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Friedrich Nietzsche

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Thus do I counsel you, my friends: distrust all in whom the impulse to punish is powerful!

Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche (15 October 1844 – 25 August 1900) was a German philosopher, cultural critic, composer, poet, writer, and philologist whose work has exerted a profound influence on modern intellectual history. His critiques of contemporary culture, religion, and philosophy centered on a basic question regarding the foundation of values and morality.

See also:
Human, All Too Human
The Dawn of Day
The Gay Science
Thus Spoke Zarathustra
Beyond Good and Evil
Twilight of the Idols
Ecce Homo
The Antichrist
On Truth and Lies in a Nonmoral Sense
Untimely Meditations
On the Genealogy of Morality

Quotes

[edit]
It is precisely facts that do not exist, only interpretations.
  • I am utterly amazed, utterly enchanted! I have a precursor, and what a precursor! I hardly knew Spinoza: that I should have turned to him just now, was inspired by "instinct." Not only is his overtendency like mine—namely to make all knowledge the most powerful affect — but in five main points of his doctrine I recognize myself; this most unusual and loneliest thinker is closest to me precisely in these matters: he denies the freedom of the will, teleology, the moral world-order, the unegoistic, and evil. Even though the divergencies are admittedly tremendous, they are due more to the difference in time, culture, and science. In summa: my lonesomeness, which, as on very high mountains, often made it hard for me to breathe and make my blood rush out, is now at least a twosomeness. Strange! Incidentally, I am not at all as well as I had hoped. Exceptional weather here too! Eternal change of atmospheric conditions! — that will yet drive me out of Europe! I must have clear skies for months, else I get nowhere. Already six severe attacks of two or three days each. With affectionate love, Your friend.
  • 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.
    • Letter to Elisabeth Nietzsche, Bonn, 1865-06-11,[specific citation needed] quoted as epigraph in Walter Kaufmann, The Faith of a Heretic (1961)
  • Against that positivism which stops before phenomena, saying "there are only facts," I should say: no, it is precisely facts that do not exist, only interpretations.
    • Notebooks (Late 1886 – Spring 1887) [1]
    • Popular usage: "There are no facts, only interpretations."
  • In Germany there is much complaining about my "eccentricities." But since it is not known where my center is, it won't be easy to find out where or when I have thus far been "eccentric." That I was a philologist, for example, meant that I was outside my center (which fortunately does not mean that I was a poor philologist). Likewise, I now regard my having been a Wagnerian as eccentric. It was a highly dangerous experiment; now that I know it did not ruin me, I also know what significance it had for me — it was the most severe test of my character.
    • Letter to Carl Fuchs (14 December 1887)
  • I now myself live, in every detail, striving for wisdom, while I formerly merely worshipped and idolized the wise.
    • Letter to Mathilde Mayer, July 16, 1878, cited in Karl Jaspers, Nietzsche (Baltimore: 1997), p. 46
  • So far no one had had enough courage and intelligence to reveal me to my dear Germans. My problems are new, my psychological horizon frighteningly comprehensive, my language bold and clear; there may well be no books written in German which are richer in ideas and more independent than mine.
    • Letter to Carl Fuchs (14 December 1887)
  • I've seen proof, black on white, that Herr Dr. Förster has not yet severed his connection with the anti-Semitic movement. ... Since then I've had difficulty coming up with any of the tenderness and protectiveness I've so long felt toward you. The separation between us is thereby decided in really the most absurd way. Have you grasped nothing of the reason why I am in the world? ... Now it has gone so far that I have to defend myself hand and foot against people who confuse me with these anti-Semitic canaille; after my own sister, my former sister, and after Widemann more recently have given the impetus to this most dire of all confusions. After I read the name Zarathustra in the anti-Semitic Correspondence my forbearance came to an end. I am now in a position of emergency defense against your spouse's Party. These accursed anti-Semite deformities shall not sully my ideal!!
  • You have committed one of the greatest stupidities — for yourself and for me! Your association with an anti-Semitic chief expresses a foreignness to my whole way of life which fills me again and again with ire or melancholy. ... It is a matter of honor with me to be absolutely clean and unequivocal in relation to anti-Semitism, namely, opposed to it, as I am in my writings. I have recently been persecuted with letters and Anti-Semitic Correspondence Sheets. My disgust with this party (which would like the benefit of my name only too well!) is as pronounced as possible, but the relation to Förster, as well as the aftereffects of my former publisher, the anti-Semitic Schmeitzner, always brings the adherents of this disagreeable party back to the idea that I must belong to them after all. ... It arouses mistrust against my character, as if publicly I condemned something which I have favored secretly — and that I am unable to do anything against it, that the name of Zarathustra is used in every Anti-Semitic Correspondence Sheet, has almost made me sick several times.
  • Style ought to prove that one believes in an idea; not only that one thinks it but also feels it.
    • Letter to Lou Andreas-Salomé (August 1881), in Salomé's biography of Nietzsche, tr. Siegfried Mandel (1988)
Where there have been powerful governments, societies, religions, public opinions, in short wherever there has been tyranny, there the solitary philosopher has been hated; for philosophy offers an asylum to a man into which no tyranny can force its way, the inward cave, the labyrinth of the heart.
We are responsible to ourselves for our own existence; consequently we want to be the true helmsman of this existence and refuse to allow our existence to resemble a mindless act of chance.
  • Freier Wille ohne Fatum ist ebenso wenig denkbar, wie Geist ohne Reelles, Gutes ohne Böses.
    • Free will without fate is no more conceivable than spirit without matter, good without evil.
      • "Fatum und Geschichte," April 1862
  • Sobald es aber möglich wäre, durch einen starken Willen die ganze Weltvergangenheit umzustürzen, sofort träten wir in die Reihe der unabhängigen Götter, und Weltgeschichte hieße dann für uns nichts als ein träumerisches Selbstentrücktsein; der Vorhang fällt, und der Mensch findet sich wieder, wie ein Kind mit Welten spielend, wie ein Kind, das beim Morgenglühen aufwacht und sich lachend die furchtbaren Träume von der Stirn streicht.
    • As soon as it becomes possible, by dint of a strong will, to overthrow the entire past of the world, then, in a single moment, we will join the ranks of independent gods. World history for us will then be nothing but a dreamlike otherworldly being. The curtain falls, and man once more finds himself a child playing with whole worlds—a child, awoken by the first glow of morning, who laughingly wipes the frightful dreams from his brow.
      • "Fatum und Geschichte," April 1862
  • The modern scientific counterpart to belief in God is the belief in the universe as an organism: this disgusts me. This is to make what is quite rare and extremely derivative, the organic, which we perceive only on the surface of the earth, into something essential, universal, and eternal! This is still an anthropomorphizing of nature!
    • KSA 9,11 [201]
  • Is Wagner a human being at all? Is he not rather a disease? He contaminates everything he touches - he has made music sick.
    • Der Fall Wagner (1888)
  • May I really say it! All truths are bloody truths to me—take a look at my previous writings.
    • Notebooks (Summer 1880) 4[271]
  • This is the mistake which I seem to make eternally, that I imagine the sufferings of others as far greater than they really are. Ever since my childhood, the proposition 'my greatest dangers lie in pity' has been confirmed again and again.
    • Letter to Overbeck, Sils Maria (14 September 1884), tr. Walter Kaufmann (1954)
  • Mastery over nature, the Idée fixe of the 20th century, is Brahmanism, Indo-German.
    • Friedrich Nietzsche, Nachgelassene Fragmente. quoted in Dorothy M. Figueira, Aryans, Jews, Brahmins: Theorizing Authority Through Myths of Identity, New Delhi, Navayana Publishing Pvt Ltd. (2002), Reprint 2017

