Friedrich Nietzsche Men Quotations

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.

Nothing is beautiful, only man: on this piece of naivete rests all aesthetics, it is the first truth of aesthetics. Let us immediately add its second: nothing is ugly but degenerate man - the domain of aesthetic judgment is therewith defined.

Not necessity, not desire - no, the love of power is the demon of men. Let them have everything - health, food, a place to live, entertainment - they are and remain unhappy and low-spirited: for the demon waits and waits and will be satisfied.

No one lies so boldly as the man who is indignant.

Hope in reality is the worst of all evils because it prolongs the torments of man.

In the last analysis, even the best man is evil: in the last analysis, even the best woman is bad.

Regarding life, the wisest men of all ages have judged alike: it is worthless.

Every church is a stone on the grave of a god-man: it does not want him to rise up again under any circumstances.

It is the most sensual men who need to flee women and torment their bodies.

Every man is a creative cause of what happens, a primum mobile with an original movement.

What is good? All that heightens the feeling of power, the will to power, power itself in man.

A great value of antiquity lies in the fact that its writings are the only ones that modern men still read with exactness.

There are people who want to make men's lives more difficult for no other reason than the chance it provides them afterwards to offer their prescription for alleviating life; their Christianity, for instance.

Stupid as a man, say the women: cowardly as a woman, say the men. Stupidity in a woman is unwomanly.

In the course of history, men come to see that iron necessity is neither iron nor necessary.

For the woman, the man is a means: the end is always the child.

Whoever has provoked men to rage against him has always gained a party in his favor, too.

Once spirit was God, then it became man, and now it is even becoming mob.

Great indebtedness does not make men grateful, but vengeful; and if a little charity is not forgotten, it turns into a gnawing worm.

'Evil men have no songs.' How is it that the Russians have songs?

When a hundred men stand together, each of them loses his mind and gets another one.

Many a man fails as an original thinker simply because his memory it too good.

The abdomen is the reason why man does not readily take himself to be a god.

When man does not have firm, calm lines on the horizon of his life- mountain and forest lines, as it were- then a man's innermost will becomes agitated, preoccupied, and wistful.

Man Is Something That Must Be Overcome

Man... cannot learn to forget, but hangs on the past: however far or fast he runs, that chain runs with him.

The happiness of man is: I will. The happiness of woman is: he wills. ‘Behold, just now the world became perfect!’—thus thinks every woman when she obeys out of entire love. And women must obey and find a depth for her surface. Surface is the disposition of woman: a mobile, stormy film over shallow water. Man’s disposition, however, is deep; his river roars in subterranean caves: woman feels his strength but does not comprehend it.

Truth as Circe. - Error has transformed animals into men; is truth perhaps capable of changing man back into an animal?

I am no man, I am dynamite.

The wisest man would be the one richest in contradictions, who has, as it were, antennae for all types of men---as well as his great moments of grand harmony---a rare accident even in us! A sort of planetary motion---

The secret of realizing the greatest fruitfulness and the greatest enjoyment of existence is: to live dangerously! Build your cities on the slopes of Vesuvius! Send your ships out into uncharted seas! Live in conflict with your equals and with yourselves! Be robbers and ravagers as soon as you ca not be rulers and owners, you men of knowledge! The time will soon past when you could be content to live concealed int he woods like timid deer!

What? A great man? I only ever see the ape of his own ideal.

Books that teach us to dance: There are writers who, by portraying the impossible as possible, and by speaking of morality and genius as if both were high-spirited freedom, as if man were rising up on tiptoe and simply had to dance out of inner pleasure.

We laugh at a man who, stepping out of his room at the very minute when the sun is rising, says, “It is my will that the sun shall rise”; or at him who, unable to stop a wheel, says, “I wish it to roll”; or, again, at him who, thrown in a wrestling match, says, “Here I lie, but here I wish to lie.” But, joking apart, do we not act like one of these three persons whenever we use the expression “I wish”?

It may be that until now there has been no more potent means for beautifying man himself than piety: it can turn man into so much art, surface, play of colors, graciousness that his sight no longer makes one suffer.---

A man who wills commands something within himself that renders obedience, or that he believes renders obedience.

love as a passion—it is our European specialty—must absolutely be of noble origin; as is well known, its invention is due to the Provencal poet-cavaliers, those brilliant, ingenious men of the "gai saber," to whom Europe owes so much, and almost owes itself.

