Friedrich Nietzsche 1844 – 1900
Friedrich Nietzsche (1844 – 1900) was a German philosopher of the Modern era, associated with Existentialism and Continental Philosophy.
Friedrich Nietzsche was a German philosopher, classical philologist, and cultural critic. He challenged the foundations of Christianity and traditional morality, declaring that God is dead and proposing a revaluation of values. His works include Thus Spoke Zarathustra, Beyond Good and Evil, and On the Genealogy of Morality. He developed concepts including the will to power, the eternal recurrence, and the ubermensch. His writing decisively influenced existentialism, postmodernism, and twentieth-century literature.
Friedrich Nietzsche was born in 1844 in the Prussian village of Röcken, the son of a Lutheran pastor. A precocious classical philologist, he became a professor at the University of Basel at twenty-four, but ill health forced his retirement at thirty-five. The next decade — spent largely in Swiss and Italian boarding houses — produced the works that made his name.
Nietzsche's mature philosophy is a sustained diagnostic critique of European morality, religion, and metaphysics. The death of God, the genealogy of slave morality, the will to power, the eternal recurrence, and the figure of the Übermensch are all his coinages or his distinctive elaborations. His method is genealogical: tracing the historical formation of values to show that what presents itself as universal reason is in fact the product of specific psychological and social conditions. He wrote in aphorisms, essays, and the dramatic prose-poem Thus Spoke Zarathustra, deliberately resisting the systematic philosophical treatise.
In January 1889 Nietzsche collapsed in a Turin street and never wrote philosophy again; he died eleven years later in his sister Elisabeth's care. The Nazi appropriation of his work, mediated by Elisabeth's selective editing, distorted his reception for decades. Walter Kaufmann's postwar work and a generation of careful scholars have since recovered Nietzsche's actual project, and his influence on twentieth-century continental philosophy — Heidegger, Foucault, Deleuze — is matched by no other modern figure.
Key facts
- Nationality
- German
- Era
- Modern
- Movements
- Existentialism, Continental Philosophy
Selected quotes
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Attributed to Friedrich Nietzsche:
“He who has a why to live for can bear with almost any how.”
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Attributed to Friedrich Nietzsche:
“God is dead. God remains dead. And we have killed him.”
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Attributed to Friedrich Nietzsche:
“What does not kill me makes me stronger.”
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Attributed to Friedrich Nietzsche:
“He who fights with monsters should look to it that he himself does not become a monster. And when you gaze long into an abyss, the abyss also gazes into you.”
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Attributed to Friedrich Nietzsche:
“Without music, life would be a mistake.”
Friedrich Nietzsche by topic
Friedrich Nietzsche vs other philosophers
- Arthur Schopenhauer vs Friedrich Nietzsche
- Buddha vs Friedrich Nietzsche
- Friedrich Nietzsche vs Fyodor Dostoevsky
- Friedrich Nietzsche vs Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel
- Friedrich Nietzsche vs Immanuel Kant
- Friedrich Nietzsche vs Jean-Paul Sartre
- Friedrich Nietzsche vs Karl Marx
- Friedrich Nietzsche vs Plato
- Friedrich Nietzsche vs Soren Kierkegaard
Three-way comparisons including Friedrich Nietzsche
Frequently asked about Friedrich Nietzsche
- When did Friedrich Nietzsche live?
- Friedrich Nietzsche was born in 1844 and died in 1900.
- Where was Friedrich Nietzsche from?
- Friedrich Nietzsche was a German philosopher of the Modern era.
- What philosophical movements is Friedrich Nietzsche associated with?
- Friedrich Nietzsche was associated with Existentialism and Continental Philosophy.
- What was Friedrich Nietzsche known for?
- Friedrich Nietzsche was a German philosopher, classical philologist, and cultural critic.
- How many quotes are attributed to Friedrich Nietzsche?
- There are 21 attributed quotations from Friedrich Nietzsche in the 1001Philosophers collection, organized by topic.
Quotes that are not actually from Friedrich Nietzsche
These lines are widely circulated as Friedrich Nietzsche, but they do not appear in Friedrich Nietzsche's works. Each entry below identifies the actual source.
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“And those who were seen dancing were thought to be insane by those who could not hear the music.”
Although evocative of Nietzsche's recurring use of dance and music as metaphors for life-affirmation, this exact line does not appear in any of his published or notebook works. It is a 20th-century aphorism with no identified original author.
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“Sometimes people don't want to hear the truth because they don't want their illusions destroyed.”
