Quotes by Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche

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In Germany there is much complaining about my "eccentricities." But since it is not known where my center is, it won't be easy to find out where or when I have thus far been "eccentric." That I was a philologist, for example, meant that I was outside my center (which fortunately does not mean that I was a poor philologist). Likewise, I now regard my having been a Wagnerian as eccentric. It was a highly dangerous experiment; now that I know it did not ruin me, I also know what significance it had for me, it was the most severe test of my character.

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Benefiting and hurting others are ways of exercising one's power upon others; that is all one desires in such cases. One hurts those whom one wants to feel one's power, for pain is a much more efficient means to that end than pleasure; pain always raises the question about its origin while pleasure is inclined to stop with itself without looking back. We benefit and show benevolence to those who are already dependent on us in some way (which means that they are used to thinking of us as causes); we want to increase their power because in that way we increase ours, or we want to show them how advantageous it is to be in our power; that way they will become more satisfied with their condition and more hostile to and willing to fight against the enemies of our power.

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There never was more than one Christian, and he died on the Cross.

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Are designations congruent with things? Is language the adequate expression of all realities?

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Morality is herd instinct in the individual.

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The possibility has been established for the production of a master race, the future "masters of the earth", made to endure for millennia, a higher kind of men who employ democratic Europe as their most pliant and supple instrument for getting hold of the destinies of the earth.

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How people keep correcting us when we are young! There is always some bad habit or other they tell us we ought to get over. Yet most habits are tools to help us through life.

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Because of the way that myth takes it for granted that miracles are always happening, the waking life of a mythically inspired people, the ancient Greeks, for instance, more closely resembles a dream than it does the waking world of a scientifically disenchanted thinker.

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Unhappiness. 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.

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Man has an invincible inclination to allow himself to be deceived and is, as it were, enchanted with happiness when the rhapsodist tells him epic fables as if they were true, or when the actor in the theater acts more royally than any real king. So long as it is able to deceive without injuring, that master of deception, the intellect, is free; it is released from its former slavery and celebrates its Saturnalia. It is never more luxuriant, richer, prouder, more clever and more daring.