The Dionysian Vision of the World

[edit]
Translated by Ira J. Allen [2]
  • The horrible or the absurd is uplifting, because it is only seemingly horrible or absurd. The Dionysian power of enchantment here proves itself, even at the highest point of this vision of the world; all that is actual gives way to seeming and behind it is announced the unitary nature of the Will, wholly wrapped in the glory of wisdom and truth, in dazzling brilliance. Illusion, delusion is at its peak.
    • page 48
  • Here we arrive at the most dangerous limit that the Hellenic Will, with its Apollonian-optimistic founding principle, could tolerate. Here, the Hellenic Will set to work immediately with its natural healing power, reversing that negating disposition; its means are the tragic work of art and the tragic idea. Its intent absolutely could not be to weaken, still less to suppress, the Dionysian state; direct coercion was impossible and, if it was possible, far too dangerous — for, if detained in its outpouring, the element would then break for itself some other course and infuse all the veins of life.
    • page 44
  • An art that spoke the truth [...] banished the muses of the arts of seeming; [...] the individuum — with its limits and measure — went under. A twilight of the gods stood near at hand. [...] A new and higher mechanick of existence had come into play.
    • page 43
  • All that had thus far counted as limit, as measuring determination, proved itself here but artificial
    • page 42
  • The artist — as the one who compels motion through art media toward art — cannot be simultaneously the absorptive instrument of art's own activity.
    • page 41
  • Never, however, was the struggle between truth and beauty greater than with the invasion of the Dionysian ritual; in this ritual, nature disclosed itself and spoke of its secret with terrible clarity, with that tone against which seductive seeming [...] A great revolution began in all forms of life
    • page 40
  • The true aim is [...] reaching nature with this deception
    • page 39-38
  • Best is not to be ... second-best is to die quickly
    • page 37-36

The Birth of Tragedy (1872)