Man is a rope, tied between beast and Superman--a rope over an abyss.

This tremendous event is still on its way, still wandering; it has not yet reached the ears of men. Lightning and thunder require time; the light on the stars requires time; deeds though done, still require time to be seen and heard. This deed is still more distant from them than the most distant stars - and yet they have done it themselves.

God is dead, but considering the state the species man is in, there will perhaps be caves, for ages yet, in which his shadow will be shown.

Every true faith is infallible. It performs what the believing person hopes to find in it. But it does not offer the least support for the establishing of an objective truth. Here the ways of men divide. If you want to achieve peace of mind and happiness, have faith. If you want to be a disciple of truth, then search.

A nation is a detour of nature to arrive at five or six great men- yes, and then to get around them.

In the world of high finance the shilling of the idle rich man can buy more than that of the poor, industrious man.

The consequence is that every man comes to know himself solely in terms of his power for defence and attack.

The noble man honours in himself the powerful one, him also who has power over himself, who knows how to speak and how to keep silence, who takes pleasure in subjecting himself to severity and hardness, and has reverence for all that is severe and hard.

'God himself cannot exist without wise men' - Luther said, and was right. But 'God can exist even less without unwise men' - that good old Luther did not say.

There are no limits to God's compassion with Paradises over their one universally felt want: he immediately created other animals besides. God's first blunder: Man didn't find the animals amusing, - he dominated them and didn't even want to be an 'animal.'

Go through the moral demands...one by one and you will find that man could not live up to them; the intention is not that he should become more moral, but that he should feel as sinful as possible. If man had failed to find this feeling pleasant - why should he have engendered such an idea and adhered to it for so long?... Man was by every means to be made sinful and thereby become excited, animated, enlivened in general. To excite, animate, enliven at any price...

A man should not play the coward to his deeds. He should not repudiate them once he has performed them. Pangs of conscience are indecent.

It is an end with priests and gods, if man becomes scientific. Moral: science is the thing forbidden in itself - it alone is forbidden. Science is the first sin, the germ of all sin, original sin. This alones is mortality: Thou shalt not know.

The value of many men and books rests solely on their faculty for compelling all to seek out the most hidden and intimate things.

Man does not strive for happiness; only the Englishman does that.

The noble type of man feels himself to be the determiner of values, he does not need to be approved of, he judges 'what harms me is harmful in itself', he knows himself to be that which in general accords honour to things, he creates values.

There is no more dreary or more repulsive creature than the man who has evaded his genius.

It's not the intensity of the man, but the duration of his intensity that makes the man great.

Under peaceful conditions a warlike man sets upon himself.

O Voltaire! O humanity! O idiocy! There is something ticklish in "the truth," and in the SEARCH for the truth; and if man goes about it too humanely-"il ne cherche le vrai que pour faire le bien"-I wager he finds nothing!

The strong individual loves the earth so much he lusts for recurrence. He can smile in the face of the most terrible thought: meaningless, aimless existence recurring eternally. The second characteristic of such a man is that he has the strength to recognize - and to live with the recognition - that the world is valueless in itself and that all values are human ones. He creates himself by fashioning his own values; he has the pride to live by the values he wills.

The man who does not wish to be one of the mass only needs to cease to be easy on himself.

I know my fate. One day my name will be tied to the memory of something monstrous - a crisis without equal on earth.... I am no man, I am dynamite!

I enquire now as to the genesis of a philologist and assert the following: 1. A young man cannot possibly know what Greeks and Romans are. 2. He does not know whether he is suited for finding out about them.

Without the perpetual counterfeiting of the universe by number, man could not continue to live

Is man God's biggest blunder, or is man's God?

[Heraclitus] did not require humans or their sort of knowledge, since everything into which one may inquire he despises [as being] in contrast [to his own] inward-turning wisdom. [To him] all learning from others is a sign of nonwisdom, because the wise man focuses his vision on his own intelligence.

No man ever wrote more eloquently and luminously [than Heraclitus].

Man is very well defended against himself... The actual fortress is inaccessible, even invisible to him, unless his friends and enemies play the traitor and conduct him in by a secret path.

