The Will to Power Quotes

“To those human beings who are of any concern to me I wish suffering, desolation, sickness, ill-treatment, indignities—I wish that they should not remain unfamiliar with profound self-contempt, the torture of self-mistrust, the wretchedness of the vanquished: I have no pity for them, because I wish them the only thing that can prove today whether one is worth anything or not—that one endures.”
― Friedrich Nietzsche, The Will to Power

“It is a self-deception of philosophers and moralists to imagine that they escape decadence by opposing it. That is beyond their will; and, however little they acknowledge it, one later discovers that they were among the most powerful promoters of decadence.”
― Friedrich Nietzsche, The Will to Power

“And do you know what “the world” is to me? Shall I show it to you in my mirror? This world: a monster of energy, without beginning, without end; a firm, iron magnitude of force that does not grow bigger or smaller, that does not expend itself but only transforms itself; as a whole, of unalterable size, a household without expenses or losses, but likewise without increase or income; enclosed by “nothingness” as by a boundary; not something blurry or wasted, not something endlessly extended, but set in a definite space as a definite force, and not a space that might be “empty” here or there, but rather as force throughout, as a play of forces and waves of forces, at the same time one and many, increasing here and at the same time decreasing there; a sea of forces flowing and rushing together, eternally changing, eternally flooding back, with tremendous years of recurrence, with an ebb and a flood of its forms; out of the simplest forms striving toward the most complex, out of the stillest, most rigid, coldest forms striving toward the hottest, most turbulent, most self-contradictory, and then again returning home to the simple out of this abundance, out of the play of contradictions back to the joy of concord, still affirming itself in this uniformity of its courses and its years, blessing itself as that which must return eternally, as a becoming that knows no satiety, no disgust, no weariness: this, my Dionysian world of the eternally self- creating, the eternally self-destroying, this mystery world of the twofold voluptuous delight, my “beyond good and evil,” without goal, unless the joy of the circle is itself a goal; without will, unless a ring feels good will toward itself— do you want a name for this world? A solution for all of its riddles? A light for you, too, you best-concealed, strongest, most intrepid, most midnightly men?— This world is the will to power—and nothing besides! And you yourselves are also this will to power—and nothing besides!”
― Friedrich Nietzsche, The Will to Power

“Virtue is under certain circumstances merely an honorable form of stupidity: who could be ill-disposed toward it on that account? And this kind of virtue has not been outlived even today. A kind of sturdy peasant simplicity, which, however, is possible in all classes and can be encountered only with respect and a smile, believes even today that everything is in good hands, namely in the "hands of God"; and when it maintains this proportion with the same modest certainty as it would that two and two make four, we others certainly refrain from contradicting. Why disturb THIS pure foolishness? Why darken it with our worries about man, people, goal, future? And even if we wanted to do it, we could not. They project their own honorable stupidity and goodness into the heart of things (the old God, deus myops, still lives among them!); we others — we read something else into the heart of things: our own enigmatic nature, our contradictions, our deeper, more painful, more mistrustful wisdom.”
― Friedrich Nietzsche, The Will to Power

“The higher man is distinguished from the lower by his fearlessness and his readiness to challenge misfortune.”
― Friedrich Nietzsche, The Will to Power

“My humanity is a constant self-overcoming.”
― Friedrich Nietzsche, The Will to Power

“Well-meaning, helpful, good-natured attitudes of mind have not come to be honored on account of their usefulness, but because they are states of richer souls that are capable of bestowing and have their value in the feeling of the plenitude of life.”
― Friedrich Nietzsche, The Will to Power

“Of what is great one must either be silent or speak with greatness. With greatness--that means cynically and with innocence.”
― Friedrich Nietzsche, The Will to Power

“How does one become stronger? By deciding slowly; and by holding firmly to the decision once it is made. Everything else follows of itself.”
― Friedrich Nietzsche, The Will to Power

“The wisest man would be the one richest in contradictions, who has, as it were, antennae for all types of men---as well as his great moments of grand harmony---a rare accident even in us! A sort of planetary motion---”
― Friedrich Nietzsche, The Will to Power

“However modest one may be in one's demand for intellectual cleanliness, one cannot help feeling, when coming into contact with the New Testament, a kind of inexpressible discomfiture: for the unchecked impudence with which the least qualified want to raise their voice on the greatest problems, and even claim to be judges of things, surpasses all measure. The shameless levity with which the most intractable problems (life, world, God, purpose of life) are spoken of, as if they were not problems at all but simply things that these little bigots KNEW!”
― Friedrich Nietzsche, The Will to Power

“It is disgraceful for a philosopher to say: the good and the beautiful are one; if he adds 'also the true', one ought to beat him. Truth is ugly. We possess art lest we perish of the truth.”
― Friedrich Nietzsche, The Will to Power

“The misunderstanding of passion and reason, as if the latter were an independent entity and not rather a system of relations between various passions and desires; and as if every passion did not possess its quantum of reason”
― Friedrich Nietzsche, The Will to Power

