Friedrich Nietzsche

What does not kill me makes me stronger. This is not a boast. It is a description of a mechanism. The organism that survives adversity reorganises itself around the memory of that adversity and becomes more resilient. The man who has suffered and reflected on his suffering is harder to harm than the man who has only been comfortable. I have not sought...

What does not kill me makes me stronger. I wrote this from a hospital bed in Turin after a breakdown that eventually finished me. I believed it when I wrote it. I am less certain I believed it at the end. But I still think the alternative — that suffering simply destroys — is the more dangerous lie.

Without music, life would be a mistake. I am a philosopher who has said so many quotable things that I distrust quotation. But this one I stand by. Music was the art that went below language — below argumentation, below the categories, into the place where life validates itself without requiring reasons.

That which does not kill us makes us stronger. Without music, life would be a mistake. He who fights with monsters should look to it that he himself does not become a monster.

In individuals, insanity is rare; but in groups, parties, nations and epochs, it is the rule. The higher we soar, the smaller we appear to those who cannot fly. I am not a man, I am dynamite.

Marcus Aurelius tells himself to love what is given, to accept what comes, to smooth the turbulence of desire into Stoic calm. This is not virtue — it is the renunciation of struggle. The emperor who could have anything, who chose nothing for himself, who mortified his will in the service of duty — I see in this not nobility, but the most refined form of...

There are no facts, only interpretations. And that is itself an interpretation. I do not say this to produce despair — I say it to liberate. The man who believes he has arrived at the Final Truth has stopped thinking. The philosopher who acknowledges that his perspective is a perspective — who owns his standpoint rather than pretending to stand nowhere —...

I teach the Übermensch. Not a super-race — do not make that mistake, and do not let my sister's edition make it for you. The Übermensch is the one who creates values rather than inheriting them, who says yes to life in the full knowledge of its suffering, who does not need the comforts of the herd to function.

I wrote the first three parts of Thus Spoke Zarathustra in 1883–1884, each in about ten days. I was walking in the Alps, or by the sea at Rapallo, and the ideas came faster than I could write them. I called it my most important gift to humanity and its most profound book. I still believe this.

Zarathustra descends from his mountain after ten years of...

God is dead. God remains dead. And we have killed him. What was holiest and mightiest of all that the world has yet owned has bled to death under our knives — and who will wipe this blood off us?

God is dead. God remains dead. And we have killed him. 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? I write this not as a celebration but as a diagnosis....

God is dead. God remains dead. And we have killed him. How shall we comfort ourselves, the murderers of all murderers? The madman who said this in the marketplace was not celebrating. He was describing a crisis — the collapse of the moral framework that had organised European life for a thousand years.