Friedrich Nietzsche: Trending quotes (page 9)

“Greek tragedy met her death in a different way from all the older sister arts: she died tragically by her own hand, after irresolvable conflicts, while the others died happy and peaceful at an advanced age. If a painless death, leaving behind beautiful progeny, is the sign of a happy natural state, then the endings of the other arts show us the example of just such a happy natural state: they sink slowly, and with their dying eyes they behold their fairer offspring, who lift up their heads in bold impatience. The death of Greek tragedy, on the other hand, left a great void whose effects were felt profoundly, far and wide; as once Greek sailors in Tiberius' time heard the distressing cry 'the god Pan is dead' issuing from a lonely island, now, throughout the Hellenic world, this cry resounded like an agonized lament: 'Tragedy is dead! Poetry itself died with it! Away, away with you, puny, stunted imitators! Away with you to Hades, and eat your fill of the old masters' crumbs!”

Friedrich Nietzsche book The Birth of Tragedy

Mit dem Tode der griechischen Tragödie dagegen entstand eine ungeheure, überall tief empfundene Leere; wie einmal griechische Schiffer zu Zeiten des Tiberius an einem einsamen Eiland den erschütternden Schrei hörten "der grosse Pan ist todt": so klang es jetzt wie ein schmerzlicher Klageton durch die hellenische Welt: "die Tragödie ist todt! Die Poesie selbst ist mit ihr verloren gegangen! Fort, fort mit euch verkümmerten, abgemagerten Epigonen! Fort in den Hades, damit ihr euch dort an den Brosamen der vormaligen Meister einmal satt essen könnt!"
Source: The Birth of Tragedy (1872), p. 54

Death , God , Age , World

“My task is to throw a light on that which we must always love and revere, of which no subsequent knowledge can rob us: man in his greatness.”

Friedrich Nietzsche book Philosophy in the Tragic Age of the Greeks

Philosophy in the Tragic Age of the Greeks (posthumous)

Love , Knowledge , Light

“As a genius of construction man raises himself far above the bee in the following way: whereas the bee builds with wax that he gathers from nature, man builds with the far more delicate conceptual material which he first has to manufacture from himself.”

Friedrich Nietzsche

On Truth and Lie in an Extra-Moral Sense (1873)

Way , Nature , Bee

“Nihilist and Christian. They rhyme, and do not merely rhyme…”

Friedrich Nietzsche book The Antichrist

Nihilist und Christ: das reimt sich, das reimt sich nicht bloss.
Sec. 58, as translated by R. J. Hollingdale. In German these words do rhyme; variant translation: Nihilist and Christian. They rhyme, and they do indeed do more than just rhyme.
The Antichrist (1888)

“We are unknown to ourselves, we men of knowledge-and with good reason. We have never sought ourselves- how could it happen that we should ever find ourselves?”

Friedrich Nietzsche book On the Genealogy of Morality

Preface, Section 1
On the Genealogy of Morality (1887)

Men , Knowledge

“All instincts that do not discharge themselves outwardly turn inward — this is what I call the internalization of man: thus it was that man first developed what was later called his "soul."”

Friedrich Nietzsche book On the Genealogy of Morality

Essay 2, Section 16
On the Genealogy of Morality (1887)

Soul

“I am a pure-blooded Polish nobleman, without a single drop of bad blood, certainly not German blood. When I look for my diametric opposite, an immeasurably shabby instinct, I always think of my mother and sister, — it would blaspheme my divinity to think I am related to this sort of canaille. The way my mother and sister treat me to this very day is a source of unspeakable horror; a real time bomb is at work here, which can tell with unerring certainty the exact moment I can be hurt — in my highest moments, … because at that point I do not have the strength to resist poison worms …”

Friedrich Nietzsche book Ecce homo

"Why I Am So Wise", 3, as translated in The Anti-Christ, Ecce Homo, Twilight of the Idols, and Other Writings (2005) edited by Aaron Ridley and Judith Norman, p. 77
Ecce Homo (1888)

Way , Thinking , Sister , Time

“Now, when suffering is always the first of the arguments marshalled against life, as its most questionable feature, it is salutary to remember the times when people made the opposite assessment, because they could not do without making people suffer and saw first-rate magic in it, a veritable seductive lure to life. Perhaps pain - I say this to comfort the squeamish - did not hurt as much then as it does now; at least, a doctor would be justified in assuming this, if he had treated a Negro (taken as a representative for primeval man) for serious internal inflammations which would drive the European with the stoutest constitution to distraction; - they do not do that to Negroes. (The curve of human capacity for pain actually does seem to sink dramatically and almost precipitously beyond the first ten thousand or ten million of the cultural elite; and for myself, I do not doubt that in comparison with one night of pain endured by a single, hysterical blue stocking, the total suffering of all the animals who have been interrogated by the knife in scientific research is as nothing.)”

Friedrich Nietzsche book On the Genealogy of Morality

Essay 2, Section 7
On the Genealogy of Morality (1887)

Life , Pain , People , Question

“This independence is glorified as "academic freedom," … except that in the background, a discreet distance away, stands the state watching with a certain supervisory look on its face, making sure to remind everybody from time to time that it is the aim, the purpose, the essence of this whole strange process.”

