We review the way of seeing the life of the iconic German philosopher.
The influence of Nietzschean thought reaches us even to this day, his way of explaining the world made him a very charismatic philosopher and studied in all the faculties of Philosophy in the world.
Great phrases and thoughts of Friedrich Nietzsche
Anyone who has been minimally interested in philosophy knows the important figure that Nietzsche was and his transcendence in modern philosophy.
That is why we have decided to make a brief selection of 90 Nietzsche phrases that we think you will surely like and that will give us an overview of his opinions and reflections on different planes of reality.
1. The man of faith, the “believer” of every kind is, by necessity, a dependent man…
Nietzsche speaks to us with this phrase about the need for man to believe in something greater than himself.
2. God also has his hell: it is his love for men.
A curious way of seeing religion, since all the evil on earth is caused by man.
3. Superior men are not made by the force of their feelings, but by their duration.
The feelings of truth endure over time within us.
4. A man’s worth is measured by the amount of loneliness he can bear.
Loneliness is something that no man wants, it can be useful at times to reflect but man does not want it for a long time in his life.
5. There is not, in all of nature, a sadder and more repugnant creature than the man who has deserted his genius and who looks to the right and to the left, behind him and in all directions.
The man without his intellect is lost in life, this makes us a unique creature in the world.
6. The proudest of men, the philosopher, is wholly of the opinion that, from everywhere, the eyes of the universe are directed telescopically on his works and his thoughts.
Nietzsche comments on the egocentrism within the philosophers themselves and their desire to be recognized, something that many of us share.
7. Even the most reasonable man needs to return to Nature, that is, to his fundamental illogical relationship with all things.
Our rootedness with nature is something intrinsic in the human being. We feel comfortable and relaxed in a controlled natural environment.
8. The liberation of man, the breaking of the chains that still keep him tied to the animal, goes through the overcoming of moral prejudices.
Certain moral prejudices were, according to Nietzsche, something that weakened us as a society.
9. The man of the afternoon, with his savage instincts asleep, needs summer vacations, baths, snowdrifts.
As the day goes by, all men relax and like to dedicate themselves to idle tasks.
10. During sleep, man, in times of civilization and rudimentary, learns to know a second real world; such is the origin of all metaphysics.
Nietzsche tells us about the dream world and how it helps us clarify our ideas or even create.
11. His virtue is the consequence of his happiness. A happy man will necessarily perform certain acts and will instinctively flee from committing others, because the feeling of the order that he physiologically represents so demands.
Our actions lead us in life to achieve our goals, although seen from the outside others believe that it is a matter of luck.
12. The Christian needs illness, more or less as the Greeks need an excess of health, making man sick is the true hidden intention of the entire system of health procedures of the Church. And the Church itself, isn’t she the Catholic asylum as the ultimate ideal?
Religion has always used its speech to attract new members to its congregation, and this speaks much more to sick people, because they feel the need to believe that something superior will help them… although this is not really the case.
13. But man himself has an invincible tendency to be deceived…
Man feels the need to find an easy solution to his problems, even if this solution is not a reality. .
14. The most common lie is the one with which a man deceives himself. Deceiving others is a relatively vain defect.
Hypocrisy is a disease that many people suffer from, and this is much worse than a simple lie. One of Nietzsche’s most famous phrases.
15. There are times when the rational man and the intuitive man are together, the one anguished before intuition, the other mocking abstraction; the latter is as irrational, then, as the former is unartistic.
Our personality, with its numerous aspects, often leads us to boycott ourselves.
16. Vicious is all kinds of unnaturalness. The most vicious kind of man is the priest: he teaches the unnatural. Against the priest there are no reasons, there is prison.
Nietzsche shows us his vision of men of faith, which were totally contrary to his own personal vision.
17. There are questions in which it is not up to man to decide on truth and untruth: all the highest questions, all the supreme problems of value are beyond human reason…
The most complicated problems seem beyond our comprehension as human beings.
18. The greatness of man is in being a bridge and not a goal: what can be loved in man is that he is a transit and a sunset.
Enjoying our path in life and living in the moment makes us much happier than obsessing over personal goals.
19. The philosophical man has the premonition that under this reality in which we live and are lies a second very different reality, that is to say, that it is an appearance.
The reality we perceive is limited by our senses and is only part of a much larger total reality.
20. Buddhism is a religion for late men.
Nietzsche tells us about his particular way of seeing Buddhism; he was a very critical man of religion.
21. How many men rush towards the light, not to see better but to shine.
Many times we seek a goal for our own personal fulfillment, not because it is totally necessary for us to achieve it.
22. The party man becomes a liar out of necessity.
Someone who submits to the guidelines of a political party and has to totally adopt an ideology sometimes has to lie about certain aspects, even though he doesn’t really believe in them himself.
