Human, All Too Human Quotes

“There is not enough love and goodness in the world to permit giving any of it away to imaginary beings.”
― Friedrich Nietzsche, Human, All Too Human: A Book for Free Spirits

“Stupidity in a woman is unfeminine.”
― Friedrich Nietzsche, Human, All Too Human

“He who cannot put his thoughts on ice should not enter into the heat of dispute.”
― Friedrich Nietzsche, Human, All Too Human: A Book for Free Spirits

“And so, onwards... along a path of wisdom, with a hearty tread, a hearty confidence.. however you may be, be your own source of experience. Throw off your discontent about your nature. Forgive yourself your own self. You have it in your power to merge everything you have lived through- false starts, errors, delusions, passions, your loves and your hopes- into your goal, with nothing left over.”
― Friedrich Nietzsche, Human, All Too Human: A Book for Free Spirits

“Most people are far too much occupied with themselves to be malicious.”
― Friedrich Nietzsche, Human, All Too Human: A Book for Free Spirits

“Marriage as a long conversation. - When marrying you should ask yourself this question: do you believe you are going to enjoy talking with this woman into your old age? Everything else in a marriage is transitory, but most of the time that you're together will be devoted to conversation.”
― Friedrich Nietzsche, Human, All Too Human: A Book for Free Spirits

“There is a certain right by which we many deprive a man of life, but none by which we may deprive him of death; this is mere cruelty.”
― Friedrich Nietzsche, Human, All Too Human: A Book for Free Spirits

“The one necessary thing.— A person must have one or the other. Either a cheerful disposition by nature, or a disposition made cheerful by art and knowledge.”
― Friedrich Nietzsche, Human, All Too Human: A Book for Free Spirits

“At a certain place in Beethoven's Ninth Symphony, for example, he might feel that he is floating above the earth in a starry dome, with the dream of immortality in his heart; all the stars seem to glimmer around him, and the earth seems to sink ever deeper downwards.”
― Friedrich Nietzsche, Human, All Too Human: A Book for Free Spirits

“In reality, hope is the worst of all evils, because it prolongs man’s torments.”
― Friedrich Nietzsche, Human, All Too Human: A Book for Free Spirits

“As soon as a religion comes to dominate it has as its opponents all those who would have been its first disciples. ”
― Friedrich Nietzsche, Human, All Too Human

“No one dies of fatal truths nowadays: there are too many antidotes.”
― Friedrich Nietzsche, Human, All Too Human: A Book for Free Spirits

“Socialism itself can hope to exist only for brief periods here and there, and then only through the exercise of the extremest terrorism. For this reason it is secretly preparing itself for rule through fear and is driving the word “justice” into the heads of the half-educated masses like a nail so as to rob them of their reason… and to create in them a good conscience for the evil game they are to play.”
― Friedrich Nietzsche, Human, All Too Human: A Book for Free Spirits

“Do not talk about giftedness, inborn talents! One can name great men of all kinds who were very little gifted. They acquired greatness, became 'geniuses' (as we put it), through qualities the lack of which no one who knew what they were would boast of: they all pos­sessed that seriousness of the efficient workman which first learns to con­struct the parts properly before it ventures to fashion a great whole; they allowed themselves time for it, because they took more pleasure in making the little, secondary things well than in the effect of a dazzling whole”
― Friedrich Nietzsche, Human, All Too Human: A Book for Free Spirits

“The mother of excess is not joy but joylessness.”
― Friedrich Nietzsche, Human, All Too Human: A Book for Free Spirits

“It is not conflict of opinions that has made history so violent but conflict of belief in opinions, that is to say conflict of convictions.”
― Friedrich Nietzsche, Human, All Too Human: A Book for Free Spirits

“He who speaks a bit of a foreign language has more delight in it than he who speaks it well; pleasure goes along with superficial knowledge.”
― Friedrich Nietzsche, Human, All Too Human: A Book for Free Spirits

“A man far oftener appears to have a decided character from persistently following his temperament than from persistently following his principles.”
― Friedrich Nietzsche, Human, All Too Human: A Book for Free Spirits

“The complete irresponsibility of man for his actions and his nature is the bitterest drop which he who understands must swallow.”
― Friedrich Nietzsche, Human, All Too Human: A Book for Free Spirits

“The Hour-Hand of Life --- Life consists of rare, isolated moments of the greatest significance, and of innumerably many intervals, during which at best the silhouettes of those moments hover about us. Love, springtime, every beautiful melody, mountains, the moon, the sea – all these speak completely to the heart but once, if in fact they ever do get a chance to speak completely. For many men do not have those moments at all, and are themselves intervals and intermissions in the symphony of real life.”
― Friedrich Nietzsche, Human, All Too Human: A Book for Free Spirits

