The only true wisdom is in knowing you know nothing.

I know that I am intelligent, because I know that I know nothing.

True wisdom comes to each of us when we realize how little we understand about life, ourselves, and the world around us.

By all means, marry. If you get a good wife, you’ll become happy; if you get a bad one, you’ll become a philosopher.

Be as you wish to seem.

Death may be the greatest of all human blessings.

Worthless people live only to eat and drink; people of worth eat and drink only to live.

He is richest who is content with the least, for content is the wealth of nature.

Wisdom begins in wonder.

From the deepest desires often come the deadliest hate.

Employ your time in improving yourself by other men’s writings so that you shall come easily by what others have labored hard for.

Well I am certainly wiser than this man. It is only too likely that neither of us has any knowledge to boast of; but he thinks that he knows something which he does not know, whereas I am quite conscious of my ignorance. At any rate it seems that I am wiser than he is to this small extent, that I do not think that I know what I do not know.

The beginning of wisdom is a definition of terms.

What a lot of things there are a man can do without.

I cannot teach anybody anything. I can only make them think.

Slanderers do not hurt me because they do not hit me.

I was afraid that by observing objects with my eyes and trying to comprehend them with each of my other senses I might blind my soul altogether.

He who is not contented with what he has, would not be contented with what he would like to have.

If a man is proud of his wealth, he should not be praised until it is known how he employs it.

Where there is reverence there is fear, but there is not reverence everywhere that there is fear, because fear presumably has a wider extension than reverence.

I decided that it was not wisdom that enabled poets to write their poetry, but a kind of instinct or inspiration, such as you find in seers and prophets who deliver all their sublime messages without knowing in the least what they mean.

Only the extremely ignorant or the extremely intelligent can resist change.

Virtue does not come from wealth, but. . . wealth, and every other good thing which men have. . . comes from virtue.

The only good is knowledge and the only evil is ignorance.

The unexamined life is not worth living.

I do nothing but go about persuading you all, old and young alike, not to take thought for your persons or your properties, but and chiefly to care about the greatest improvement of the soul. I tell you that virtue is not given by money, but that from virtue comes money and every other good of man, public as well as private. This is my teaching, and if this is the doctrine which corrupts the youth, I am a mischievous person.

I thought to myself, ‘I am wiser than this man neither of us knows anything that is really worthwhile, but he thinks he has knowledge when he has not, while I, having no knowledge, do not think that I have. I seem, at any rate, to be a little wiser than he is on this point I do not think that I know what I do not know.

Envy is the ulcer of the soul.

Bad men live that they may eat and drink, whereas good men eat and drink that they may live.

True knowledge exists in knowing that you know nothing. And in knowing that you know nothing, that makes you the smartest of all.

To know, is to know that you know nothing. That is the meaning of true knowledge.

Education is the kindling of a flame, not the filling of a vessel.

Strong minds discuss ideas, average minds discuss events, weak minds discuss people.

Be slow to fall into friendship, but when you are in, continue firm and constant.

Sometimes you put walls up not to keep people out, but to see who cares enough to break them down.

Contentment is natural wealth, luxury is artificial poverty.

Do not do to others what angers you if done to you by others.

The secret of change is to focus all of your energy, not on fighting the old, but on building the new.

Those who are hardest to love, need it the most.

We cannot live better than in seeking to become better.

Beware the barrenness of a busy life.

A system of morality which is based on relative emotional values is a mere illusion, a thoroughly vulgar conception which has nothing sound in it and nothing true.

There is only one good, knowledge, and one evil, ignorance.

Be kind, for everyone you meet is fighting a hard battle.

To find yourself, think for yourself.

Get not your friends by bare compliments, but by giving them sensible tokens of your love.

Regard your good name as the richest jewel you can possibly be possessed of – for credit is like fire; when once you have kindled it you may easily preserve it, but if you once extinguish it, you will find it an arduous task to rekindle it again. The way to gain a good reputation is to endeavor to be what you desire to appear.

Remember that there is nothing stable in human affairs; therefore avoid undue elation in prosperity, or undue depression in adversity.

Remember what is unbecoming to do is also unbecoming to speak of.

The shortest and surest way to live with honour in the world, is to be in reality what we would appear to be; and if we observe, we shall find, that all human virtues increase and strengthen themselves by the practice of them.

There is always some madness in love. But there is also always some reason in madness.

He who cannot give anything away cannot feel anything either.

We love life, not because we are used to living but because we are used to loving.

When marrying, ask yourself this question: Do you believe that you will be able to converse well with this person into your old age? Everything else in marriage is transitory.

Thoughts are the shadows of our feelings – always darker, emptier and simpler.

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

Marriage: that I call the will of two to create the one who is more than those who created it.