23. A religious man thinks only of himself.
Religion can also be a search for personal fulfillment and therefore a mere egocentric desire of the one who practices it.
24. God is dead, long live the man, who has killed him.
Nietzsche doesn’t talk about how modern man today doesn’t have that need to believe in a god and can live without the need for a religion.
25. Man conditioned in this way transforms things until they become reflections of his perfection. This transformation into the perfect is art.
What is art if not the search for perfection? Or is it simply our particular way of seeing this perfection.
26. My destiny wants me to be the first honest man.
Nietzsche shows us in his thoughts as a man with no holds barred, showing and saying what he thinks regardless of what others think.
27. But only man is to himself a heavy burden! And this because he carries too many foreign things on his shoulders. Like the camel, he kneels down and lays down burdens well.
People carry a lot throughout our lives and we should learn to let go of what really does us no good.
28. What we recognize in a man, that we also make burn in him.
Praising those positive things in your relatives makes them highlight them and therefore improve as people.
29. The need to believe is a need of the weak. The weak man needs to depend.
The need for people to believe in something superior is usually due to a physical or moral weakness that makes them believe that they are not capable of facing the world around them on their own.
30. When there is peace, the warrior man attacks himself.
The warlike man feels the need to be permanently at war.
31. The authentic man wants two things: danger and play. That is why he loves the woman: the most dangerous of games.
Nietzsche processes his love for women in this particular way.
32. Is man just a mistake of God? Or is God just a man’s mistake?
God created man or did man create god?
33. The judgment of the beauty of man is a product of the vanity that he possesses as a species.
Vanity as a species makes us believe that we are more important than we really are.
34. Every man is a unique mystery.
Each person has a unique personality that makes us very different from each other.
35. The voice of conscience is the voice of some men in man.
Our way of perceiving what is correct is often conditioned by the teachings of those people who were relevant in our lives and taught us to be the person we are.
36. Practical people do not like the circumspect man, they consider him dangerous.
Practical people use all the tools that life offers them to achieve their goals.
37. In the world there is only one road that only you can travel: where does it lead? Don’t ask, follow it. Who said that “a man never rises so high as when he does not know where his path may take him?
Where our lives will take us none of us know, but our obligation to live them can take us very far. One of Nietzsche’s most remembered phrases.
38. History belongs above all to the active and powerful man, to the one who sustains a great struggle, needs models, teachers, comforters, and cannot find them among his companions or in the present.
Those men who stand out from the rest and guide us on our way, end up becoming those people with more relevance among us, and can even become part of History.
39. Apes are too good for man to descend from them.
Evil is intrinsic to the human being, evil is not found within the animal world, according to this reflection of Nietzsche.
40. The man of knowledge dislikes going down to the water of truth not when it is dirty, but when it is not deep.
The person who seeks the truth wants a real truth, not a half truth.
41. Because in modern man the avidity for the beautiful form dictated by fashion corresponds to the ugliness of its content…
The world of fashion and human beauty does not care about values and thoughts, which means that a person can be very beautiful on the outside and very ugly on the inside.
42. Error has made man profound enough to make religions and arts proceed from him.
The search for personal fulfillment has made man develop much of his potential, creating much along the way.
43. Man is the sickest animal for being the most deviated from his instincts.
Man is the only animal that is guided by reason and not by instincts, which makes us totally different from all other animals.
44. Only through the woman did the man come to taste the tree of knowledge
The intellect and our ability to reason is the same in the human being between men and women, and Nietzsche was always a defender of the figure of women within the arts and sciences.
45. We no longer derive man from the “spirit”, from the “divinity”, we have returned to placing him among the animals.
Science dismantles the creationism with which the church had subjected man for hundreds of years.
46. The necessary man of the future must have always found himself in contradiction with his time.
Many of us have once thought that we were born at the wrong time in history, and Nietzsche had also come to that conclusion.
47. The most intellectual men as they are strong find their happiness where others would find their ruin: in the labyrinth, in the hardness with themselves and with others, in the experiment; their enjoyment consists in conquering themselves.
Those intelligent people want to improve and be better than they were the day before, self-improvement makes them.
48. Christianity is based on the lie that man cannot know for himself what is good and evil.
Nietzsche tells us about the need for Christianity to partially annul the will of people in order to submit them to its designs.
49. Nature and not God is what separates men who dominate by their understanding, by force or by character.
The qualities in people are what differentiate us among ourselves and with other living beings.
50. Christianity should not be adorned or adorned: he has waged a war to the death against that superior type of man, he has extracted from those instincts, by distillation, the evil, the evil man — the strong man considered as a man typically reprobate, as a reprobate man.
Nietzsche shows us in this sentence his disgust with Christianity and the ideas it represents, he was not an atheist but he was not a supporter of the Church either.
