself is will to power.
Beyond Good and Evil, ‘On the Prejudices of Philosophers’, Section 13
Live dangerously! Build your cities on the slopes of Vesuvius!
The Gay Science, Book IV, Section 283
To give birth to a dancing star one must first have chaos within.
Thus Spoke Zarathustra, ‘Zarathustra’s Prologue’, Part I, Section 5
We want to be poets of our life – first of all in the smallest most everyday matters.
The Gay Science, Book IV, Section 299
What doesn’t kill me makes me stronger.
Twilight of the Idols, ‘Epigrams and Maxims’, Section 8
He who has a why? in life can tolerate almost any how?
Twilight of the Idols, ‘Epigrams and Maxims’, Section 12
Man does not strive for happiness; only the Englishman does that.
Twilight of the Idols, ‘Epigrams and Maxims’, Section 12
One should take a bold and dangerous line with existence: whatever happens, we’re bound to lose it.
Untimely Meditations, ‘Schopenhauer as Educator’, Section 1
How can a man know himself? He is a thing dark and veiled; and if the hare has seven skins, man can slough off seventy times seven and still not be able to say: ‘This is really you, this is no longer outer shell.’
Untimely Meditations, ‘Schopenhauer as Educator’, Section 1
No victor believes in chance.
The Gay Science, Book III, Section 258
The advantage of a bad memory is that one can enjoy the same good things for the first time several times.
Human, All Too Human, ‘Man Alone with Himself’, Section 580
Virtue no longer meets with any belief; its attraction has disappeared. Someone would have to think of a way of marketing it afresh, perhaps as an unusual form of adventure and excess.
Notebook 9, Autumn 1887, 155
Some men have sighed over the abduction of their wives, but more over the fact that nobody wished to abduct them.
Human, All Too Human, ‘Woman and Child’, Section 388
The laws of numbers assume there are identical things, but in fact nothing is identical with anything else.
Human, All Too Human, ‘Of First and Last Things’, Section 19
Mathematics would certainly not have come into existence if one had known from the beginning that there was in nature no such thing as a straight line, no perfect circle or absolute magnitude.
Human, All Too Human, ‘Of First and Last Things’, Section 11
Even if the existence of a metaphysical world were demonstrated, it is certain that knowledge of it would be as useless as knowledge of the chemical composition of water to a shipwrecked sailor.
Human, All Too Human, ‘Of First and Last Things’, Section 9
To greatness belongs dreadfulness, let no one be deceived about that.
Notebook 9, Autumn 1887, Section 94
The gentlest, most reasonable man may, if he wears a large moustache, sit as it were in its shade and feel safe. As the accessory of a large moustache he will give the impression of being military, irascible and sometimes violent – and will be treated accordingly.
Daybreak, Book IV, Section 381
Without music, life would be a mistake. Germans even imagine God singing songs.
Twilight of the Idols, ‘Epigrams and Maxims’, 33
Is Wagner a human being at all? Is he not rather a disease? He contaminates everything he touches – he has made music sick.
You need hashish to get rid of unbearable pressure. Well then, I need Wagner. He is the antidote to all things German.
Ecce Homo, ‘Why I am So Clever’, Section 6
‘Deutschland, Deutschland über Alles’, I’m afraid that was the end of German philosophy.
Twilight of the Idols, ‘What the Germans Lack’, Section 1
For even if I am a bad German, I am at all events a very good European.
Letter to his mother, August 1886
To live alone one must be an animal or a god, says Aristotle. But you can be both – a philosopher.
Twilight of the Idols, ‘Epigrams and Maxims’, Section 3
Plato is boring.
Twilight of the Idols, ‘What I Owe to the Ancients’, Section 2
There could never have been a Platonic philosophy without such beautiful young men in Athens. Plato’s philosophy is more accurately defined as an erotic contest.
Twilight of the Idols, ‘Skirmishes of an Untimely Man’, Section 23
Today’s philosophers want to enjoy the divine principle of incomprehensibility.
Daybreak, Book V, Section 544
Mystical explanations are considered deep; the truth is they are not even shallow.
The Gay Science, Book III, Section 126
To find everything profound – that is an inconvenient trait. It makes one strain one’s eyes all the time, and in the end one finds more than one might have wished.
The Gay Science, Book III, Section 158
Philosophy offers an asylum to a man into which no tyranny can force its way, the inward cave, the labyrinth of the heart – and that annoys the tyrants.
Untimely Meditations, ‘Schopenhauer as Educator’, Section 3
Thoughts are the shadows of our feelings – always darker, emptier, simpler.
The Gay Science, Book III, Section 179
The Socratic equation: reason = virtue = happiness was opposed to all the instincts of the earlier Greeks.
Twilight of the Idols, ‘The Problem of Socrates’, Section 4
You repay a teacher badly by becoming merely a pupil.
Ecce Homo, Foreword, Section 4
How to ruin a youth: instruct him to hold in high esteem only those who think like him.
Daybreak, Book IV, Section 297
Being photographically executed by the one-eyed Cyclops I try each time to prevent disaster but I come out every time eternalised anew as a pirate or a prominent tenor or a Boyar.
Letter to Malwida von Meysenbug, 20 December 1872
Morality is herd instinct in the individual.
The Gay Science, Book III, Section 116
Every one who has ever built a ‘new heaven’ only mustered the power he needed through his own hell.
On the Genealogy of Morality, Essay 3, Section 10
He who thinks a great deal is not suited to be a party man: he thinks his way through the party and out the other side too soon.
Human, All Too Human, ‘Man Alone with Himself’, Section 579
No one talks more passionately about his rights than he who in the depths of his soul doubts whether he has any.
