Friedrich Nietzsche Quotes on Life
The affirmation of life — life including its terrors, losses, and sufferings — is the central ethical-aesthetic project of Nietzsche's mature work. Thus Spoke Zarathustra, The Gay Science, and the late notebooks develop the thought-experiment of the eternal recurrence as a test of life-affirmation: would you will this life again, in every detail, infinitely many times? Amor fati — love of fate — names the resulting attitude, and the diagnosis of European nihilism in On the Genealogy of Morality and the late notebooks frames the question of whether modern humanity, having lost its absolute moral coordinates, can survive without sliding into life-denial.
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:
“What does not kill me makes me stronger.”
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Attributed to Friedrich Nietzsche:
“Without music, life would be a mistake.”
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Attributed to Friedrich Nietzsche:
“You must have chaos within you to give birth to a dancing star.”
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Attributed to Friedrich Nietzsche:
“Become who you are.”
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Attributed to Friedrich Nietzsche:
“Hope is the worst of evils, for it prolongs the torment of man.”
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“I now myself live, in every detail, striving for wisdom, while I formerly merely worshipped and idolized the wise.”
Letter to Mathilde Mayer, July 16, 1878, cited in Karl Jaspers , Nietzsche (Baltimore: 1997), p. 46