[edit]
The Birth of Tragedy Out of the Spirit of Music (1873), later expanded as The Birth of Tragedy, Or: Hellenism and Pessimism (1886), Shaun Whiteside translation, Penguin Classics (1993)
Art is the supreme task and the truly metaphysical activity in this life.
We cannot help but see Socrates as the turning-point, the vortex of world history.
  • Nochmals gesagt, heute ist es mir ein unmögliches Buch, - ich heisse es schlecht geschrieben, schwerfällig, peinlich, bilderwüthig und bilderwirrig, gefühlsam, hier und da verzuckert bis zum Femininischen, ungleich im Tempo, ohne Willen zur logischen Sauberkeit, sehr überzeugt und deshalb des Beweisens sich überhebend, misstrauisch selbst gegen die Schicklichkeit des Beweisens, als Buch für Eingeweihte, als "Musik" für Solche, die auf Musik getauft, die auf gemeinsame und seltene Kunst-Erfahrungen hin von Anfang der Dinge an verbunden sind, als Erkennungszeichen für Blutsverwandte in artibus, - ein hochmüthiges und schwärmerisches Buch, das sich gegen das profanum vulgus der "Gebildeten" von vornherein noch mehr als gegen das "Volk" abschliesst, welches aber, wie seine Wirkung bewies und beweist, sich gut genug auch darauf verstehen muss, sich seine Mitschwärmer zu suchen und sie auf neue Schleichwege und Tanzplätze zu locken.
    • To say it once again: today I find it an impossible book — badly written, clumsy and embarrassing, its images frenzied and confused, sentimental, in some places saccharine-sweet to the point of effeminacy, uneven in pace, lacking in any desire for logical purity, so sure of its convictions that it is above any need for proof, and even suspicious of the propriety of proof, a book for initiates, 'music' for those who have been baptized in the name of music and who are related from the first by their common and rare experiences of art, a shibboleth for first cousins in artibus [in the arts] an arrogant and fanatical book that wished from the start to exclude the profanum vulgus [the profane mass] of the 'educated' even more than the 'people'; but a book which, as its impact has shown and continues to show, has a strange knack of seeking out its fellow-revellers and enticing them on to new secret paths and dancing-places.
    • "Attempt at a Self-Criticism", p. 5
  • Oh wie ferne war mir damals gerade dieser ganze Resignationismus!
    • How far I was then from all that resignationism!
    • "Attempt at a Self-criticism", p. 10
  • Diesen Ernsthaften diene zur Belehrung, dass ich von der Kunst als der höchsten Aufgabe und der eigentlich metaphysischen Thätigkeit dieses Lebens im Sinne des Mannes überzeugt bin, dem ich hier, als meinem erhabenen Vorkämpfer auf dieser Bahn, diese Schrift gewidmet haben will.
    • Art is the supreme task and the truly metaphysical activity in this life...
    • "Preface to Richard Wagner", p. 13
  • Wie nun der Philosoph zur Wirklichkeit des Daseins, so verhält sich der künstlerisch erregbare Mensch zur Wirklichkeit des Traumes; er sieht genau und gern zu: denn aus diesen Bildern deutet er sich das Leben, an diesen Vorgängen übt er sich für das Leben. Nicht etwa nur die angenehmen und freundlichen Bilder sind es, die er mit jener Allverständigkeit an sich erfährt: auch das Ernste, Trübe, Traurige, Finstere, die plötzlichen Hemmungen, die Neckereien des Zufalls, die bänglichen Erwartungen, kurz die ganze "göttliche Komödie" des Lebens, mit dem Inferno, zieht an ihm vorbei, nicht nur wie ein Schattenspiel - denn er lebt und leidet mit in diesen Scenen - und doch auch nicht ohne jene flüchtige Empfindung des Scheins; und vielleicht erinnert sich Mancher, gleich mir, in den Gefährlichkeiten und Schrecken des Traumes sich mitunter ermuthigend und mit Erfolg zugerufen zu haben: "Es ist ein Traum! Ich will ihn weiter träumen!" Wie man mir auch von Personen erzählt hat, die die Causalität eines und desselben Traumes über drei und mehr aufeinanderfolgende Nächte hin fortzusetzen im Stande waren: Thatsachen, welche deutlich Zeugniss dafür abgeben, dass unser innerstes Wesen, der gemeinsame Untergrund von uns allen, mit tiefer Lust und freudiger Nothwendigkeit den Traum an sich erfährt.
    • Thus the man who is responsive to artistic stimuli reacts to the reality of dreams as does the philosopher to the reality of existence; he observes closely, and he enjoys his observation: for it is out of these images that he interprets life, out of these processes that he trains himself for life. It is not only pleasant and agreeable images that he experiences with such universal understanding: the serious, the gloomy, the sad and the profound, the sudden restraints, the mockeries of chance, fearful expectations, in short the whole 'divine comedy' of life, the Inferno included, passes before him, not only as a shadow-play — for he too lives and suffers through these scenes — and yet also not without that fleeting sense of illusion; and perhaps many, like myself, can remember calling out to themselves in encouragement, amid the perils and terrors of the dream, and with success: 'It is a dream! I want to dream on!' Just as I have often been told of people who have been able to continue one and the same dream over three and more successive nights: facts which clearly show that our innermost being, our common foundation, experiences dreams with profound pleasure and joyful necessity.
    • p. 15
  • 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.
    • 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.
    • p. 17
In the mountains of truth you will never climb in vain: either you will get up higher today or you will exercise your strength so as to be able to get up higher tomorrow.
  • Es geht die alte Sage, dass König Midas lange Zeit nach dem weisen Silen, dem Begleiter des Dionysus, im Walde gejagt habe, ohne ihn zu fangen. Als er ihm endlich in die Hände gefallen ist, fragt der König, was für den Menschen das Allerbeste und Allervorzüglichste sei. Starr und unbeweglich schweigt der Dämon; bis er, durch den König gezwungen, endlich unter gellem Lachen in diese Worte ausbricht: `Elendes Eintagsgeschlecht, des Zufalls Kinder und der Mühsal, was zwingst du mich dir zu sagen, was nicht zu hören für dich das Erspriesslichste ist? Das Allerbeste ist für dich gänzlich unerreichbar: nicht geboren zu sein, nicht zu sein, nichts zu sein. Das Zweitbeste aber ist für dich - bald zu sterben.
    • According to the old story, King Midas had long hunted wise Silenus, Dionysus' companion, without catching him. When Silenus had finally fallen into his clutches, the king asked him what was the best and most desirable thing of all for mankind. The daemon stood still, stiff and motionless, until at last, forced by the king, he gave a shrill laugh and spoke these words: 'Miserable, ephemeral race, children of hazard and hardship, why do you force me to say what it would be much more fruitful for you not to hear? The best of all things is something entirely outside your grasp: not to be born, not to be, to be nothing. But the second-best thing for you — is to die soon.'
    • p. 22
  • Der philosophische Mensch hat sogar das Vorgefühl, dass auch unter dieser Wirklichkeit, in der wir leben und sind, eine zweite ganz andre verborgen liege...
    • Underneath this reality in which we live and have our being, another and altogether different reality lies concealed...
