Books Quotes by Friedrich Nietzsche

The wittiest authors evoke a barely perceptible smile.

— Friedrich Nietzsche

A book full of brilliance imparts some of it even to its opponents.

— Friedrich Nietzsche

The author must keep his mouth shut when his work starts to speak.

— Friedrich Nietzsche

“The wittiest authors raise the very slightest of smiles.”

— Friedrich Nietzsche

It is my ambition to say in ten sentences what others say in a whole book.

— Friedrich Nietzsche

The best author will be the one who is ashamed to become a writer.

— Friedrich Nietzsche

We criticize a man or a book most sharply when we sketch out their ideal.

— Friedrich Nietzsche

What good is a book that does not even transport us beyond all books?

— Friedrich Nietzsche

“The fool interrupts — The writer of this book is no misanthrope; today one pays too dearly for hatred of man.”

— Friedrich Nietzsche

“Books for general reading always smell badly. The odor of common people hangs about them.”

— Friedrich Nietzsche

The worst readers are those who behave like plundering troops: they take away a few things they can use, dirty and confound…

— Friedrich Nietzsche

The so-called paradoxes of an author, to which a reader takes exception, often exist not in the author's book at all, but…

— Friedrich Nietzsche

How can anyone become a thinker unless he spends at least a third of every day away from passions, people, and books?

— Friedrich Nietzsche

“It is a curious thing that God learned Greek when he wished to turn author--and that he did not learn it better.”

— Friedrich Nietzsche

Never to read another book that was born and baptized (with ink) at the same time.

— Friedrich Nietzsche

The value of many men and books rests solely on their faculty for compelling all to seek out the most hidden and…

— Friedrich Nietzsche

In Russia there is an emigration of intelligence: émigrés cross the frontier in order to read and to write good books. But…

— Friedrich Nietzsche

“This book belongs to the most rare of men. Perhaps not one of them is yet alive. It is possible that they…

— Friedrich Nietzsche

The perfect woman perpetrates literature as she perpetrates a small sin: as an experiment, in passing, glancing around to see whether anybody…

— Friedrich Nietzsche

It seems to me that to take a book of mine into his hands is one of the rarest distinctions that anyone…

— Friedrich Nietzsche

“Writers whose thoughts are expressed with clarity and precision are assumed by readers to be superficial. Where the meaning is obscured, then…

— Friedrich Nietzsche

The aphorism, the apothegm, in which I am the first among the Germans to be a master, are the forms of “eternity”;…

— Friedrich Nietzsche

Writers ought to be regarded as wrongdoers who deserve to be acquitted or pardoned only in the rarest cases: that would be…

— Friedrich Nietzsche

We do not belong to those who only get their thought from books, or at the prompting of books, -- it is…

— Friedrich Nietzsche

Books and drafts mean something quite different for different thinkers. One collects in a book the lights he was able to steal…

— Friedrich Nietzsche

A good aphorism is too hard for the tooth of time, and is not worn away by all the centuries, although it…

— Friedrich Nietzsche

“The progress of science has been amazingly rapid in the last decade; but consider the savants, those exhausted hens. They are certainly…

— Friedrich Nietzsche

Against the censurers of brevity. - Something said briefly can be the fruit of much long thought: but the reader who is…

— Friedrich Nietzsche

“The solitary speaks."One receives as a reward for much ennui , ill-humour and boredom, such as a solitude without friends, books, duties…

— Friedrich Nietzsche

“Twofold misjudgement. - The misfortune suffered by clear-minded and easily understood writers is that they are taken for shallow and thus little…

— Friedrich Nietzsche

“Of all that is written, I love only what a person hath written with his blood. Write with blood, and thou wilt…

— Friedrich Nietzsche

“Plato has given to all posterity the model of a new art form, the model of the novel --which may be described…

— Friedrich Nietzsche

“today we read of Don Quixote with a bitter taste in the mouth, it is almost an ordeal, which would make us…

— Friedrich Nietzsche

“Of all that is written, I love only what a person hath written with his blood. Write with blood, and thou wilt…

— Friedrich Nietzsche

“381 On the question of being understandable.— One does not only wish to be understood when one writes; one wishes just as…

— Friedrich Nietzsche

“A good book is made better by good readers and clearer by good opponents.”

— Friedrich Nietzsche

A book is made better by good readers and clearer by good opponents.

— Friedrich Nietzsche

It is neither the best nor the worst things in a book that defy translation.

— Friedrich Nietzsche

“This book is intended for calm readers.”

— Friedrich Nietzsche

“He who knows the reader, does nothing for the reader.”

— Friedrich Nietzsche