Of all that is written, I love only what a person has written with his own blood.

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

What else is love but understanding and rejoicing in the fact that another person lives acts and experiences otherwise than we do?

The man of knowledge must be able not only to love his enemies but also to hate his friends.

Love is not consolation. It is light.

A pair of powerful spectacles has sometimes sufficed to cure a person in love.

The demand to be loved is the greatest of all arrogant presumptions.

Whatever is done for love always occurs beyond good and evil.

Love is blind; friendship closes its eyes.

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.

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

I love those who do not know how to live for today.

It is not when truth is dirty, but when it is shallow, that the lover of knowledge is reluctant to step into its waters.

Today I love myself as I love my god: who could charge me with a sin today? I know only sins against my god; but who knows my god?

God is dead. God remains dead. And we have killed him. Yet his shadow still looms. How shall we comfort ourselves, the murderers of all murderers? What was holiest and mightiest of all that the world has yet owned has bled to death under our knives; who will wipe this blood off us? What water is there for us to clean ourselves?

There cannot be a God because if there were one, I could not believe that I was not He.

I cannot believe in a God who wants to be praised all the time.

Woman was God’s second mistake.

Is man one of God’s blunders? Or is God one of man’s blunders?

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

A subject for a great poet would be God’s boredom after the seventh day of creation.

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

I would believe only in a God that knows how to Dance.

Around the hero everything turns into a tragedy, around the demigod, a satyr-play, and around God–what? perhaps a “world”?

Is man one of God’s blunders? Or is God one of man’s blunders?

That God became man indicates only this: that man should not seek his salvation in eternity, but rather establish his heaven on earth.

There is not enough love and goodness in the world to permit giving any of it away to imaginary beings.

Everything good is the transmutation of something evil: every god has a devil for a father.

In every ascetic morality man worships a part of himself as God and for that he needs to diabolize the other part.

A nation that still believes in itself holds fast to its own god.

There did he sit shrivelled in his chimney corner, fretting on account of his weak legs, world weary, will weary, and one day he suffocated through his excessive pity.

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.

There is in general good reason to suppose that in several respects the gods could all benefit from instruction by us human beings. We humans are – more humane.

On the mountains of truth you can never climb in vain: either you will reach a point higher up today, or you will be training your powers so that you will be able to climb higher tomorrow.

There are no facts, only interpretations.

Sometimes people don’t want to hear the truth because they don’t want their illusions destroyed.

A thinker sees his own actions as experiments and questions–as attempts to find out something. Success and failure are for him answers above all.

On the mountains of truth you can never climb in vain: either you will reach a point higher up today, or you will be training your powers so that you will be able to climb higher tomorrow.

Convictions are more dangerous foes of truth than lies.

I’m not upset that you lied to me, I’m upset that from now on I can’t believe you.

So long as the priest, that professional negator, slanderer and poisoner of life, is regarded as a superior type of human being, there cannot be any answer to the question: What is Truth?

And we should call every truth false which was not accompanied by at least one laugh.

In the mountains of truth, you never climb in vain.

Young people love what is interesting and odd, no matter how true or false it is. More mature minds love what is interesting and odd about truth. Fully mature intellects, finally, love truth, even when it appears plain and simple, boring to the ordinary person; for they have noticed that truth tends to reveal its highest wisdom in the guise of simplicity.

Art is not merely an imitation of the reality of nature, but in truth a metaphysical supplement to the reality of nature, placed alongside thereof for its conquest.

All things are subject to interpretation whichever interpretation prevails at a given time is a function of power and not truth.

We have art in order not to die of the truth.

The more abstract the truth you want to teach, the more thoroughly you must seduce the senses to accept it.

There are no eternal facts, as there are no absolute truths.

Belief in the truth commences with the doubting of all those “truths” we once believed.

Faith: not wanting to know what the truth is.

In truth,there was only one christian and he died on the cross.

All things are subject to interpretation. Whichever interpretation prevails at a given time is a function of power and not truth.

The Christian resolution to find the world ugly and bad has made the world ugly and bad.

In heaven, all the interesting people are missing.

I cannot believe in a God who wants to be praised all the time.

Jesus died too soon. If he had lived to my age he would have repudiated his doctrine.

In Christianity neither morality nor religion come into contact with reality at any point.

The concepts “beyond” and “real world” were invented in order to depreciate the only world that exists-in order that no goal, no aim or task might be left for our earthly reality.

The surest way to corrupt a youth is to instruct him to hold in higher esteem those who think alike than those who think differently.

A casual stroll through the lunatic asylum shows that faith does not prove anything.

Is man merely a mistake of God’s? Or God merely a mistake of man?

After coming into contact with a religious man I always feel I must wash my hands.

