“The quest for philosophical beginnings is idle, for everywhere in all beginnings we find only the crude, the unformed, the empty and the ugly. What matters in all things is the higher levels.”
Source: Philosophy in the Tragic Age of the Greeks (posthumous), p. 30
Help us to complete the source, original and additional information
Friedrich Nietzsche 655
German philosopher, poet, composer, cultural critic, and cl… 1844–1900Related quotes

“If there is an underlying oneness of all things, it does not matter where we begin”
Pt 1, Ch. 1 http://www.resologist.net/lo101.htm
Lo! (1931)
Context: If there is an underlying oneness of all things, it does not matter where we begin, whether with stars, or laws of supply and demand, or frogs, or Napoleon Bonaparte. One measures a circle, beginning anywhere.

“Everywhere there is, at most, only a beginning of beginnings.”
The Renaissance in India (1918)
Context: To attempt to penetrate through the indeterminate confusion of present tendencies and first efforts in order to foresee the exact forms the new creation will take, would be an effort of very doubtful utility. One might as well try to forecast a harmony from the sounds made by the tuning of the instrument. In one direction or another we may just detect certain decisive indications, but even these are only first indications and we may be quite sure that much lies behind them that will go far beyond anything that they yet suggest. This is true whether in religion and spirituality or thought and science, poetry and art or society and politics. Everywhere there is, at most, only a beginning of beginnings.

Light on Life: B.K.S. Iyengar's Yoga Insights

Novalis (1829)
Context: The true philosophical Act is annihilation of self (Selbsttodtung); this is the real beginning of all Philosophy; all requisites for being a Disciple of Philosophy point hither. This Act alone corresponds to all the conditions and characteristics of transcendental conduct.