Human, All Too Human, ‘Man Alone with Himself’, Section 597
Possession usually diminishes the possession.
The Gay Science, Book I, Section 14
One possesses one’s opinions the way one possesses fish – insofar, that is, that one possesses a fishpond. One has to go fishing and be lucky – then one has one’s own fish, one’s own opinions. I am speaking here of living fish. Others are content to possess a cabinet of stuffed fish – and in their heads, convictions.
Human, All Too Human, Book IV, ‘The Wanderer and His Shadow’, Section 317
Convictions are more dangerous enemies of truth than lies.
Human, All Too Human, ‘Man Alone with Himself’, Section 483
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.
The Gay Science, Book I, Section 23
The most perfidious way of harming a cause consists of defending it deliberately with faulty arguments.
The Gay Science, Book III, Section 191
Without cruelty there is no festival: thus the longest and most ancient part of human history teaches – and in punishment there is so much that is festive!
On the Genealogy of Morality, Essay 2, Section 6
To see others suffer does one good, to make others suffer even more.
On the Genealogy of Morality, Essay 2, Section 6
The distinction that lies in being unhappy (as if to feel happy were a sign of shallowness, lack of ambition, ordinariness) is so great that when someone says, ‘But how happy you must be!’ we usually protest.
Human, All Too Human, ‘Man Alone with Himself’, Section 534
For those who need consolation no means of consolation is so effective as the assertion that in their case no consolation is possible: it implies so great a degree of distinction that they at once hold up their heads again.
Daybreak, Book IV, Section 380
There are no moral phenomena, only moral interpretations of phenomena.
Beyond Good and Evil, ‘Epigrams and Entr’actes’, Section 108
The fact that something happens regularly and predictably does not mean that it happens necessarily.
Notebook 9, Autumn 1887, 91
The irrationality of a thing is no argument against it – rather a condition of it.
Human, All Too Human, ‘Man Alone with Himself’, Section 515
There are no facts, only interpretations.
Notebooks, Summer 1886–Autumn 1887, Section 91
Sex: the thorn and stake of all body-despisers for it mocks and makes fools of all teachers …
Sex: the slow fire on which the rabble are stewed in lust …
Sex: innocent and free for free hearts …
Sex: I shall fence my thoughts and my heart so pigs and pilferers do not break in …
Thus Spoke Zarathustra, Part III, ‘On the Three Evils’, Section 2
The state wants men to render it the same idolatry they used to render the church.
Untimely Meditations, ‘Schopenhauer as Educator’, Section 4
Everything the state says is a lie, and everything it has it has stolen.
Thus Spoke Zarathustra, Part I, ‘On the New Idol’
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.’
Thus Spoke Zarathustra, Part I, ‘On the New Idol’
Philosophy, so far as I have understood it and lived it so far, is living freely in ice and high mountains.
Ecce Homo, Preface, Section 3
Even the most beautiful scenery is no longer assured of our love after we have lived in it for three months, and some distant coast attracts our avarice.
The Gay Science, Book I, Section 14
Never trust a thought that occurs to you indoors.
Ecce Homo, ‘Why I am so Clever’, Section 1
Overwork, inquisitiveness and compassion – our modern vices.
Notebook 9, Autumn 1887, Section 141
It is the misfortune of active men that their activity is almost always a bit irrational. For example, one must not enquire of the cash-amassing banker what the purpose for his restless activity is: it is irrational. Active people roll like a stone, conforming to the stupidity of mechanics.
Human, All Too Human, ‘Tokens of Higher and Lower Culture’, Section 283
Today as always, men fall into two groups: slaves and free men. Whoever does not have two-thirds of his day for himself is a slave, whatever he may be: a statesman, a businessman, an official, or a scholar.
Human, All Too Human, ‘Tokens of Higher and Lower Culture’, Section 283
Whoever lives for the sake of combat has an interest in the enemy staying alive.
Human, All Too Human, ‘Man Alone with Himself’, Section 531
The waters of religion are ebbing away, leaving swamps and stagnant pools; the nations are drawing away from each other in the most hostile fashion, longing to tear each other to pieces.
Untimely Meditations, ‘Schopenhauer as Educator’, Section 4
God created woman. And boredom did indeed cease from that moment – but many other things ceased as well! Woman was God’s second mistake.
The Anti-Christ, Section 48
Two things a real man wants: danger and play. That’s why he wants woman – the most dangerous plaything.
Thus Spoke Zarathustra, Part I, ‘On Little Women Old and Young’
Women know this: a bit fatter, a bit thinner – oh! How much destiny lies in so little!
Thus Spoke Zarathustra, Part III, ‘Of the Spirit of Gravity’, Section 2
You go to women? Do not forget the whip!
Thus Spoke Zarathustra, Part I, ‘On Little Women Old and Young’
There is something comical in the sight of authors who enjoy the rustling folds of long and involved sentences: they are trying to cover up their feet.
The Gay Science, Book IV, Section 282
Only those with very large lungs have the right to write long sentences.
Rules of Writing set out for Lou Salomé
Thoughts in a poem. The poet presents his thoughts festively, on the carriage of rhythm: usually because they could not walk.
Human, All Too Human, ‘From the Souls of Artists and Writers’, Section 189
If it is true that the forests are going to get thinner, might the time come when libraries should be used for firewood? Since most books are born out of smoke and vapour of the brain, maybe they should return to that state. If they have no fire in them, fire should punish them for it.
Untimely Meditations, ‘Schopenhauer as Educator’, Section 4
I am the first German to have mastered the aphorism, and aphorisms are a form of eternity. It is my ambition to say in ten sentences what everyone else says in a whole book – what everyone else does not say in a whole book.
Twilight of the Idols, ‘Skirmishes of an Untimely Man’, Section 51