Do not paint a picture either of God or the devil on your walls: this will ruin both your walls and the atmosphere.

Just look at the faces of the great Christians! They are the faces of great haters.

Christianity has a hunter’s instinct for finding out all those who by one means or another may be driven to despair –although only a part of mankind is capable of such despair. Christianity lies in wait for such as those and pursues them.

Away from God and gods did this will lure me: what would there be to create if gods existed?

The concepts “soul”, “spirit” and last of all the concept “immortal soul” were invented in order to despise the body, in order to make it sick — “holy” — in order to cultivate an attitude of appalling disrespect for all things in life which deserve to be treated seriously i.

”God”, “the immortality of the soul”, “salvation”, “the beyond”—even as a child I had no time for such notions, I do not waste any time upon them—maybe I was never childish enough for that?

God is a too palpably clumsy answer; an answer which shows a lack of delicacy towards us thinkers—fundamentally, even a crude prohibition to us: you shall not think!

Faith, indeed, has up to the present not been able to move real mountains, although I do not know who assumed that it could. But it can put mountains where there are none.

If that glad message of your Bible were written in your faces, you would not need to demand belief in the authority of that book in such stiff-necked fashion.

In short, then, the religious cult is based upon the representations of sorcery between man and man, and the sorcerer is older than the priest.

Without music, life would be a mistake.

And those who were seen dancing were thought to be insane by those who could not hear the music.

We should consider every day lost on which we have not danced at least once.

Without music, life would be a mistake… I would only believe in a God who knew how to dance.

In music the passions enjoy themselves.

Only sick music makes money today.

Without music, life would be an error. The German imagines even God singing songs.

Dancing in all its forms cannot be excluded from the curriculum of all noble education; dancing with the feet, with ideas, with words, and, need I add that one must also be able to dance with the pen?

Speaking of Georges Bizet: His music has the tang of sunny climates, their bracing air, their clearness. It voices a sensibility hitherto unknown to us.

How good music and bad reasons sound when one marches against an enemy.

Madness is rare in individuals – but in groups, parties, nations, and ages it is the rule.

One must still have chaos in oneself to be able to give birth to a dancing star.

If we affirm one moment, we thus affirm not only ourselves but all existence. For nothing is self-sufficient, neither in us ourselves nor in things; and if our soul has trembled with happiness and sounded like a harp string just once, all eternity was needed to produce this one event – and in this single moment of affirmation all eternity was called good, redeemed, justified, and affirmed.

Human, all too human.

The overman…Who has organized the chaos of his passions, given style to his character, and become creative. Aware of life’s terrors, he affirms life without resentment.

…throw roses into the abyss and say: ‘here is my thanks to the monster who didn’t succeed in swallowing me alive.

The world itself is the will to power – and nothing else! And you yourself are the will to power – and nothing else!

I assess the power of a will by how much resistance, pain, torture it endures and knows how to turn to its advantage.

The architect represents neither a Dionysian nor an Apollinian condition: here it is the mighty act of will, the will which moves mountains, the intoxication of the strong will, which demands artistic expression. The most powerful men have always inspired the architects; the architect has always been influenced by power.

What is evil?-Whatever springs from weakness.

No power can be maintained when it is only represented by hypocrites.

Men submit from habit to everything that seeks power.

Be generous in nature and thought; for this wins respect and gives confidence and power.

Life is an instinct for growth, for survival, for the accumulation of forces, for power.

Reckoned physiologically, everything ugly weakens and afflicts man. It recalls decay, danger, impotence; he actually suffers a loss of energy in its presence. The effect of the ugly can be measured with a dynamometer. Whenever man feels in any way depressed, he senses the proximity of something ugly. His feeling of power, his will to power, his courage, his pride – they decline with the ugly, they increase with the beautiful.

Distrust all in whom the impulse to punish is powerful.

My idea is that every specific body strives to become master over all space and to extend its force (–its will to power:) and to thrust back all that resists its extension. But it continually encounters similar efforts on the part of other bodies and ends by coming to an arrangement (“union”) with those of them that are sufficiently related to it: thus they then conspire together for power. And the process goes on–

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.

There is only nobility of birth, only nobility of blood. When one speaks of “aristocrats of the spirit,” reasons are usually not lacking for concealing something. As is well known, it is a favorite term among ambitious Jews. For spirit alone does not make noble. Rather, there must be something to ennoble the spirit. What then is required? Blood.

The homogenizing of European man… requires a justification: it lies in serving a higher sovereign species that stands upon the former which can raise itself to its task only by doing this. Not merely a Master Race whose sole task is to rule, but a Race with its own sphere of life, with an excess of strength… strong enough to have no need of the tyranny of the virtue-imperative.

