WORDS OF WISDOM

Friedrich Nietzsche

The broad effects which can be obtained by punishment in man and beast are the increase of fear, the sharpening of the sense of cunning, the mastery of the desires; so it is that punishment tames man, but does not make him "better."

Life always gets harder toward the summit -- the cold increases, responsibility increases.

My time has not yet come either; some are born posthumously.

One will rarely err if extreme actions be ascribed to vanity, ordinary actions to habit, and mean actions to fear.

Simply by being compelled to keep constantly on his guard, a man may grow so weak as to be unable any longer to defend himself.

God created woman. And boredom did indeed cease from that moment -- but many other things ceased as well! Woman was God's second mistake.

Blessed are the forgetful: for they get the better even of their blunders.

Our destiny exercises its influence over us even when, as yet, we have not learned its nature: it is our future that lays down the law of our today.

I believe only in French culture, and regard everything else in Europe which calls itself "culture" as a misunderstanding. I do not even take the German kind into consideration.

In revenge and in love woman is more barbarous than man.

When Zarathustra was alone . . . he said to his heart: "Could it be possible! This old saint in the forest hath not yet heard of it, that God is dead!”

It is certainly not the least charm of a theory that it is refutable.

I want to teach men the sense of their existence, which is the Superman, the lightning out of the dark cloud man.

No one is such a liar as the indignant man.

As an artist, a man has no home in Europe save in Paris.

No one can draw more out of things, books included, than he already knows. A man has no ears for that to which experience has given him no access.

Is not life a hundred times too short for us to bore ourselves?

Distrust all in whom the impulse to punish is powerful.

One must have a good memory to be able to keep the promises one makes.

Two great European narcotics, alcohol and Christianity.

Liberal institutions straightway cease from being liberal the moment they are soundly established: once this is attained no more grievous and more thorough enemies of freedom exist than liberal institutions.

At the core of all these aristocratic races the beast of prey is not to be mistaken, the magnificent blond beast, avidly rampant for spoil and victory.

It is not the strength but the duration of great sentiments that makes great men.

Every tradition grows ever more venerable -- the more remote is its origin, the more confused that origin is. The reverence due to it increases from generation to generation. The tradition finally becomes holy and inspires awe.

If ye would go up high, then use your own legs! Do not get yourselves carried aloft; do not seat yourselves on other people's backs and heads!

Man is a rope stretched between the animal and the Superman -- a rope over an abyss.

This is the hardest of all: to close the open hand out of love, and keep modest as a giver.

We ought to learn from the kine one thing: ruminating.

Whoever fights monsters should see to it that in the process he does not become a monster. And when you look long into an abyss, the abyss also looks into you.

The thought of suicide is a great consolation: by means of it one gets successfully through many a bad night.

One does not know -- cannot know -- the best that is in one.

Mozart, the last chord of a centuries-old great European taste.

The melancholia of everything completed!

Nothing on earth consumes a man more quickly than the passion of resentment.

The Germans are like women, you can scarcely ever fathom their depths -- they haven't any.

The Will to Power.

The masters have been done away with; the morality of the common man has triumphed.

The sick are the greatest danger for the healthy; it is not from the strongest that harm comes to the strong, but from the weakest.

A strong and well-constituted man digests his experiences (deeds and misdeeds all included) just as he digests his meats, even when he has some tough morsels to swallow.

What is it: is man only a blunder of God, or God only a blunder of man?

All prejudices may be traced back to the intestines. A sedentary life is the real sin against the Holy Ghost .

One must separate from anything that forces one to repeat No again and again.

If a man have a strong faith he can indulge in the luxury of skepticism.

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.

Love is the state in which man sees things most widely different from what they are. The force of illusion reaches its zenith here, as likewise the sweetening and transfiguring power. When a man is in love he endures more than at other times; he submits to everything.

I call Christianity the one great curse, the one enormous and innermost perversion, the one great instinct of revenge, for which no means are too venomous, too underhand, too underground and too petty -- I call it the one immortal blemish of man- kind.

My doctrine is: Live that thou mayest desire to live again -- that is thy duty -- for in any case thou wilt live again!

Even a thought, even a possibility, can shatter us and transform us.

Wherever Germany extends her sway, she ruins culture.

Love is a state in which a man sees things most decidedly as they are not.

It is not a lack of love, but a lack of friendship that makes unhappy marriages.