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Daily Inspiration Quote by Friedrich Nietzsche

"When one has a great deal to put into it a day has a hundred pockets"

About this Quote

Time expands for the overfull mind. Nietzsche’s line turns the day into clothing: not a neutral container of hours but a garment with “a hundred pockets,” ready to be stuffed by anyone who arrives with purpose, obsession, or appetite. The image is slyly anti-modern before modernity even finishes installing itself. It rejects the passive complaint that life is short and schedules are tyrants; scarcity, Nietzsche implies, is often a symptom of inner thinness. If you have “a great deal to put into it” - projects, questions, experiments, desires - you don’t experience time as a guillotine. You experience it as elastic storage.

The subtext is characteristically Nietzschean: value is not found but made. A “day” is not meaningful by default; it becomes meaningful when a strong will organizes it, when one imposes form on the formless. The pockets aren’t handed out by fate. They appear for the person capable of filling them. That’s both empowering and accusatory, the way Nietzsche likes it. It flatters the creator and indicts the drifter.

Context matters: Nietzsche is writing in a 19th-century Europe newly disciplined by clocks, factories, and bourgeois respectability, while he himself lives against the grain - itinerant, ill, working in intense bursts. The metaphor reads like a private survival technique elevated into philosophy: if your body limits you, your intensity has to out-invent limitation. “A hundred pockets” isn’t productivity-hustle; it’s a theory of lived abundance, where time feels larger when your inner life is larger.

Quote Details

TopicTime
Source
Unverified source: Human, All-too-Human (Volume 1) (Friedrich Nietzsche, 1878)
Text match: 80.00%   Provider: Cross-Reference
Evidence:
The Length of the Day., When one has much to put into them, a day has a hundred pockets. (Aphorism 529 (Section IX: Man Alone with Himself)). This is the earliest primary-source location I could verify for the quote (as an aphorism in Nietzsche’s Human, All-too-Human). Many modern quote sites par...
Other candidates (1)
The Very Best of Friedrich Nietzsche (David Graham, 2014) compilation95.0%
... When one has a great deal to put into it a day has a hundred pockets . " " There is a rollicking kindness that lo...
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Citation Formats

APA Style (7th ed.)
Nietzsche, Friedrich. (2026, February 11). When one has a great deal to put into it a day has a hundred pockets. FixQuotes. https://fixquotes.com/quotes/when-one-has-a-great-deal-to-put-into-it-a-day-34560/

Chicago Style
Nietzsche, Friedrich. "When one has a great deal to put into it a day has a hundred pockets." FixQuotes. February 11, 2026. https://fixquotes.com/quotes/when-one-has-a-great-deal-to-put-into-it-a-day-34560/.

MLA Style (9th ed.)
"When one has a great deal to put into it a day has a hundred pockets." FixQuotes, 11 Feb. 2026, https://fixquotes.com/quotes/when-one-has-a-great-deal-to-put-into-it-a-day-34560/. Accessed 12 Feb. 2026.

More Quotes by Friedrich Add to List
A Day Has a Hundred Pockets: Nietzsche's Perspective
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Friedrich Nietzsche

Friedrich Nietzsche (October 15, 1844 - August 25, 1900) was a Philosopher from Germany.

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