51. In the depths of the soul the man is only evil, but the woman herself can be evil.
Nietzsche knew very well that women deserved his respect and admiration just as much as men and that they should not be undervalued.
52. What serves as food and strength for superior men, must be almost a poison for inferior men.
Those hard experiences strengthen us as people and the weak is the one who does not know how to grow with them.
53. Better than the man understands the children the woman; but the man is more of a child than the woman.
A way of saying that childcare has always been in the hands of women, since perhaps they also show a greater degree of maturity in life than men.
54. I am 6000 feet beyond man and time.
A phrase that shows us how the philosopher felt misunderstood in the society he was in.
55. There is a right that allows us to take the life of a man; there is none that allows us to take death from him; it is pure cruelty.
Nietzsche was an abolitionist of the death penalty, because he believed that nothing gave us the right to take someone else’s life.
56. According to Christianity, man should not think and should suffer in such a way that he constantly needs the priest.
The need for religion to create in people a dependency on it for their own survival.
57. The brevity of human life leads to many erroneous statements about the qualities of man.
Many times we believe that we have certain qualities that over the years and seen with perspective shows that they were not such.
58. Ours is, without a doubt, a time of grave danger: men seem to be on the verge of discovering that at all times the selfishness of individuals, groups or masses has been the engine of historical movements; but he is not alarmed by this discovery, but at once decrees: “Egoism must be our god”.
The desire for self-improvement is what has often led people to perform great deeds in history, and in today’s society, selfishness is something that is often even rewarded in life.
59. The concept “son of man” is not a specific person, belonging to history, a unique, unrepeatable reality, but an “eternal” fact, a psychological symbol detached from the concept of time.
Nietzsche tells us about this concept “son of man” and that it can be used over time, since it does not refer to a specific moment or person.
60. An altruistic morality is a bad thing; physiologically it means: I don’t know where to find my interest. Decomposition of the instincts, finished man who becomes altruistic.
Nietzsche tells us about how society does not sufficiently value altruistic acts and how it detaches itself from them.
61. Every superior man instinctively tends to look for a nest where he can be sheltered from the vulgar, where he can forget the rule of man to feel himself an exception.
People tend to believe that we are unique and unrepeatable, different from the rest of society, but we are not always right.
62. The maturity of man is having rediscovered the seriousness with which he played as a child.
Growing up many times leads us to rediscover our thoughts from when we were children, and these can take us one step further, because they lead us to really know what we wanted at the beginning of our history.
63. The weak and unsuccessful must perish: first article of our love for men. And furthermore they must be helped to perish.
Nietzsche shows us the harshness of the society where he was and how it showed no mercy to unfortunate people.
64. I think that animals see in man a being just like them who has lost in an extraordinarily dangerous way the healthy animal intellect, that is, they see in him the irrational animal, the animal that laughs, the animal that cries, the animal unhappy.
A somewhat curious way of how people can be perceived by animals, even tending to humanize the thoughts of animals.
65. The historical men: the gaze fixed on the past pushes them towards the future, encourages them to continue fighting with life and kindles in them the hope that the good will still come, that happiness is behind the mountain that is ready to climb
The value in men takes them far in life, even leading them to achieve historical immortality.
66. Modern man has become a spectator who enjoys and wanders and is now in a situation where not even great wars and revolutions can hardly change anything for an instant.
Modern society means that even in the most catastrophic situations, man always finds refuge somewhere for a moment.
67. But I have never believed the people when they have spoken of great men – and I maintained my belief that I was a backwards cripple, that I had very little of everything and too much of one thing.
A thought that makes us reflect on whether those great people really were or were simply involved in a specific situation.
68. What has been able to give a greater dimension and a more beautiful realization to the concept of man must have an eternal existence in order to continue doing so eternally.
The creation of religion and how it establishes its base in eternity so that it never has an expiration date.
69. Deep down, every man knows very well that he is only once, as a unique specimen, on earth, and that no chance, no matter how singular, will reunite again, in a single unit, that which he himself is, a so amazingly diverse material. He knows it, but he hides it, as if it were a guilty conscience.
We all feel unique and at the same time we are afraid to show ourselves as we really are in front of society, in case the time comes when we do not have its approval.
70. For primitively, whenever man saw an event taking place, he believed in the existence of a will as its cause, as well as in that of beings acting personally in the background. The idea of mechanics was completely foreign to him.
The human being for a long time has not been more able to see the obvious that was in front of him, he was not aware that a series of alien events could have occurred without his knowledge.
71. There are days when a feeling invades me that is blacker than the blackest melancholy: contempt for men. And to leave no doubt about what it is that I despise, about who it is that I despise: he is the man of today, the man of whom I am fatally contemporary.
The loss of faith in the society in which he found himself made Nietzsche a person who was never comfortable in the moment of history in which he lived.
