Friedrich Nietzsche Quotes

In praising science, it does not follow that we must adopt the very poor philosophies which scientific men have constructed. In philosophy they have much more to learn than to teach.

The grandeur of a philosophy does not certify its truth.

I credit that eight years of grammar school with nourishing me in a direction where I could trust myself and trust my instincts. They gave me the tools to reject my faith. They taught me to question and think for myself and to believe in my instincts to such an extent that I just said, "This is a wonderful fairy tale they have going here, but it's not for me."

Philosophy, as the modern world knows it, is only intellectual club-swinging.

Philosophy's position with regard to science, which at one time could be designated with the name "theory of knowledge," has been undermined by the movement of philosophical thought itself. Philosophy was dislodged from this position by philosophy.

Do you come to a philosopher as to a cunning man, to learn something by magic or witchcraft, beyond what can be known by common prudence and discretion?

It was while teaching philosophy that I saw how easily one can say ... what one wants to say. ... In fact, I became particularly aware if the dangers of speculation ... It's so much easier than digging out the facts. You sit in your office and build a system. But with my training in biology, I felt this kind of undertaking precarious.

I am only a philosopher, and there is only one thing that a philosopher can be relied on to do, and that is, to contradict other philosophers.

Every philosophical review ought to be a philosophy of reviews at the same time.

Philosophy is a necessary activity because we, all of us, take a great number of things for granted, and many of these assumptions are of a philosophical character; we act on them in private life, in politics, in our work, and in every other sphere of our lives -- but while some of these assumptions are no doubt true, it is likely, that more are false and some are harmful. So the critical examination of our presuppositions -- which is a philosophical activity -- is morally as well as intellectually important.

If you're studying Geology, which is all facts, as soon as you get out of school you forget it all, but Philosophy you remember just enough to screw you up for the rest of your life.

Philosophy is at once the most sublime and the most trivial of human pursuits. It works in the minutest crannies and it opens outthe widest vistas. It 'bakes no bread', as has been said, but it can inspire our souls with courage.

This sort of thing has got to be stopped. Bad philosophers are like slum landlords. It's my job to put them out of business.

Educated fools; from uneducated schools.

Nietzsche said that the earth has been a madhouse long enough. Without contradicting him we might perhaps soften the expression, and say that philosophy has been long enough an asylum for enthusiasts.

Cynicism was a school in Greece - the Cynics. Diogenes is a famous Cynic. There was a strong belief in nihilism and narcissism. Those are old schools too.

The philosopher forms his principles on an infinity of particular observations. He does not confuse truth with plausibility, he takes for truth what is true, for false what is false, for doubtful what is doubtful, and probable what is probable. The philosophical spirit is thus a spirit of observation and accuracy.

The only purpose of education is to teach a student how to live his life-by developing his mind and equipping him to deal with reality. The training he needs is theoretical, i.e., conceptual. He has to be taught to think, to understand, to integrate, to prove. He has to be taught the essentials of the knowledge discovered in the past-and he has to be equipped to acquire further knowledge by his own effort.

In philosophy it is always good to put a question instead of an answer to a question. For an answer to the philosophical question may easily be unfair; disposing of it by means of another question is not.

Literary critics, like a herd of cows or a school of fish, always face in the same direction, obeying that love for unity that every critic requires.

Pythagoras, Locke, Socrates - but pages might be filled up, as vainly as before, with the sad usage of all sorts of sages, who in his life-time, each was deemed a bore! The loftiest minds outrun their tardy ages.

A main cause of philosophical disease-an unbalanced diet: one nourishes one's thinking with only one kind of example.

Chronological snobbery is the uncritical acceptance of the intellectual climate common to our own age and the assumption that whatever has gone out of date is on that account discredited. You must find why it went out of date. Was it ever refuted (and if so by whom, where, and how conclusively), or did it merely die away as fashions do? If the latter, this tells us nothing about its truth or falsehood.

Schools teach ignorance.

But in philosophy, sometimes the baby ought to go out with the bath water.