“He is called a free spirit who thinks differently from what, on the basis of his origin, environment, his class and profession, or on the basis of the dominant views of the age, would have been expected of him”
― Friedrich Nietzsche, Human, All Too Human: A Book for Free Spirits

“Do you deserve truth? You sure seek it, but do you deserve it? If you want to see real things burning you first have to reach up to the height of the fire.”
― Friedrich Nietzsche, Human, All Too Human: A Book for Free Spirits

“We set no special value on the possession of a virtue until we percieve that it is entirely lacking in our adversary.”
― Friedrich Nietzsche, Human, All Too Human: A Book for Free Spirits

“Masks. - There are women who, however you may search them, prove to have no content but are purely masks. The man who associates with such almost spectral, necessarily unsatisfied beings is to be commiserated with, yet it is precisely they who are able to arouse the desire of the man most strongly: he seeks for her soul - and goes on seeking.”
― Friedrich Nietzsche, Human, All Too Human: A Book for Free Spirits

“Our crime against criminals lies in the fact that we treat them like rascals.”
― Friedrich Nietzsche, Human, All Too Human: A Book for Free Spirits

“In conversation we are sometimes confused by the tone of our own voice, and mislead to make assertions that do not at all correspond to our opinions.”
― Friedrich Nietzsche, Human, All Too Human: A Book for Free Spirits

“Language as putative science. -

The significance of language for the evolution of culture lies in this, that mankind set up in language a separate world beside the other world, a place it took to be so firmly set that, standing upon it, it could lift the rest of the world off its hinges and make itself master of it. To the extent that man has for long ages believed in the concepts and names of things as in aeternae veritates he has appropriated to himself that pride by which he raised himself above the animal: he really thought that in language he possessed knowledge of the world. The sculptor of language was not so modest as to believe that he was only giving things designations, he conceived rather that with words he was expressing supreame knowledge of things; language is, in fact, the first stage of occupation with science. Here, too, it is the belief that the truth has been found out of which the mightiest sources of energy have flowed. A great deal later - only now - it dawns on men that in their belief in language they have propagated a tremendous error. Happily, it is too late for the evolution of reason, which depends on this belief, to be put back. - Logic too depends on presuppositions with which nothing in the real world corresponds, for example on the presupposition that there are identical things, that the same thing is identical at different points of time: but this science came into existence through the opposite belief (that such conditions do obtain in the real world). It is the same with mathematics, which would certainly not have come into existence if one had known from the beginning that there was in nature no exactly straight line, no real circle, no absolute magnitude.”
― Friedrich Nietzsche, Human, All Too Human: A Book for Free Spirits

“Ages of happiness. - An age of happiness is quite impossible, because men want only to desire it but not to have it, and every individual who experiences good times learns to downright pray for misery and disquietude. The destiny of man is designed for happy moments - every life has them - but not for happy ages. Nonetheless they will remain fixed in the imagination of man as 'the other side of the hill' because they have been inherited from ages past: for the concepts of the age of happiness was no doubt acquired in primeval times from that condition of which, after violent exertion in hunting and warfare, man gives himself up to repose, stretches his limbs and hears the pinions of sleep rustling about him. It is a false conclusion if, in accordance with that ancient familiar experience, man imagines that, after whole ages of toil and deprivation, he can then partake of that condition of happiness correspondingly enhanced and protracted.”
― Friedrich Nietzsche, Human, All Too Human: A Book for Free Spirits

“One thing a man must have: either a naturally light disposition or a disposition lightened by art and knowledge.”
― Friedrich Nietzsche, Human, All Too Human: A Book for Free Spirits

“When we hear the ancient bells growling on a Sunday morning we ask ourselves: Is it really possible! This, for a jew, crucified two thousand years ago, who said he was God's son? The proof of such a claim is lacking. Certainly the Christian religion is an antiquity projected into our times from remote prehistory; and the fact that the claim is believed - whereas one is otherwise so strict in examining pretensions - is perhaps the most ancient piece of this heritage. A god who begets children with a mortal woman; a sage who bids men work no more, have no more courts, but look for the signs of the impending end of the world; a justice that accepts the innocent as a vicarious sacrifice; someone who orders his disciples to drink his blood; prayers for miraculous interventions; sins perpetrated against a god, atoned for by a god; fear of a beyond to which death is the portal; the form of the cross as a symbol in a time that no longer knows the function and ignominy of the cross -- how ghoulishly all this touches us, as if from the tomb of a primeval past! Can one believe that such things are still believed?”
― Friedrich Nietzsche, Human, All Too Human: A Book for Free Spirits