    • p. 23, William Haussmann translation
  • 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!"
    • 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!'
    • p. 54
  • Bei diesem Zusammenhange ist die leidenschaftliche Zuneigung begreiflich, welche die Dichter der neueren Komödie zu Euripides empfanden; so dass der Wunsch des Philemon nicht weiter befremdet, der sich sogleich aufhängen lassen mochte, nur um den Euripides in der Unterwelt aufsuchen zu können: wenn er nur überhaupt überzeugt sein dürfte, dass der Verstorbene auch jetzt noch bei Verstande sei.
    • This context enables us to understand the passionate affection in which the poets of the New Comedy held Euripides; so that we are no longer startled by the desire of Philemon, who wished to be hanged at once so that he might meet Euripides in the underworld, so long as he could be sure that the deceased was still in full possession of his senses.
    • p. 55
  • ...aesthetischen Sokratismus...dessen oberstes Gesetz ungefähr so lautet: "alles muss verständig sein, um schön zu sein"; als Parallelsatz zu dem sokratischen "nur der Wissende ist tugendhaft."
    • ...aesthetic Socratism, the chief law of which is, more or less: "to be beautiful everything must first be intelligible" — a parallel to the Socratic dictum: "only the one who knows is virtuous."
    • p. 62
  • Nun aber schien Sokrates die tragische Kunst nicht einmal "die Wahrheit zu sagen": abgesehen davon, dass sie sich an den wendet, der "nicht viel Verstand besitzt", also nicht an den Philosophen: ein zweifacher Grund, von ihr fern zu bleiben. Wie Plato, rechnete er sie zu den schmeichlerischen Künsten, die nur das Angenehme, nicht das Nützliche darstellen und verlangte deshalb bei seinen Jüngern Enthaltsamkeit und strenge Absonderung von solchen unphilosophischen Reizungen; mit solchem Erfolge, dass der jugendliche Tragödiendichter Plato zu allererst seine Dichtungen verbrannte, um Schüler des Sokrates werden zu können.
    • But for Socrates, tragedy did not even seem to "tell what's true", quite apart from the fact that it addresses "those without much wit", not the philosopher: another reason for giving it a wide berth. Like Plato, he numbered it among the flattering arts which represent only the agreeable, not the useful, and therefore required that his disciples abstain most rigidly from such unphilosophical stimuli — with such success that the young tragedian, Plato, burnt his writings in order to become a pupil of Socrates.
    • p. 68
No one can construct for you the bridge upon which precisely you must cross the stream of life, no one but you yourself alone.
  • Darum hat Lessing, der ehrlichste theoretische Mensch, es auszusprechen gewagt, dass ihm mehr am Suchen der Wahrheit als an ihr selbst gelegen sei...
    • 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.
    • p. 73
  • ...der kann sich nicht entbrechen, in Sokrates den einen Wendepunkt und Wirbel der sogenannten Weltgeschichte zu sehen. Denn dächte man sich einmal diese ganze unbezifferbare Summe von Kraft, die für jene Welttendenz verbraucht worden ist, nicht im Dienste des Erkennens, sondern auf die praktischen d.h. egoistischen Ziele der Individuen und Völker verwendet, so wäre wahrscheinlich in allgemeinen Vernichtungskämpfen und fortdauernden Völkerwanderungen die instinctive Lust zum Leben so abgeschwächt, dass, bei der Gewohnheit des Selbstmordes, der Einzelne vielleicht den letzten Rest von Pflichtgefühl empfinden müsste, wenn er, wie der Bewohner der Fidschiinseln, als Sohn seine Eltern, als Freund seinen Freund erdrosselt: ein praktischer Pessimismus, der selbst eine grausenhafte Ethik des Völkermordes aus Mitleid erzeugen könnte - der übrigens überall in der Welt vorhanden ist und vorhanden war, wo nicht die Kunst in irgend welchen Formen, besonders als Religion und Wissenschaft, zum Heilmittel und zur Abwehr jenes Pesthauchs erschienen ist.
    • We cannot help but see Socrates as the turning-point, the vortex of world history. For if we imagine that the whole incalculable store of energy used in that global tendency had been used not in the service of knowledge but in ways applied to the practical — selfish — goals of individuals and nations, universal wars of destruction and constant migrations of peoples would have enfeebled man's instinctive zest for life to the point where, suicide having become universal, the individual would perhaps feel a vestigial duty as a son to strangle his parents, or as a friend his friend, as the Fiji islanders do: a practical pessimism that could even produce a terrible ethic of genocide through pity, and which is, and always has been, present everywhere in the world where art has not in some form, particularly as religion and science, appeared as a remedy and means of prevention for this breath of pestilence.
    • p. 73
  • Aber wie verändert sich plötzlich jene eben so düster geschilderte Wildniss unserer ermüdeten Cultur, wenn sie der dionysische Zauber berührt! Ein Sturmwind packt alles Abgelebte, Morsche, Zerbrochne, Verkümmerte, hüllt es wirbelnd in eine rothe Staubwolke und trägt es wie ein Geier in die Lüfte. Verwirrt suchen unsere Blicke nach dem Entschwundenen: denn was sie sehen, ist wie aus einer Versenkung an's goldne Licht gestiegen, so voll und grün, so üppig lebendig, so sehnsuchtsvoll unermesslich. Die Tragödie sitzt inmitten dieses Ueberflusses an Leben, Leid und Lust, in erhabener Entzückung, sie horcht einem fernen schwermüthigen Gesange - er erzählt von den Müttern des Seins, deren Namen lauten: Wahn, Wille, Wehe. - Ja, meine Freunde, glaubt mit mir an das dionysische Leben und an die Wiedergeburt der Tragödie. Die Zeit des sokratischen Menschen ist vorüber: kränzt euch mit Epheu, nehmt den Thyrsusstab zur Hand und wundert euch nicht, wenn Tiger und Panther sich schmeichelnd zu euren Knien niederlegen. Jetzt wagt es nur, tragische Menschen zu sein: denn ihr sollt erlöst werden. Ihr sollt den dionysischen Festzug von Indien nach Griechenland geleiten! Rüstet euch zu hartem Streite, aber glaubt an die Wunder eures Gottes!
    • But what changes come upon the weary desert of our culture, so darkly described, when it is touched by the magic of Dionysus! A storm seizes everything decrepit, rotten, broken, stunted; shrouds it in a whirling red cloud of dust and carries it into the air like a vulture. In vain confusion we seek for all that has vanished; for what we see has risen as if from beneath he earth into the gold light, so full and green, so luxuriantly alive, immeasurable and filled with yearning. Tragedy sits in sublime rapture amidst this abundance of life, suffering and delight, listening to a far-off, melancholy song which tells of the Mothers of Being, whose names are Delusion, Will, Woe. -
      Yes, my friends, join me in my faith in this Dionysiac life and the rebirth of tragedy. The age of Socratic man is past: crown yourselves with ivy, grasp the thyrsus and do not be amazed if tigers and panthers lie down fawning at your feet. Now dare to be tragic men, for you will be redeemed. You shall join the Dionysiac procession from India to Greece! Gird yourselves for a hard battle, but have faith in the miracles of your god!
    • p. 98

