50 Friedrich Nietzsche Quotes About Love
What else is love?
Friedrich Nietzsche was a German philosopher who wrote about good and evil, along with introducing the concept of "super-man" — also known as Übermensch or "the superior man" — to us all. Nietzsche was born in October of 1844 in Röcken, Germany. Son to a Lutheran father, and he lived in a home with his mother, grandmother, two aunts, and his younger sister, Elisabeth.
The vast majority of people associate Nietzsche's philosophies with the work of Sigmund Freud and Karl Marx, largely because much of his work likely influenced theirs as well. It's said that Friedrich Nietzsche would "just talk to talk" without having any interest in knowing the truth, however, many still believed that he was one of the most intelligent people of his time.
When Nietzsche was a mere 24-years-old, he became a chairperson in the classical philology department at Basel, and in 1876 he took a leave of absence from Basel due to his deteriorating health.
Come 1879, Neitzche took to writing books, and published about a book per year. Unfortunately, Nietzsche's health deteriorated so quickly that at one point he collapsed in the streets of Turin. The fall is thought to have caused him to suffer from dementia — and after another breakdown in the 1880s, Nietzsche was forced to live with his mother and then his sister. Ultimately, he died in 1900 of a stroke and pneumonia.
During his life, Nietzsche believed in a certain set of values, which included "power and life," "affirmation," "honesty," "art and artistry," "individuality, autonomy, and freedom of spirit," and "pluralism." While I won't go into depth about all of them, a full critique of his philosophies can be found on the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy website.
Friedrich Nietzche was known for his provocative sayings and radical ideals, so take a look below at some of the best Friedrich Nietzsche quotes about love and marriage.
1. "It's not a lack of love, but a lack of friendship that makes unhappy marriages."
2. "We love life, not because we are used to living but because we are used to loving."
3. "Love is blind; friendship closes its eyes."
4. "The demand to be loved is the greatest of all arrogant presumptions."
5. "Love is not consolation. It is light."
6. "The apprentice and the master love the master in different ways."
7. "In revenge and love, a woman is more barbarous than man."
8. "Marriage: that I call the will of the two to create the one who is more than those who created it."
9. "Of all that is written, I love only what a person has written with his blood."
10. "When marrying, ask yourself this question: Do you believe that you will be able to converse well with this person into your old age? Everything else in marriage is transitory."
11. "What else is love but understanding and rejoicing in the fact that another person lives acts and experiences otherwise than we do?"
12. "The man of knowledge must be able not only to love his enemies but also to hate his friends."
13. "A pair of powerful spectacles has sometimes sufficed to cure a person in love."
14. "Whatever we did for love always occurs beyond good and evil."
15. "Not necessity, not desire - no, the love of power is the demon of men. Let them have everything – health, food, a place to live, entertainment – they are and remain unhappy and low-spirited: for the demon waits and waits and will be satisfied.”
16. "This is the hardest of all: to close the open hand out of love, and keep modest as a giver."
17. "It is not when the truth is dirty, but when it is shallow, the lover of knowledge is reluctant to step into its waters."
18. "On the mountains of truth you can never climb in vain: either you will reach a point higher up today, or you will be training your powers so that you will be able to climb higher tomorrow.”
19. "Young people love what is interesting and odd, no matter how true or false it is. More mature minds love what is interesting and odd about truth. Fully mature intellects, finally, love truth, even when it appears plain and simple, boring to the ordinary person; for they have noticed that truth tends to reveal its highest wisdom in the guise of simplicity.”
20. "One can promise actions, but not feelings, for the latter, are involuntary. He who promises to love forever or hate forever or be forever faithful to someone is promising something that is not in his power."
21. "There is not enough love and goodness in the world to permit giving any of it away to imaginary beings."
22. "Out of damp and gloomy days, out of solitude, out of loveless words directed at us, conclusions grow up in us like fungus: one morning they are there, we know not how, and they gaze upon us, morose and gray. Woe to the thinker who is not the gardener but only the soil of the plants that grow in him."
23. "I love those who do not know how to live for today."
24. "Sensuality often makes love grow too quickly so that the root remains weak and is easy to pull out."
25. "One must learn to love oneself with a wholesome and healthy love so that one can bear to be with oneself and need not roam."
26. "Love is a state in which a man sees things most decidedly as they are not."
27. "The spiritualization of sensuality is called love: it is a great triumph over Christianity."
28. "Untroubled, scornful, outrageous - that is how wisdom wants us to be: she is a woman and never loves anyone but a warrior."
29. "Today I love myself as I love my god: who could charge me with a sin today? I know only sins against my god; but who knows my god?
30. "The man loves danger and sport. That is why he loves women, the most dangerous of sports."
31. "One must learn to be a sponge if one wants to be loved by hearts that overflow."
32. "It is true love it is in the soul that envelops the body."
33. "Marriage marks the end of many short follies - being one long stupidity."
34. "What do I care about the purring of one who cannot love, like the cat?"
35. "You know these things as thoughts, but your thoughts are not your experiences, they are an echo and after-effect of your experiences: as when your room trembles when a carriage goes past. I, however, am sitting in the carriage, and often I am the carriage itself. In a man who thinks like this, the dichotomy between thinking and feeling, intellect and passion, has really disappeared. He feels his thoughts. He can fall in love with an idea. An idea can make him ill."
36. "Love matches, so-called, have an illusion for their father and need for their mother."
37. "The enormous expectation of having to do with love and the shame involved in this expectation degrade all a woman's perspectives from the start."
38. "I feel all those human beings to be pernicious who can no longer oppose what they love: they thereby ruin the best things and people."
39. "Love brings to light the lofty and hidden characteristics of the lover - what is rare and exceptional in him: to that extent it can easily be deceptive with respect to what is normal in him."
40. "Loving and perishing: it's been a rhyme all these eternities. The will to love: that is, also being willing to die."
41. "What is that you love in others?"
42. "Just as soon as we notice that someone has to force himself to pay attention when dealing and talking with us, we have a valid demonstration that he does not love or us that he does not love us anymore."
43. "Out of love, women become entirely what is is that they are in the imaginations of the men who love them."
44. "To discover he is loved in return ought really to disenchant the lover with the beloved."
45. "I devote myself to what I love the most, and for this very reason I hesitate to designate with lofty words: I do not want to risk believing that it is a sublime compulsion, a law, which I obey: I love what I love the most too much to wish to appear to it as one compelled."
46. "In every form of womanly love, something of motherly love also comes to light."
47. "Love forgives the lover even his lust."
48. "Sometimes it just takes stronger eyeglasses to cure those who are in love - and someone with the ability to imagine a face or a figure twenty years older might perhaps pass through life quite undisturbed."
49. "Marriages that are made out of love (so-called "love matches") have an error as their father and misery (necessity) as their mother."
50. "There is always some madness in love. But there is also always some reason in madness."
Liz Abere is a writer who talks about food, love, and mental health.