Friedrich Nietzsche Knowledge Quotations

Genuine historical knowledge requires nobility of character, a profound understanding of human existence - not detachment and objectivity.

The unselective knowledge drive resembles the indiscriminate sexual drive--signs of vulgarity!

The drive toward knowledge has a moral origin.

Once and for all, there are many things I choose not to know.--Wisdom sets limits even to knowledge.

Over immense periods of time the intellect produced nothing but errors. A few of these proved to be useful and helped to preserve the species: those who hit upon or inherited these had better luck in their struggle for themselves and their progeny. Such erroneous articles of faith... include the following: that there are things, substances, bodies; that a thing is what it appears to be; that our will is free; that what is good for me is also good in itself.

We have arranged for ourselves a world in which we can live - by positing bodies, lines, planes, causes and effects, motion and rest, form and content; without these articles of faith nobody could now endure life. But that does not prove them. Life is no argument. The conditions of life might include error.

The reasons for which 'this' world has been characterized as 'apparent' are the very reasons which indicate its reality; any other kind of reality is absolutely indemonstrable.

In the knowledge of truth, what really matters is the possession of it, not the impulse under which it was sought.

Our salvation lies not in knowing, but in creating!

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....

Our treasure lies in the beehive of our knowledge. We are perpetually on the way thither, being by nature winged insects and honey gatherers of the mind.

Partial knowledge is more triumphant than complete knowledge; it takes things to be simpler than they are, and so makes its theory more popular and convincing.

He who speaks a bit of a foreign language has more delight in it than he who speaks it well; pleasure goes along with superficial knowledge.

Linguistic danger to spiritual freedom.- Every word is a prejudice.

Wisdom sets bounds even to knowledge.

Knowing things halfway is a greater success than knowing things completely: it takes things to be simpler than they really are andso makes its opinions more easily understandable and persuasive.

Even truthfulness is but one means to knowledge, a ladder--but not the ladder.

From whatever you wish to know and measure you must take your leave, at least for a time. Only when you have left the town can yousee how high its towers rise above the houses.

Only with the ultimate knowledge of all things will man have come to know himself. For things are but the boundaries of man.

We no longer love our knowledge enough once we have passed it on.

Today a man of knowledge might well feel as though he were God transformed into an animal.

The charm of knowledge would be small indeed, were it not that there is so much shame to be overcome on the way to it.

Even great spirits have only their five-fingers' breadth of experience - just beyond it their thinking ceases and their endless empty space and stupidity begins.

Why does man not see things? He is himself standing in the way: he conceals things.

Error has made man so deep, sensitive, and inventive that he has put forth such blossoms as religions and arts. Pure knowledge could not have been capable of it.

No honey is sweeter than that of knowledge.

Conversation with a friend will only bear good fruit of knowledge when both think only of the matter under consideration and forget that they are friends.

For the purpose of knowledge we must know how to make use of the inward current which draws us towards a thing, and also of the current which after a time draws us away from it.

In almost all sciences the fundamental knowledge is either found in earliest times or is still being sought.

We have no organ at all for knowledge, for truth: we know (or believe or imagine) precisely as much as may be useful in the interest of the human herd, the species: and even what is here called usefulness is in the end only a belief, something imagined and perhaps precisely that most fatal piece of stupidity by which we shall one day perish.

Where there is the tree of knowledge, there is always Paradise: so say the most ancient and most modern serpents.

No one dies of fatal truths nowadays: there are too many antidotes.

Metaphysical world.- It is true, there could be a metaphysical world; the absolute possibility of it is hardly to be disputed. We behold all things through the human head and cannot cut off this head; while the question nonetheless remains what of the world would still be there if one had cut it off.