On the Future of Our Educational Institutions (1872)

[edit]
1872 lectures "Gedanken über die Zukunft unserer Bildungsanstalten" [The future of our educational institutions] — Translated by D. Searls (2015)
There exists in the world a single path along which no one can go except you: whither does it lead? Do not ask, go along it.
  • 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.
    • 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.
  • So ist langsam an Stelle einer tiefsinnigen Ausdeutung der ewig gleichen Probleme ein historisches, ja selbst ein philologisches Abwägen und Fragen getreten: was der und jener Philosoph gedacht habe oder nicht, oder ob die und jene Schrift ihm mit Recht zuzuschreiben sei oder gar ob diese oder jene Lesart den Vorzug verdiene. Zu einem derartigen neutralen Sichbefassen mit Philosophie werden jetzt unsere Studenten in den philosophischen Seminarien unserer Universitäten angereizt: weshalb ich mich längst gewöhnt habe, eine solche Wissenschaft als Abzweigung der Philologie zu betrachten und ihre Vertreter danach abzuschätzen, ob sie gute Philologen sind oder nicht. Demnach ist nun freilich die Philosophie selbst von der Universität verbannt: womit unsre erste Frage nach dem Bildungswert der Universitäten beantwortet ist.
    • Philological considerations have slowly but surely taken the place of profound explorations of eternal problems. The question becomes: What did this or that philosopher think or not think? And is this or that text rightly ascribed to him or not? And even: Is this variant of a classical text preferable to that other? Students in university seminars today are encouraged to occupy themselves with such emasculated inquiries. As a result, of course, philosophy itself is banished from the university altogether.
  • Not one of these nobly equipped young men has escaped the restless, exhausting, confusing, debilitating crisis of education. ... He feels that he cannot guide himself, cannot help himself—and then he dives hopelessly into the world of everyday life and daily routine, he is immersed in the most trivial activity possible, and his limbs grow weak and weary.
  • Only by means of such discipline can the young man acquire that physical loathing for the beloved and much-admired 'elegance' of style of our newspaper manufacturers and novelists, and for the 'ornate style' of our literary men; by it alone is he irrevocably elevated at a stroke above a whole host of absurd questions and scruples, such, for instance, as whether Auerbach and Gutzkow are really poets, for his disgust at both will be so great that he will be unable to read them any longer, and thus the problem will be solved for him. Let no one imagine that it is an easy matter to develop this feeling to the extent necessary in order to have this physical loathing; but let no one hope to reach sound æsthetic judgments along any other road than the thorny one of language, and by this I do not mean philological research, but self-discipline in one's mother-tongue. Everybody who is in earnest in this matter will have the same sort of experience as the recruit in the army who is compelled to learn walking after having walked almost all his life as a dilettante or empiricist. It is a hard time: one almost fears that the tendons are going to snap and one ceases to hope that the artificial and consciously acquired movements and positions of the feet will ever be carried out with ease and comfort. It is painful to see how awkwardly and heavily one foot is set before the other, and one dreads that one may not only be unable to learn the new way of walking, but that one will forget how to walk at all. Then it suddenly become noticeable that a new habit and a second nature have been born of the practised movements, and that the assurance and strength of the old manner of walking returns with a little more grace: at this point one begins to realise how difficult walking is, and one feels in a position to laugh at the untrained empiricist or the elegant dilettante. Our 'elegant' writers, as their style shows, have never learnt 'walking' in this sense, and in our public schools, as our other writers show, no one learns walking either. Culture begins, however, with the correct movement of the language: and once it has properly begun, it begets that physical sensation in the presence of 'elegant' writers which is known by the name of 'loathing.'

Dionysian-Dithyrambs (1888)

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Dionysian-Dithyrambs (1888)

  • Only fool! Only poet!
    Merely speaking colorfully,
    From fools' masks shouting colorfully,
    Climbing about on deceptive word-bridges,
    On misleading rainbows,
    Between false heavens
    Rambling, lurking —
    Only fool! Only poet!
  • The desert grows: woe to him in whom deserts hide ...
  • Do not forget, man, consumed by lust:
    you—are the stone, the desert, are death ...
  • You sacrifice yourself, your wealth torments you,
    You give away yourself,
    You don't take care of yourself, you don't love yourself;
    Great agony always compels you,
    The agony of an overflowing barn, an overabundant heart;
    But no one thanks you any longer ...
  • Dionysus:
    Be clever, Ariadne! ...
    You have little ears; you have my ears:
    Put a clever word in them! —
    Must one not first hate oneself, in order to love oneself? ...
    I am your labyrinth ...

The Will to Power (1888)

