He who fights with monsters might take care lest he thereby become a monster. And when you gaze long into an abyss the abyss also gazes into you.
Use itGS4/GS2: those fighting terror or crime must not adopt illegal means; ends vs means.
Quotes / Thinkers / Friedrich Nietzsche
Thinker · 11 quotes
Friedrich Nietzsche quotes for UPSC
11 sourced quotes by Friedrich Nietzsche on resilience & perseverance, truth & wisdom, mind & self-awareness, ethics & morality, education & knowledge, with a use case for each in GS4, Essay and interviews.
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The surest way to corrupt a youth is to instruct him to hold in higher esteem those who think alike than those who think differently.
Use itEssay on echo chambers and polarisation: teaching youth to value only like-minded people corrupts them.
Lessing, the most honest of theoretical men, dared to say that he took greater delight in the quest for truth than in the truth itself.
Use itEssay on learning: the search for truth matters as much as the truth itself.
Here the ways of men part: if you wish to strive for peace of soul and pleasure, then believe; if you wish to be a devotee of truth, then inquire.
— Friedrich NietzscheLetter to Elisabeth Nietzsche, Bonn, 1865-06-11, quoted as epigraph in Walter Kaufmann, The Faith of a Heretic (1961)
Use itEssay on faith vs reason: comfort comes from belief, truth from inquiry.
Today as always, men fall into two groups: slaves and free men. Whoever does not have two-thirds of his day for himself, is a slave, whatever he may be: a statesman, a businessman, an official, or a scholar.
— Friedrich NietzscheAphorism 283, tr. Marion Faber and Stephen Lehmann
Use itEssay on work-life balance: without time for oneself, one is enslaved whatever the status.
What does not kill me, makes me stronger.
Use itLife: after a failed attempt, use the setback to grow stronger.
All becoming and growing—all that guarantees a future—involves pain.
— Friedrich Nietzsche“What I owe to the ancients,” § 10.4
Use itEssay on change and reform: all growth carries pain; transitions demand short-term costs.
Whence come the highest mountains? I once asked. Then I learned that they came out of the sea. The evidence is written in their rocks and in the walls of their peaks. It is out of the deepest depth that the highest must come to its height.
Use itLife/Interview: greatest heights rise from deepest struggles; reframe failures as foundations.
If we have our own why in life, we shall get along with almost any how.
Use itLife/Interview: a clear purpose ('why') carries you through any hardship ('how').
What is great in man is that he is a bridge and not a goal.
— Friedrich NietzschePrologue, § 4, tr. Thomas Common
Use itEssay on human potential: humans are always in transition, a bridge to something greater.
Madness is something rare in individuals — but in groups, parties, peoples, epochs it is the rule.
— Friedrich NietzscheChapter IV, aphorism 156, tr. R. J. Hollingdale
Use itEssay on mob mentality and communalism: irrationality is rare in individuals, common in crowds.