72. When a man lowers his talent just to catch up with the reader, he commits a mortal sin that the reader will never forgive him for, assuming, of course, that he realizes it. One can say atrocious things to a man, but exalting his vanity.
We must not limit ourselves for fear of not being understood, we must be what we really are to be consistent with ourselves.
73. We have discovered happiness, we know the way, we found the way out of many millennia of labyrinth. Who else found her? Modern man perhaps? I don’t know how to go out or come in; I am everything that does not know how to go out or come in, that is how modern man sighs…
Modern civilization also brought to men the restlessness of non-realization and this led them to turn them into much more unhappy beings.
74. In what way, then, does the monumental conception of the past serve today’s man, the occupation with the classic and infrequent of past times? He extracts from it the certainty that the great once happened, was in any case possible, and, consequently, will be possible again some time; He advances more animated, because the doubt that assailed him in hours of weakness has been overcome, the doubt that perhaps he aspired to the impossible.
Nietzsche talks to us here about how we tend to deceive ourselves in order to continue with our lives, thinking that if things were better in the past, they can be better in the future.
75. In reality, we are living, in this regard, the consequences of the doctrine, lately proclaimed from all corners, that the State is the supreme goal of humanity and that there is no greater duty for a man than to serve to the State. Something in which I do not perceive so much a return to paganism as nonsense.
Politics seen from the point of view of the philosopher and how he downplays it, leaving it only as one more part of life and not as something vital.
76. Since the times in which men got used to believing in the possession of absolute truths, a deep discomfort has arisen in all skeptical and relative attitudes, taken in relation to any problem of knowledge: it is much more often preferred to consecrate , with their hands and feet tied, to a conviction that is that of people in authority (parents, friends, teachers, princes), and they feel, by not doing so, a kind of remorse.
Not finding a goal in life makes us much unhappier people and that is why we sometimes spend our lives in activities that really do not deserve our time.
77. I am not a man, I am a battlefield.
The internal battles that all of us experience are constant throughout our lives.
78. Man is something entertaining…
A brief quote that tells us that the study of man and how he develops is something that can take us a long time.
79. Among men you will always be a stranger.
There will always be someone who sees you through the eyes of a stranger, because you will never have the approval of the whole world.
80. Among men, as in any other animal species, there is an excess of sick people, degenerates, weak people, and sufferers; healthy ones are an exception.
Those people free from moral or physical ailments are statistically few in number among the whole society.
81. Man then withdraws from the infinity of the horizon, folding in on himself, and shuts himself up within the smallest egoistic enclosure, where he is condemned to dry up and atrophy: there it is probable that he will become intelligent, but never wise.
Selfishness and self-centeredness make us less wise people, because we never value the truth that someone other than ourselves transmits to us.
82. The type of man that should be loved as the most valuable.
All people are equal in front of society and we should all be treated with the same dignity.
83. Man has created woman; with what? With a rib of his god… of his ideal.
What is woman if not what man most desires? even in the most basic instincts of her.
84. Certain men are born posthumous.
There are men who are born lacking everything that makes them great: the search for personal development and self-improvement.
85. It can be considered as a monstrous atavism that even today the common man is waiting for the opinions of others about himself to submit to them.
People are slaves of society, as well as hostages of its approval and we submit to it without questioning it, thus wasting our lives.
86. The same thing happens to man as to the tree. The more he wants to rise to the heights and to the light, the more strongly his roots tend towards the earth, downwards, towards the dark, the deep, towards evil.
On our way to excellence we end up performing acts that we did not think we had to do, but the fact is that the duality in life and in the universe is constant. To get high first we have to get our boots dirty.
87. Religions tend to preserve these abortive cases and banish the strong, make happiness suspect. His goal is to turn man into a sublime abortion.
Religion despises the intellectual, because he questions all the doctrines on which it is based, and furthermore it feeds on the ignorance of its followers.
88. Man, as a building genius, rises in such ways far above the bee: the latter builds with wax that he collects from nature, he with the much finer matter of the concepts that he first has to fabricate of himself.
Nietzsche tells us about how our ideas are built just like bees build their nests, but with the difference that the former are built with the material of our thoughts.
89. Since man wants to exist, both out of necessity and boredom, in a social and gregarious way, he needs a peace treaty…
For the development of a society it is necessary that the countries that comprise it coexist in peace.
90. Because what is necessary is for man to be happy with himself, regardless of whether he achieves this with this or that type of art or poetry.
The search for personal fulfillment is the path that people follow throughout our lives, and each one must choose the path that will lead to it.
To the classic question “what do you do?” I always answer “basically I am a psychologist”. In fact, my academic training has revolved around the psychology of development, education and community, a field of study influenced my volunteer activities, as well as my first work experiences in personal services.