Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche (15 October 1844 – 25 August 1900) was a German philosopher, cultural critic, poet, philologist, Latin, and Greek scholar whose work has exerted a profound influence on Western philosophy and modern intellectual history. He began his career as a classical philologist before turning to philosophy. He became the youngest ever to hold the Chair of Classical Philology at the University of Basel in 1869, at the age of 24. Nietzsche resigned in 1879 due to health problems that plagued him most of his life, and he completed much of his core writing in the following decade. In 1889, at age 44, he suffered a collapse and a complete loss of his mental faculties. He lived his remaining years in the care of his mother (until her death in 1897), and then with his sister Elisabeth Förster-Nietzsche, and died in 1900.
Nietzsche’s body of writing spanned philosophical polemics, poetry, cultural criticism, and fiction, and drew widely on art, philology, history, religion, and science. His writing displayed a fondness for aphorism and irony, while engaging with a wide range of subjects including morality, aesthetics, tragedy, epistemology, atheism, and consciousness. Some prominent elements of his philosophy include his radical critique of reason and truth in favor of perspectivism; his notion of the Apollonian and Dionysian; his genealogical critique of religion and Christian ethics, and his related theory of master–slave morality; his aesthetic affirmation of existence in response to the “death of God” and the profound crisis of nihilism; and his characterization of the human subject as the expression of competing wills, collectively understood as the will to power. In his later work, he developed influential concepts such as the Übermensch and the doctrine of eternal return, and became increasingly preoccupied with the creative powers of the individual to overcome social, cultural, and moral contexts in pursuit of aesthetic health.
1. There is always some madness in love. But there is also always some reason in madness.
2. We love life, not because we are used to living but because we are used to loving.
3. That which does not kill us makes us stronger.
4. Whoever fights monsters should see to it that in the process he does not become a monster. And if you gaze long enough into an abyss, the abyss will gaze back into you.
5. Love is blind; friendship closes its eyes.
6. There are no facts, only interpretations.
7. 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.
8. The individual has always had to struggle to keep from being overwhelmed by the tribe. If you try it, you will be lonely often, and sometimes frightened. But no price is too high to pay for the privilege of owning yourself.
9. Without music, life would be a mistake.
10. In every real man a child is hidden that wants to play.
11. Those who cannot understand how to put their thoughts on ice should not enter into the heat of debate.
12. One must still have chaos in oneself to be able to give birth to a dancing star.
13. 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.
14. All truly great thoughts are conceived by walking.
15. He who has a why to live can bear almost any how.
16. To live is to suffer, to survive is to find some meaning in the suffering.
17. The essence of all beautiful art, all great art, is gratitude.
18. And we should consider every day lost on which we have not danced at least once. And we should call every truth false which was not accompanied by at least one laugh.
19. When you look into an abyss, the abyss also looks into you.
20. In individuals, insanity is rare; but in groups, parties, nations and epochs, it is the rule.
21. Undeserved praise causes more pangs of conscience later than undeserved blame, but probably only for this reason, that our power of judgment are more completely exposed by being over praised than by being unjustly underestimated.
22. There is an innocence in admiration; it is found in those to whom it has never yet occurred that they, too, might be admired some day.
23. One has to pay dearly for immortality; one has to die several times while one is still alive.
24. A good writer possesses not only his own spirit but also the spirit of his friends.
25. Nothing has been purchased more dearly than the little bit of reason and sense of freedom which now constitutes our pride.
Biography via: Wikipedia.
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