[edit]
Der Wille zur Macht (1888) is an anthology of material from Nietzsche's notebooks of the 1880s, edited by his friend Peter Gast, supervised by his sister Elisabeth Nietzsche, and misrepresented by her as his unpublished magnum opus. All but 16 of its 1067 fragments can be traced to source texts in the historical-critical edition of Nietzsche's writings, Kritische Gesamtausgabe: Werke, though 204 of the 1067 sections involve patching together paragraphs not originally juxtaposed by Nietzsche, or dividing continuous passages into multiple "aphorisms" and re-arranging their order, and much of the text has been lightly edited to correct punctuation errors. Because of its misrepresentation of Nietzsche's private notes as an all but finished magnum opus, it has been called a "historic forgery".
  • In my opinion, Henrik Ibsen has become very German. With all his robust idealism and "Will to Truth," he never dared to ring himself free from moral-illusionism which says "freedom," and will not admit, even to itself, what freedom is: the second stage in the metamorphosis of the "Will to Power" in him who lacks it. In the first stage, one demands justice at the hands of those who have power. In the second, one speaks of "freedom," that is to say, one wishes to "shake oneself free" from those who have power. In the third stage, one speaks of "equal rights"—that is to say, so long as one is not a predominant personality one wishes to prevent one's competitors from growing in power.
    • Friedrich Nietzsche The Will to Power Vol 1 S. 86 p. 71 1914
  • This is the antinomy: Insofar as we believe in morality we pass sentence on existence.
    • Sec. 6 (Notebook W II 2. Autumn 1887, KGW VIII, 2.237, KSA 12.571 [citations are to Nietzsche's manuscripts by archival code, and the page numbers in which the entire section can be found transcribed therefrom, in the hardcover and softcover historical-critical editions]).
  • Natürlicher ist unsere Stellung in politicis: wir sehen Probleme der Macht, des Quantums Macht gegen ein anderes Quantum. Wir glauben nicht an ein Recht, das nicht auf der Macht ruht, sich durchzusetzen: wir empfinden alle Rechte als Eroberungen.
    • More natural is our position in politics: We see problems of power, of one quantum of power against another. We do not believe in any right that is not supported by the power of enforcement: we feel all rights to be conquests.
      • Sec. 120 (Spring-Fall 1887)
  • Moralities and religions are the principal means by which one can make whatever one wishes out of man, provided one possesses a superfluity of creative forces and can assert one's will over long periods of time — in the form of legislation and customs.
    • Sec. 144 (Notebook N VII 1. April - June 1885, KGW VII, 3.198, KSA 11.478)
  • A man as he ought to be: that sounds to us as insipid as "a tree as it ought to be."
    • Sec. 332 (Notebook W II 3. November 1887 - March 1888, KGW VIII, 2.304, KSA 13.62)
  • The stronger becomes master of the weaker, in so far as the latter cannot assert its degree of independence — here there is no mercy, no forbearance, even less a respect for "laws."
    • Sec. 630 (Notebook W I 4. June - July 1885, KGW VII, 3.283, KSA 11.559)
  • The individual itself as a struggle between parts (for food, space, etc.): its evolution tied to the victory or predominance of individual parts, to an atrophy, a "becoming an organ" of other parts. ... The aristocracy in the body, the majority of the rulers (struggle between cells and tissues). ... Slavery and division of labor: the higher type possible only through the subjugation of the lower, so that it becomes a function.
    • Sec. 660 : The Body as a Political Structure
  • Morality is: the mediocre are worth more than the exceptions ... I abhore Christianity with a deadly hatred.
    • Sec. 685 (Notebook W II 5. Spring 1888, KGW VIII, 3.95-7, KSA 13.303-5)
  • The states in which we infuse a transfiguration and a fullness into things and poetize about them until they reflect back our fullness and joy in life...three elements principally: sexuality, intoxication and cruelty — all belonging to the oldest festal joys.
    • Sec. 801 (Notebook W II 1. Fall 1887, KGW VIII, 2.57-8, KSA 12.393-4)
  • The beautiful exists just as little as the true. In every case it is a question of the conditions of preservation of a certain type of man: thus the herd-man will experience the value feeling of the true in different things than will the overman.
    • Sec. 804 (Notebook W II 2. Fall 1887, KGW VIII, 2.220-1, KSA 12.554-5)
  • A declaration of war on the masses by higher men is needed! ... Everything that makes soft and effeminate, that serves the end of the people or the feminine, works in favor of universal suffrage, i.e. the domination of the inferior men. But we should take reprisal and bring this whole affair to light and the bar of judgment.
    • Sec. 864 (Notebook W II 5. Spring 1888, KGW VIII, 3.157-62, KSA 13.365-70)
  • The rights a man arrogates to himself are related to the duties he imposes on himself, to the tasks to which he feels equal. The great majority of men have no right to existence, but are a misfortune to higher men.
    • Sec. 872 (Notebook W I 1. Spring 1884, KGW VII, 2.97-8, KSA 11.101-2)
  • The homogenizing of European man ... requires a justification: it lies in serving a higher sovereign species that stands upon the former which can raise itself to its task only by doing this. Not merely a master race whose sole task is to rule, but a race with its own sphere of life, with an excess of strength ... strong enough to have no need of the tyranny of the virtue-imperative.
    • Sec. 898 (Notebook W II 1. Fall 1887, KGW VIII, 2.88-90, KSA 12.424-6)
  • To those human beings who are of any concern to me I wish suffering, desolation, sickness, ill-treatment, indignities — I wish that they should not remain unfamiliar with profound self-contempt, the torture of self-mistrust, the wretchedness of the vanquished: I have no pity for them, because I wish them the only thing that can prove today whether one is worth anything or not — that one endures.
    • Sec 910 (Autumn 1887, KSA 12.513)
  • There is only nobility of birth, only nobility of blood. When one speaks of "aristocrats of the spirit," reasons are usually not lacking for concealing something. As is well known, it is a favorite term among ambitious Jews. For spirit alone does not make noble. Rather, there must be something to ennoble the spirit. What then is required? Blood.
    • Sec. 942 (Notebook W I 5. August - September 1885, KGW VII, 3.412, KSA 11.678)
  • The possibility has been established for the production of...a master race, the future "masters of the earth"...made to endure for millennia — a higher kind of men who...employ democratic Europe as their most pliant and supple instrument for getting hold of the destinies of the earth.
    • Sec. 960 (Notebook W I 8. Fall 1885 - Fall 1886, KGW VIII, 1.85-6, KSA 12.87-8)

Philosophy in the Tragic Age of the Greeks (posthumous)

[edit]
as translated by Marianne Cowan (1962)
  • I tell the story of these philosophers in simplified form: I merely wish to bring out in each system that point which represents a piece of the personality, and which history must preserve as a part of what is irrefutable and indisputable.
  • 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.
  • The only thing of interest in a refuted system is the personal element. It alone is what is forever irrefutable.
    • p. 25
  • Whoever wishes to justify [Philosophy] must show ... to what ends a healthy culture uses and has used philosophy.
    • p. 27
  • Where could we find an instance of cultural pathology which philosophy restored to health? If philosophy ever manifested itself as helpful, redeeming, or prophylactic, it was in a healthy culture. The sick, it made even sicker.
    • p. 27
  • The very reason [the Greeks] got so far is that they knew how to pick up the spear and throw it onward from the point where others had left it. Their skill in the art of fruitful learning was admirable. We ought to be learning from our neighbors precisely as the Greeks learned from theirs, not for the sake of learned pedantry but rather using everything we learn as a foothold which will take us up as high, and higher, than our neighbor.
    • p. 30
  • 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.
    • p. 30
  • ... the republic of creative minds: each giant calling to his brother through the desolate intervals of time. And undisturbed by the wanton noises of the dwarfs that creep past beneath them, their high spirit-converse continues.
    • p. 32
  • Philosophy leaps ahead on tiny toeholds; hope and intuition lend wings to its feet. Calculating reason lumbers heavily behind, looking for better footholds, for reason too wants to reach that alluring goal which its divine comrade has long since reached.
    • p. 40
  • Science rushes headlong, without selectivity, without “taste,” at whatever is knowable, in the blind desire to know all at any cost. Philosophical thinking, on the other hand, is ever on the scent of those things which are most worth knowing, the great and the important insights.
    • p. 43
  • 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.
    • p. 43
  • "Grant me, ye gods, but one certainty," runs Parmenides' prayer, "and if it be but a log's breadth on which to lie. on which to ride upon the sea of uncertainty. Take away everything that comes-to-be, everything lush, colorful, blossoming, illusory, everything that charms and is alive. Take all these for yourselves and grant me but the one and only, poor empty certainty.”
    • p. 81

Bartlett's Familiar Quotations, 10th ed. (1919)

[edit]
Quotes reported in Bartlett's Familiar Quotations, 10th ed. (1919).

Maxims

[edit]
  • The good generally displeases us when it is beyond our ken.
  • Everyone who enjoys thinks that the principal thing to the tree is the fruit, but in point of fact the principal thing to it is the seed.—Herein lies the difference between them that create and them that enjoy.
  • He that prefers the beautiful to the useful in life will, undoubtedly, like children who prefer sweetmeats to bread, destroy his digestion and acquire a very fretful outlook on the world.
  • On the heights it is warmer than people in the valleys suppose, especially in winter. The thinker recognizes the full import of this simile.
  • The value of many men and books rests solely on their faculty for compelling all to speak out the most hidden and intimate things.
  • Merchant and pirate were for a long period one and the same person. Even today mercantile morality is really nothing but a refinement of piratical morality.
  • I teach you the Overman. Man is something which shall be surpassed.
    • Thus Spake Zarathustra.

