Irvin D. Yalom Quotes

Friedrich Nietzsche--the prophet of restless young men everywhere

Nietzsche's ideas and plans: for example, the idea of giving up the whole wretched academic world to form a secular monastic community.

This world is the will to power and nothing besides!

You would not enjoy Nietzsche, sir. He is fundamentally unsound.

I should like to meet a philosopher like Nietzsche somewhere in a train or a steamer, and to spend the whole night talking to him. I consider his philosophy won't last long, however. It's more showy than convincing.

I'm a Nietzschean scholar. I've read an immense amount about nihilism and existentialism.

I like Nietzsche. I quote him in many of my books. He was born 100 years before me.

Why live? Life was its own answer. Life was the propagation of more life and the living of as good a life as possible.

Man is a rope, tied between beast and overman — a rope over an abyss.

When life does not find a singer to sing her heart she produces a philosopher to speak her mind.

The Gay Science, section 108

Man is a rope stretched between the animal and the Superman-a rope over an abyss. A dangerous crossing, a dangerous wayfaring, a dangerous looking-back, a dangerous trembling and halting

Nietzsche says that we will live the same life, over and over again. God - I'll have to sit through the Ice Capades again.

Nietzche . . . he was a confirmed Life Force worshipper. It was he who raked up the Superman, who is as old as Prometheus; and the 20th century will run after this newest of the old crazes when it gets tired of the world, the flesh, and your humble servant.

[Zarathustra] never abandoned the watchword of not having any end, not serving a cause, because, as he knew, causes pluck off the wings we fly with.

[Nietzsche's doctrine of the eternal return] is what makes moments caught up in the immanence of return suddenly appear as ends. In every other system, don't forget, these moments are viewed as means: Every moral system proclaims that "each moment of life ought to be motivated." Return unmotivates the moment and frees life of ends.

If you put into one room everyone who considered themselves a Nietzschean, there would be a bloodbath.

I read a book lately by Nietzsche and he says religion is just to dull the senses of the people. I agree.

Nietzsche was personally more philosophical than his philosophy. His talk about power, harshness, and superb immorality was the hobby of a harmless young scholar and constitutional invalid.

What, if some day or night a demon were to steal after you into your loneliest loneliness and say to you: 'This life as you now live it and have lived it, you will have to live once more and innumerable times more' ... Would you not throw yourself down and gnash your teeth and curse the demon who spoke thus? Or have you once experienced a tremendous moment when you would have answered him: 'You are a god and never have I heard anything more divine.

They didn't teach Nietzsche in the philosophy department at Harvard; philosophy there was strictly analytical stuff and the poetic ramblings of Nietzsche did not belong. And see - you are teaching it in a literature class - so they must have been right.

[Friedrich] Nietzsche said something marvellous, he said "Madness is not a consequence of uncertainty but of certainty", and this is fanaticism.

Nietzsche ... has caused [philosophers] so much confusion.

Nietzsche's my favorite. He's just insane.

God is dead, but considering the state the species man is in, there will perhaps be caves, for ages yet, in which his shadow will be shown.