“Democracy represents the disbelief in all great men and in all elite societies: everybody is everybody else's equal, 'At bottom we are all herd and mob.”
― Friedrich Nietzsche, The Will to Power

“Brave and creative men never consider pleasure and pain as ultimate values—they are epiphenomena: one must desire both if one is to achieve anything.”
― Friedrich Nietzsche, The Will to Power

“The worst mutilation of man that can be imagined presented as the "good man".”
― Friedrich Nietzsche, The Will to Power

“Close the Bible and open the Manu Smriti. It has an affirmation of life, a triumphing agreeable sensation in life and that to draw up a lawbook such as Manu means to permit oneself to get the upper hand, to become perfection, to be ambitious of the highest art of living.”
― Friedrich Nietzsche, The Will to Power

“A full and powerful soul not only copes with painful even terrible losses, deprivations, robberies, insults; it emerges from such hells with a greater fullness and powerfulness, and most essential of all with a new increase in the bliss-Fulness of love.

I believe that he who has divined something of the most basic conditions for his growth in love will understand what Dante meant when he wrote over the gate of his inferno: 'I, too, was created by eternal love.”
― Friedrich Nietzsche, The Will to Power

“Beauty is for the artist something outside all orders of rank, because in beauty opposites are tamed; the highest sign of power, namely power over opposites; moreover, without tension: – that violence is no longer needed: that everything follows, obeys, so easily and so pleasantly – that is what delights the artist’s WILL TO POWER.”
― Friedrich Nietzsche, The Will to Power

“Psychology has falsified love as surrender and altruism, while it is an appropriation or a bestowal following from a super-abundance of personality. Only the most complete persons can love. The depersonalized and objective are the worst lovers.”
― Friedrich Nietzsche, The Will to Power

“It is not enough that you understand in what ignorance man and beast live; you must also have and acquire the will to ignorance. You need to grasp that without this kind of ignorance life itself would be impossible, that it is a condition under which alone the living thing can preserve itself and prosper: a great, firm dome of ignorance must encompass you.”
― Friedrich Nietzsche, The Will to Power

“Another Christian concept, no less crazy, has passed even more deeply into the tissue of modernity: the concept of the 'equality of souls before God.' This concept furnishes the prototype of all theories of equal rights...”
― Friedrich Nietzsche, The Will to Power

“Insight: all evaluation is made from a definite perspective: that of the preservation of the individual, a community, a race, a state, a church, a faith, a culture.--- Because we forget that valuation is always from a perspective, a single individual contains within him a vast confusion of contradictory valuations and consequently of contradictory drives. This is the expression of the diseased condition in man, in contrast to the animals in which all existing instincts answer to quite definite tasks.
This contradictory creature has in his nature, however, a great method of acquiring knowledge: he feels many pros and cons, he raises himself to justice---to comprehension beyond esteeming things good and evil.
The wisest man would be the one richest in contradictions, who has, as it were, antennae for all types of men---as well as his great moments of grand harmony---a rare accident even in us! A sort of planetary motion---”
― Friedrich Nietzsche, The Will to Power

“Terribleness is part of greatness: let us not deceive ourselves.”
― Friedrich Nietzsche, The Will to Power

“It is not the victory of science that distinguishes our nineteenth century, but the victory of scientific method over science.”
― Friedrich Nietzsche, The Will to Power

“It is the richness of a personality, the fullness of it, its power to flow over and to bestow, its instinctive feeling of ease, and its affirmative attitude towards itself, that creates great love and great sacrifices: these passions proceed from strong and godlike personalism as surely as do the desire to be master, to obtrude, and the inner certainty that one has a right to everything.”
― Friedrich Nietzsche, The Will to Power

“The domestication (the culture) of man does not go deep--where it does go deep it at once becomes degeneration (type: the Christian). The 'savage' (or, in moral terms, the evil man) is a return to nature--and in a certain sense his recovery, his cure from 'culture'.”
― Friedrich Nietzsche, The Will to Power

“For some time now, our whole European culture has been moving with a tortured tension that is growing from decade to decade, as toward a catastrophe: restlessly, violently, headlong, like a river that wants to reach the end, that no longer reflects, that is afraid to reflect.”
― Friedrich Nietzsche, The Will to Power

“This is the antinomy: insofar as we believe in morality we pass sentence on existence.”
― Friedrich Nietzsche, The Will to Power

“The levelling of the European man is the great process which cannot be obstructed; it should even be accelerated. The necessity of cleaving gulfs, distance, order of rank, is therefore imperative —not the necessity of retarding this process. This homogenizing species requires justification as soon as it is attained: its justification is that it lies in serving a higher and sovereign race which stands upon the former and can raise itself this task only by doing this. Not merely a race of masters whose sole task is to rule, but a race with its own sphere of life, with an overflow of energy for beauty, bravery, culture, and manners, even for the most abstract thought; a yea-saying race that may grant itself every great luxury —strong enough to have no need of the tyranny of the virtue-imperative, rich enough to have no need of economy or pedantry; beyond good and evil; a hothouse for rare and exceptional plants.”
― Friedrich Nietzsche, The Will to Power