Attributed

[edit]
  • Mathematics would certainly have not come into existence if one had known from the beginning that there was in nature no exactly straight line, no actual circle, no absolute magnitude.
    • As quoted in The Puzzle Instinct: The Meaning of Puzzles in Human Life‎ (2004) by Marcel Danesi, p. 71 from Human All-Too-Human


Disputed

[edit]
  • Rather than cope with the unbearable loneliness of their condition men will continue to seek their shattered God, and for His sake they will love the very serpents that dwell among His ruins.
    • As quoted by J. P. Stern in an interview conducted by Bryan Magee in The Great Philosophers : A History of Western Philosophy (1987)
  • 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.
    • Attributed across social media to TSZ. Is actually quoted in TSZ, Penguin Classics, Reg Hollingdale translation, in the introduction pg 12. Attributed to 'posthumously produced notes' [Nachlass?] Hollingdale continues.' 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.'
  • Nobody is more inferior than those who insist on being equal.
    • Often attributed to Nietzsche especially on social media, but no citation is ever given, and the only source I can find that states Nietzche said this was a mock interview by Richard Marshall.


Misattributed

[edit]
  • Most people are not seeking truth; they are searching for comfort in illusions.
  • A moral system valid for all is basically immoral.
    • Generally attributed to Nietzsche, this is a quotation from Curtis Cate's Friedrich Nietzsche: A Biography (2003) and is the author's interpretation of Nietzsche's Aphorism 221 (Beyond Good and Evil)
  • Meaning and morality of one's life come from within oneself. Healthy, strong individuals seek self-expansion by experimenting and by living dangerously. Life consists of an infinite number of possibilities, and the healthy person explores as many of them as possible. Religions that teach pity, self-contempt, humility, self-restraint and guilt are incorrect. The good life is ever-changing, challenging, devoid of regret, intense, creative, and risky.
    • Attributed to Nietzsche on quotes sites and on social media, the original quotation is from An Introduction to the History of Psychology by B. R. Hergenhahn (2008, page 226) and is the author's summary of Nietzsche's ideas: "The meaning and morality of one's life come from within oneself. Healthy, strong individuals seek self-expansion by experimenting, by living dangerously. Life consists of an almost infinite number of possibilities, and the healthy person (the superman) explores as many of them as possible. Religions or philosophies that teach pity, humility, submissiveness, self-contempt, self-restraint, guilt, or a sense of community are simply incorrect. [...] For Nietzsche, the good life is ever-changing, challenging, devoid of regret, intense, creative, and risky."
  • Those who dance appear insane to those who cannot hear the music.
    • First recorded appearance: Germaine de Staël's On Germany (1813). ". . . sometimes even in the habitual course of life, the reality of this world disappears all at once, and we feel ourselves in the middle of its interests as we should at a ball, where we did not hear the music; the dancing that we saw there would appear insane." There are several other pre-Nietzsche examples, indicating that the phrase was widespread in the nineteenth-century; it was referred to in 1927 as an "old proverb".
  • All I need is a sheet of paper and something to write with, and then I can turn the world upside down.
    • Commonly attributed to Nietzsche, but is most likely from Cornelia Funke’s Inkheart trilogy.
  • The individual has always had to struggle to keep from being overwhelmed by the tribe. If you try it, you will be lonely often, and sometimes frightened. But no price is too high to pay for the privilege of owning yourself.

Quotes about Nietzsche

[edit]

A

[edit]
  • Absolute nothingness is an ultimate ground of a purely apophatic mysticism, and it is even more primal in Mahayana Buddhism, just as it has been resurrected in the deepest expressions of a uniquely modern imagination. Nietzsche is the only Western thinker who has fully thought an absolute nothingness, although that nothingness is a deep even if elusive ground of Hegelian thinking, and of all of the fullest expressions of modern dialectical thinking and vision.
  • Only Nietzsche and Blake know a wholly fallen Godhead, a Godhead which is an absolutely alien Nihil, but the full reversal of that Nihil is apocalypse itself, an apocalypse which is an absolute joy, and Blake and Nietzsche are those very writers who have most evoked that joy.
  • Nietzsche's inverted Platonism, his insistence on life and the sensuously and materially given as against the suprasensuous and transcendent ideas which, since Plato, had been supposed to measure, judge, and give meaning to the given, ended in what is commonly called nihilism. Yet Nietzsche was no nihilist but, on the contrary, was the first to try to overcome the nihilism inherent not in the notions of the thinkers but in the reality of modern life. What he discovered in his attempt at “trans-valuation” was that within this categorical framework the sensuous loses its very raison d'être when it is deprived of its background of the suprasensuous and transcendent. “We abolished the true world: which world has remained? perhaps the world of appearances? . . . But no! together with the true world we abolished the world of appearances.” This insight in its elementary simplicity is relevant for all the turning-about operations in which the tradition found its end.
    • Hannah Arendt, Between Past and Future (1961), Chap. 1 : Tradition and the Modern Age
  • Nietzsche seems to have been unaware of the origin as well as of the modernity of the term “value” when he accepted it as a key notion in his assault on tradition. But when he began to devaluate the current values of society, the implications of the whole enterprise quickly became manifest. Ideas in the sense of absolute units had become identified with social values to such an extent that they simply ceased to exist once their value-character, their social status, was challenged. Nobody knew his way better than Nietzsche through the meandering paths of the modern spiritual labyrinth, where recollections and ideas of the past are hoarded up as though they had always been values which society depreciated whenever it needed better and newer commodities. Also, he was well aware of the profound nonsense of the new “value-free” science which was soon to degenerate into scientism and general scientific superstition and which never, despite all protests to the contrary, had anything in common with the Roman historians' attitude of sine ira et studio.
    • Hannah Arendt, Between Past and Future (1961), Chap. 1 : Tradition and the Modern Age

