Browse 9 quotations connecting Friedrich Nietzsche with Attitude, with meanings, source notes and related themes.
Sources represented here include Human, All-Too-Human, The Joyful Wisdom, Thus Spake Zarathustra.
“Everything has evolved; there are no eternal facts, as there are likewise no absolute truths.”
Nietzsche argues for historical philosophizing: concepts and human arrangements should be examined as things that developed rather than treated as timeless givens.
Human, All-Too-Human, Part I, aphorism 2; Helen Zimmern translation.
“The unreasonableness of a thing is no argument against its existence, but rather a condition thereof.”
The aphorism separates the fact that something exists from the expectation that existence must be rational or well ordered.
Human, All-Too-Human, Part I, aphorism 515, “From Experience”; Helen Zimmern translation.
“Whoever thinks much is unsuitable for a party-man; his thinking leads him too quickly beyond the party.”
The aphorism associates sustained thought with a tendency to outgrow fixed group positions, emphasizing intellectual independence rather than permanent allegiance.
Human, All-Too-Human, Part I, aphorism 579, “Unsuitable For a Party-man”; Helen Zimmern translation.
“Partial knowledge is more triumphant than complete knowledge; it takes things to be simpler than they are.”
The warning is that simplified partial explanations can spread more easily precisely because they remove the complications that fuller understanding would have to preserve.
Human, All-Too-Human, Part I, aphorism 578, “Partial Knowledge”; Helen Zimmern translation; sentence shortened before the final clause about popularity and persuasion.
“A man far oftener appears to have a decided character from persistently following his temperament than from persistently following his principles.”
Nietzsche distinguishes the appearance of consistency from principled consistency, suggesting repeated temperament can look like deliberate moral character.
Human, All-Too-Human, Part I, aphorism 485, “Decided Character”; Helen Zimmern translation.
“We hear only the questions to which we are capable of finding an answer.”
The aphorism suggests that inquiry is limited by the conceptual capacities of the person asking, making intellectual growth partly a matter of becoming able to formulate and recognize better questions.
The Joyful Wisdom, aphorism 196; Thomas Common translation.
“What dost thou Believe in?—In this: That the weights of all things must be determined anew.”
The aphorism calls for a revaluation of inherited measures rather than accepting established rankings of importance as final.
The Joyful Wisdom, aphorism 269; Thomas Common translation.
“Originality.—What is originality? To see something which has no name as yet, and hence cannot be mentioned although it stares us all in the face.”
Originality is framed as noticing and naming what others already encounter but have not yet conceptualized clearly.
The Joyful Wisdom, aphorism 261, “Originality”; Thomas Common translation.
“He who climbeth on the highest mountains, laugheth at all tragic plays and tragic realities.”
Distance and a wider perspective can change the scale of what once seemed overwhelming, even when the underlying difficulty has not vanished.
Thus Spake Zarathustra, “Reading and Writing,” Thomas Common translation.
