Quill / Authors / Friedrich Nietzsche quotes
Friedrich Nietzsche quotes
Friedrich Nietzsche (1844 to 1900) was a German philosopher and a professor at Basel in his twenties, who left the post through ill health and wrote his major books in the years before his collapse in 1889. Quill quotes Thus Spake Zarathustra in Thomas Common's translation and Beyond Good and Evil in Helen Zimmern's.
He writes in sharp fragments that travel well and get misused often. Zarathustra is a character, speaking in a deliberately scriptural voice, and that's a reason to look at the surrounding page before you adopt a line as a motto.
All 15 of the lines in Quill. Only lines checked against a public-domain text appear on this page.
Thus Spake Zarathustra
Read Thus Spake Zarathustra on Project Gutenberg
Life is hard to bear: but do not affect to be so delicate!
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Life is hard to bear: but do not affect to be so delicate! We are all of us fine sumpter asses and assesses.
Be not virtuous beyond your powers!
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Be not virtuous beyond your powers! And seek nothing from yourselves opposed to probability!
Your bad love to yourselves maketh solitude a prison to you.
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The one goeth to his neighbour because he seeketh himself, and the other because he would fain lose himself. Your bad love to yourselves maketh solitude a prison to you.
If man, however, hath been a failure: well then! never mind!
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And if great things have been a failure with you, have ye yourselves therefore—been a failure? And if ye yourselves have been a failure, hath man therefore—been a failure? If man, however, hath been a failure: well then! never mind!
Learn to laugh at yourselves, as ye ought to laugh!
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Be of good cheer; what doth it matter? How much is still possible! Learn to laugh at yourselves, as ye ought to laugh!
Better know nothing than half-know many things!
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Better know nothing than half-know many things! Better be a fool on one’s own account, than a sage on other people’s approbation! I—go to the basis:
Let your love to life be love to your highest hope; and let your highest hope be the highest thought of life!
Open still remaineth the earth for great souls.
Verily, like the sun do I love life, and all deep seas.
Dare only to believe in yourselves—in yourselves and in your inward parts!
To rise striveth life, and in rising to surpass itself.
Beyond Good and Evil
Read Beyond Good and Evil on Project Gutenberg
The great epochs of our life are at the points when we gain courage to rebaptize our badness as the best in us.
One loves ultimately one's desires, not the thing desired.
One must renounce the bad taste of wishing to agree with many people.
Is not life a hundred times too short for us—to bore ourselves?
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