Friedrich Nietzsche

Diese doppelte Selbständigkeit preist man mit Hochgefühl als ›akademische Freiheit‹: ... nur daß hinter beiden Gruppen in bescheidener Entfernung der Staat mit einer gewissen gespannten Aufsehermiene steht, um von Zeit zu Zeit daran zu erinnern, daß er Zweck, Ziel und Inbegriff der sonderbaren Sprech- und Hörprozedur sei.
Anti-Education (1872)

Freedom , Time

“That faith makes blessed under certain circumstances, that blessedness does not make of a fixed idea a true idea, that faith moves no mountains but puts mountains where there are none: a quick walk through a madhouse enlightens one sufficiently about this.”

Friedrich Nietzsche book The Antichrist

Sec. 51; often paraphrased as: "A casual stroll through the lunatic asylum shows that faith does not prove anything".
The Antichrist (1888)

Faith , Mountain , Idea

“New Domestic Animals. I want to have my lion and my eagle about me, that I may always have hints and premonitions concerning the amount of my strength or weakness. Must I look down on them today, and be afraid of them? And will the hour come once more when they will look up to me, and tremble?”

Friedrich Nietzsche

Sec. 250
The Gay Science (1882)

Animals

“A married philosopher belongs in comedy, that is my proposition-and as for that exception, Socrates-the malicious Socrates, it would seem, married ironically, just to demonstrate this proposition.”

Friedrich Nietzsche book On the Genealogy of Morality

Essay 3, Aphorism 7
On the Genealogy of Morality (1887)

“The concept of greatness is changeable, in the realm of morality as well as in that of esthetics. And so philosophy starts by legislating greatness.”

Friedrich Nietzsche book Philosophy in the Tragic Age of the Greeks

Source: Philosophy in the Tragic Age of the Greeks (posthumous), p. 43

“Man does not strive for happiness; only the Englishman does that”

Friedrich Nietzsche book Twilight of the Idols

Der Mensch strebt nicht nach Glück; nur der Engländer thut das
Maxims and Arrows, 12
Twilight of the Idols (1888)

Happiness

“To this end we now need many preparatory courageous human beings who cannot very well leap out of nothing — any more than out of the sand and slime of present-day civilization and metropolitanism: human beings who know how to be silent, lonely, resolute, and content and constant in invisible activities; human beings who are bent on seeking in all things for what in them must be overcome; human beings distinguished as much by cheerfulness, patience, unpretentiousness, and contempt for all great vanities as by magnanimity in victory and forbearance regarding the small vanities of the vanquished; human beings whose judgment concerning all victors and the share of chance in every victory and fame is sharp and free; human beings with their own festivals, their own working days, and their own periods of mourning, accustomed to command with assurance but instantly ready to obey when that is called for, equally proud, equally serving their own cause in both cases; more endangered human beings, more fruitful human beings, happier beings!”

Friedrich Nietzsche

The Gay Science (1882)

Courage , Chance , Victory , Patience

“The infuriating thing about an individual way of living. People are always angry at anyone who chooses very individual standards for his life; because of the extraordinary treatment which that man grants to himself, they feel degraded, like ordinary beings.”

Friedrich Nietzsche book Human, All Too Human

Section IX, "Man Alone with Himself" / aphorism 495
Human, All Too Human (1878), Helen Zimmern translation

Life , People , Way , Feeling

“That is the secret of all culture: it does not provide artificial limbs, wax noses or spectacles—that which can provide these things is, rather, only sham education. Culture is liberation, the removal of all the weeds, rubble and vermin that want to attack the tender buds of the plant.”

Friedrich Nietzsche Untimely Meditations

Untimely Meditations (1876)

Education , Secret

“Without art we would be nothing but foreground and live entirely in the spell of that perspective which makes what is closest at hand and most vulgar appear as if it were vast, and reality itself.”

Friedrich Nietzsche

Sec. 78
The Gay Science (1882)

Art , Reality , Appearance

“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.”

Friedrich Nietzsche book The Birth of Tragedy

Darum hat Lessing, der ehrlichste theoretische Mensch, es auszusprechen gewagt, dass ihm mehr am Suchen der Wahrheit als an ihr selbst gelegen sei...
Source: The Birth of Tragedy (1872), p. 73

Men , Truth

“In these dancers of Saint John and Saint Vitus we can recognize the Bacchic choruses of the Greeks, with their prehistory in Asia Minor, as far back as Babylon and the orgiastic Sacaea. Some people, either through a lack of experience or through obtuseness, turn away with pity or contempt from phenomena such as these as from 'folk diseases', bolstered by a sense of their own sanity; these poor creatures have no idea how blighted and ghostly this 'sanity' of theirs sounds when the glowing life of Dionysiac revellers thunders past them.”

Friedrich Nietzsche book The Birth of Tragedy

In diesen Sanct-Johann- und Sanct-Veittänzern erkennen wir die bacchischen Chöre der Griechen wieder, mit ihrer Vorgeschichte in Kleinasien, bis hin zu Babylon und den orgiastischen Sakäen. Es giebt Menschen, die, aus Mangel an Erfahrung oder aus Stumpfsinn, sich von solchen Erscheinungen wie von "Volkskrankheiten", spöttisch oder bedauernd im Gefühl der eigenen Gesundheit abwenden: die Armen ahnen freilich nicht, wie leichenfarbig und gespenstisch eben diese ihre "Gesundheit" sich ausnimmt, wenn an ihnen das glühende Leben dionysischer Schwärmer vorüberbraust.
Source: The Birth of Tragedy (1872), p. 17

Life , People , Disease , Idea