This sentence is widely circulated online as Nietzsche but does not appear in any of his published or notebook works. The actual author has not been identified.
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“A moral system valid for all is basically immoral.”
This quote is commonly attributed to philosophers but its actual source is uncertain or unverified in the standard reference works. Wikiquote's note on this attribution: Generally attributed to Nietzsche, this is a quotation from Curtis Cate's Friedrich Nietzsche: A Biography (2003) and is the author's interpretation of Nietzsche's Aphorism 221 ( Beyond Good and Evil )
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“Those who dance appear insane to those who cannot hear the music.”
This quote is commonly attributed to philosophers but its actual source is uncertain or unverified in the standard reference works. Wikiquote's note on this attribution: First recorded appearance: Germaine de Staël 's On Germany (1813). ". . . sometimes even in the habitual course of life, the reality of this world disappears all at once, and we feel ourselves in the middle of its interests as we should at a ball, where we did not hear the music; the dancing that we
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“All I need is a sheet of paper and something to write with, and then I can turn the world upside down.”
This quote is commonly attributed to philosophers but its actual source is uncertain or unverified in the standard reference works. Wikiquote's note on this attribution: Commonly attributed to Nietzsche, but is most likely from Cornelia Funke’s Inkheart trilogy.
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“If you crush a cockroach, you're a hero. If you crush a beautiful butterfly, you're a villain. Morals have aesthetic criteria.”
This quote is commonly attributed to philosophers but its actual source is uncertain or unverified in the standard reference works. Wikiquote's note on this attribution: Sometimes attributed to Nietzsche , the quote appears in none of his works, the likely origin is a 2012 tweet , where it was not attributed to Nietzsche. There are no earlier examples on reddit and also none on google books.
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“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.”
This quote is commonly attributed to philosophers but its actual source is uncertain or unverified in the standard reference works. Wikiquote's note on this attribution: Often misattributed to Nietzsche, and was actually said by Rudyard Kipling during a 1935 interview that was published in Reader's Digest in 1959.
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“They muddy the waters to make them look deep.”
This quote is commonly attributed to philosophers but its actual source is uncertain or unverified in the standard reference works. Wikiquote's note on this attribution: A google books search with dates restricted to 1800-2005 finds only three sources, the earliest one being Spirituality for the Skeptic: The Thoughtful Love of Life by Robert C. Solomon (2002), which attributes it to Nietzsche but gives no specific source.
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“Strong people are easy to love but difficult to live with.”
This sentiment does not appear in any of Nietzsche's published works or in his Nachlass, despite frequent attribution to him on social media. The phrasing is twentieth- or twenty-first-century English and the original source has not been identified. Nietzsche scholars including Walter Kaufmann and Bernard Reginster have catalogued spurious Nietzsche quotes; this is among them.
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“Rather than cope with the unbearable loneliness of their condition men will continue to seek their shattered God, and for His sake they will love the very serpents that dwell among His ruins.”
As quoted by J. P. Stern in an interview conducted by Bryan Magee in The Great Philosophers : A History of Western Philosophy (1987) (Disputed.)
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“You know these things as thoughts, but your thoughts are not your experiences, they are an echo and after-effect of your experiences: as when your room trembles when a carriage goes past. I however am sitting in the carriage, and often I am the carriage itself.”
Attributed across social media to TSZ. Is actually quoted in TSZ, Penguin Classics, Reg Hollingdale translation, in the introduction pg 12. Attributed to 'posthumously produced notes' [Nachlass?] Hollingdale continues.' In a man who thinks like this, the dichotomy between thinking and feeling, intellect and passion, has really disappeared. He feels his thoughts. He can fall in love with an idea. An idea can make him ill.' (Disputed.)
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“Nobody is more inferior than those who insist on being equal.”
Often attributed to Nietzsche especially on social media, but no citation is ever given, and the only source I can find that states Nietzche said this was a mock interview by Richard Marshall. (Disputed.)
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“All things are subject to interpretation; whichever interpretation prevails at a given time is a function of power and not the truth.”
Often attributed to Nietzsche especially on social media, but no citation is ever given. Dr Zuleyka Zevallos explains there is a similar quote on "Notes" (1888), translated in The Portable Nietzsche (edited by Walter Kaufmann) but it doesn't mentions power: https://socialscienceinsights.com/2015/01/20/all-things-are-subject-to-interpretation-whichever-interpretation-prevails-at-a-given-time-is-a-function-of-power/ (Disputed.)