The destiny of the human race is to widen the gap separating it from the lower races of animals. Any code of morality which retains its permanence and authority after the conditions of existence which gave rise to it have changed, works against this upward progress of man.

Moral sensibilities are nowadays at such cross-purposes that to one man a morality is proved by its utility, while to another its utility refutes it.

The inclination to self-depreciation, to freely accepting being robbed, being duped, and being swindled, could be the modesty of a god among men.

The earth has become small, and on it hops the last man, who makes everything small. His race can no more be exterminated than the flea can be. The last man lives the longest.

Man would sooner have the Void for his purpose than be void of Purpose.

Some people throw a bit of their personality after their bad arguments, as if that might straighten their paths and turn them into right and good arguments-just as a man in a bowling alley, after he has let go of the ball, still tries to direct it with gestures.

Verily, a polluted stream is man. One must actually be a sea to take in a polluted stream without becoming impure. Behold, I teach you the superman: he is the this sea, in him can your great contempt go under.

Whoever possesses abundant joy must be a good man: but he is probably not the cleverest man, although he achieves exactly what it is that the cleverest man strives with all his cleverness to achieve.

This crown to crown the laughing man, this rose-wreath crown: I myself have set this crown upon my head, I myself have pronounced my laughter holy.

For a significant man woman, the one thought he values greatly, to the laughter and scorn of insignificant men, is a key to hidden treasure chambers; for those others, it is nothing but a piece of old iron.

I looked for great men, but all I found were the apes of their ideals.

Man, a hybrid of plant and ghost.

Man makes god in his own image.

All signs of superhuman nature appear in man as illness or insanity.

Pharisaism is not a degeneration in a good man: a large portion of it is rather the condition of all being-good.

Nobody is so constituted as to be able to live everywhere and anywhere; and he who has great duties to perform, which lay claim toall his strength, has, in this respect, a very limited choice. The influence of climate upon the bodily functionsextends so far, that a blunder in the choice of locality and climate is able not only to alienate a man from his actual duty, but also to withhold it from him altogether, so that he never even comes face to face with it.

What is the ape to man? A laughing-stock or a painful embarrassment. And just that shall man be for the superman: a laughing-stockor a painful embarrassment.

Every living body continuously eliminates feces, it rejects what is not serviceable to the assimilating organism: what man despises, what arouses his disgust, what he calls evil, are excrements.

Many things about man are not very godly: whenever a person excretes feces, how can he be a god then? But it is even worse regarding the other feces we call sin: man still surely wants to retain this, and not excrete it. Now however, I must believe it: a person can be God and still excrete feces. Thus I teach you, excrete your feces and become gods.

Just as a waterfall grows slower and more lightly suspended as it plunges down, so the great man of action tends to act with greater calmness than his tempestuous desires prior to the deed would lead one to expect.

In morality, man treats himself not as individuum but as dividuum.

Having become conscious of the truth he once perceived, man now sees only the awfulness or the absurdity of existence, he now understands the symbolic element in Ophelia's fate, he now recognizes the wisdom of the woodland god, Silenus: it nauseates him.

The truthful man ends up realizing that he always lies.

In affability there is no hatred of men, but for that very reason there is all too much contempt for men.

Man is more sensitive to the contempt that others feel towards him than to the contempt that he feels towards himself.

When a man has just been greatly honored and has eaten a little he is the most generous.

I have exposed myself and am not ashamed to stand there naked. "Shame" is what we call the monster that attached itself to men when they aspired beyond the animals.

When a man reaches his maturity in understanding and in years, the feeling comes over him that his father was wrong to beget him.

That whatever a man says, promises, or resolves in passion he must stick to later on when he is cold and sober--this demand is among the heaviest burdens that weigh on humankind.

Men inadvertently comport themselves with nobility when they have grown accustomed to wanting nothing from others and always giving to them.

Whoever has looked deeply into the world might well guess what wisdom lies in the superficiality of men.

Whether a man hides his bad qualities and vices or confesses them openly, his vanity wants to gain an advantage by it in both cases: just note how subtly he distinguishes between those he will hide his bad qualities from and those he will face honestly and candidly.

In compassionate men, severity is a virtue.

A man who whinnies with noisy laughter, surpasses all the animals in vulgarity.