The rights a man arrogates to himself are related to the duties he imposes on himself, to the tasks to which he feels equal. The great majority of men have no right to existence, but are a misfortune to higher men.

The stronger becomes master of the weaker, in so far as the latter cannot assert its degree of independence – here there is no mercy, no forbearance, even less a respect for “laws.”

A declaration of war on the masses by Higher Men is needed!… Everything that makes soft and effeminate, that serves the end of the People or the Feminine, works in favor of Universal Suffrage, i.e. the domination of the Inferior Men. But we should take reprisal and bring this whole affair to light and the bar of judgment.

If there is something to pardon in everything, there is also something to condemn.

A declaration of war on the masses by Higher Men is needed! … Everything that makes soft and effeminate, that serves the end of the People or the Feminine, works in favor of Universal Suffrage, i.e. the domination of the Inferior Men. But we should take reprisal and bring this whole affair to light and the bar of judgment.

The Beautiful exists just as little as the True. In every case it is a question of the conditions of preservation of a certain type of man: thus the herd-man will experience the value feeling of the True in different things than will the Overman.

Art is the proper task of life.

The essence of all beautiful art, all great art, is gratitude.

Sleeping is no mean art: for its sake one must stay awake all day.

An artist has no home in Europe except in Paris.

Art is essentially the affirmation, the blessing, and the deification of existence.

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….

I do not know what the spirit of a philosopher could more wish to be than a good dancer. For the dance is his ideal, also his fine art, finally also the only kind of piety he knows, his ‘divine service.’

Man is the cruelest animal. At tragedies, bullfights, and crucifixions he has so far felt best on earth; and when he invented hell for himself, behold, that was his very heaven.

One must give value to their existence by behaving as if ones very existence were a work of art.

The bad gains respect through imitation, the good loses it especially in art.

Admiration for a quality or an art can be so strong that it deters us from striving to possess it.

If there is to be art, if there is to be any aesthetic doing and seeing, one physiological condition is indispensable: frenzy. Frenzy must first have enhanced the excitability of the whole machine; else there is no art. All kinds of frenzy, however diversely conditioned, have the strength to accomplish this: above all, the frenzy of sexual excitement, this most ancient and original form of frenzy.

We shall do a great deal for the science of esthetics, once we perceive not merely by logical inference, but with the immediate certainty of intuition, that the continuous development of art is bound up with the Apollonian and Dionysian duality: just as procreation depends on the duality of the sexes, involving perpetual strife with only periodically intervening reconciliations.

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

Is it better to out-monster the monster or to be quietly devoured?

Whatever is done for love always occurs beyond good and evil.

If you have an enemy, do not requite him evil with good, for that would put him to shame. Rather prove that he did you some good.

There is an old illusion. It is called good and evil.

If you are too weak to give yourselves your own law, then a tyrant shall lay his yoke upon you and say: “Obey! Clench your teeth and obey!” And all good and evil shall be drowned in obedience to him.

But it is the same with man as with the tree. The more he seeks to rise into the height and light, the more vigorously do his roots struggle earthword, downword, into the dark, the deep – into evil.

Of all evil I deem you capable: Therefore I want good from you. Verily, I have often laughed at the weaklings who thought themselves good because they had no claws.

What we experience in dreams – assuming that we experience it often – belongs in the end just as much to the over-all economy of our soul as anything experienced “actually”: we are richer or poorer on account of it.

Everything good is the transmutation of something evil: every god has a devil for a father.

He who fights with monsters should look to it that he himself does not become a monster. And when you gaze long into an abyss the abyss also gazes into you.

[Anything which] is a living and not a dying body… will have to be an incarnate will to power, it will strive to grow, spread, seize, become predominant – not from any morality or immorality but because it is living and because life simply is will to power… ‘Exploitation’… belongs to the essence of what lives, as a basic organic function; it is a consequence of the will to power, which is after all the will to life.

Digressions, objections, delight in mockery, carefree mistrust are signs of health; everything unconditional belongs in pathology.

Poets are shameless with their experiences: they exploit them.

He who fights with monsters might take care lest he thereby become a monster. And if you gaze for long into an abyss, the abyss gazes also into you.

What is done out of love always takes place beyond good and evil.

The great epochs of our life come when we gain the courage to rechristen our evil as what is best in us.

A man’s maturity: that is to have rediscovered the seriousness he possessed as a child at play.

What we experience in dreams — assuming that we experience it often — belongs in the end just as much to the over-all economy of our soul as anything experienced “actually”: we are richer or poorer on account of it.

Physiologists should think twice before positioning the drive for self-preservation as the cardinal drive of an organic being. Above all, a living thing wants to discharge its strength – life itself is will to power -: self-preservation is only one of the indirect and most frequent consequences of this.