B

[edit]
  • It is another matter, and one that objectively considered is to the praise of Nietzsche, that he thus hurled himself against the strongest and not the weakest point in the opposing front. With his discovery of the Crucified and His host he discovered the Gospel itself in a form which was missed even by the majority of its champions, let alone its opponents, in the 19th century. And by having to attack it in this form, he has done us the good office of bringing before us the fact that we have to keep to this form as unconditionally as he rejected it, in self-evident antithesis not only to him, but to the whole tradition on behalf of which he made this final hopeless sally.
    • Karl Barth, Church Dogmatics, Ⅲ, 2.(1960), 45. Man in his Determination as the Covenant-partner of God
  • It is Nietzsche's merit that he was aware that to philosophize is radically problematic in the cultural, historicist dispensation. He recognized the terrible intellectual and moral risks involved. At the center of his every thought was the question “How is it possible to do what I am doing?” He tried to apply to his own thought the teachings of cultural relativism. This practically nobody else does. For example, Freud says that men are motivated by desire for sex and power, but he did not apply those motives to explain his own science or his own scientific activity. But if he can be a true scientist, i.e., motivated by love of the truth, so can other men, and his description of their motives is thus mortally flawed. Or if he is motivated by sex or power, he is not a scientist, and his science is only one means among many possible to attain those ends. This contradiction runs throughout the natural and social sciences. They give an account of things that cannot possibly explain the conduct of their practitioners.
    • Allan Bloom, The Closing of the American Mind (New York: 1988), pp. 203-204
  • I've come to understand that the quality of memorability and inevitability which I assumed came from intense pleasure may actually have come from a kind of pain. That is to say that one learns from Nietzsche that there is something painful about meaning. Sometimes it is the pain of difficulty, sometimes the pain of being set a standard that one cannot attain.
  • Kierkegaard's criticism of actual Christianity is an inner one; he does not confront Christianity, as, for example, Nietzsche does, with an alleged higher value, and test it by that and reject it.
    • Martin Buber, criticizing Nietzsche's concept of "Will to Power," Between Man and Man (1965), p. 61

C

[edit]
  • It is Nietzsche's merit to have critically placed the problem of the relationship between life and truth and to have denounced the confusion between truth and what sustains, justifies, and legitimizes. However, the Nietzschean chant to life, the cry for the intensification of life to the detriment of “truth” etc., are simply Nietzsche's choice, not a part of his scientific (specifically, psychological) results. ... The way of truth, if it is really undertaken — and not only “proclaimed” in the apologetic discourse of the philosopher as a “seeker of truth” — must necessarily — so is the goal of my argument — lead to the non-being. ... If Nietzsche frightens you, then take your moral ideas to their last consequences, which will lead one to embrace a negative ethic, that is, an ethic in which truth will have absolute primacy over life.
  • The more exciting life is, the more absurd is the idea of losing it. This is perhaps the secret of that proud aridity felt in Nietzsche's work. In this connection, Nietzsche appears to be the only artist to have derived the extreme consequences of an aesthetic of the Absurd, inasmuch as his final message lies in a sterile and conquering lucidity and an obstinate negation of any supernatural consolation.
    • Albert Camus, The Myth of Sisyphus (1942), translated by Justin O'Brien
  • Nietzsche's philosophy, undoubtedly, revolves around the problem of rebellion. More precisely, it begins by being a rebellion. But we sense the change of position that Nietzsche makes. With him, rebellion begins with “God is dead,” which is assumed as an established fact; then it turns against everything that aims at falsely replacing the vanished deity and reflects dishonor on a world which doubtless has no direction but which remains nevertheless the only proving-ground of the gods. Contrary to the opinion of certain of his Christian critics, Nietzsche did not form a project to kill God. He found Him dead in the soul of his contemporaries. He was the first to understand the immense importance of the event and to decide that this rebellion on the part of men could not lead to a renaissance unless it was controlled and directed. Any other attitude toward it, whether regret or complacency, must lead to the apocalypse. Thus Nietzsche did not formulate a philosophy of rebellion, but constructed a philosophy on rebellion.
  • Our conjecture that metaphysics is a substitute, albeit an inadequate one, for art, seems to be further confirmed by the fact that the metaphysician who perhaps had artistic talent to the highest degree, viz Nietzsche, almost entirely avoided the error of that of confusion. A large part of his work has predominantly empirical content. We find there, for instance, historical analyses of specific artistic phenomena, or an historical psychological analysis of morals, In the work, however, in which he expresses most strongly that which others express through metaphysics or ethics, in Thus Spake Zarathustra, he does not choose the misleading theoretical form, but openly form of art, of poetry.
    • Rudolf Carnap, "The Elimination of Metaphysics through Logical Analysis of Language", originally published in Erkenntnis, Vol II (1932), translated by Arthur Pap, published in A. J. Ayer (ed.), Logical Positivism (1959)
  • Nietzsche follows the path till he reaches a complete and absolute nihilism never perhaps achieved before or since in human thinking. Human action is deprived not merely of any rational motive but of any super-rational motive. It becomes simply the expression of a biological urge to self-assertion ; the will to power. Standing beyond good and evil, and recognizing no conscious ultimate purpose, Nietzsche's superman is the perfect animal. Nietzsche is at the opposite pole to those who subordinate means to ends and hold that the end sanctifies the means. He believes only in action as a good in itself without reference to ends.
    • E. H. Carr, The New Society (1951), Chap. 6 : The Road to Freedom
  • Nietzsche's man of noble soul is an egoist (the very type whom Kant's philosophy of morals would seek to rule out a priori), not in the sense that he is "selfish", but in the sense that he feels himself to be a standard, and creator of values. Nietzsche buttresses his idea of the noble soul with an account of what we might call the natural satisfactions of an aristocrat. He describes the "aristocratic value equation" as "good = noble = powerful = happy = beloved of God". The noble morality, with its aggression, cunning, strong drives, its pride, is something to be feared. Nietzsche is not describing the "good" man, at least in any sense which Kant would recognize, but rather the superior specimen, the "great man". He is not a good man because he obeys the moral law, but is a source of values, a superior man, a man born to command, to inspire fear and awe, a man whose sense of his own power is a cause of both pride and nobility.
    • John Casey, Pagan Virtue: An Essay in Ethics (1990), p. 81
  • If Nietzsche had not ended in imbecility, Nietzscheism would end in imbecility. Thinking in isolation and with pride ends in being an idiot. Every man who will not have softening of the heart must at last have softening of the brain.
  • Nothing is more irritating than those works which “coordinate” the luxuriant products of a mind that has focused on just about everything except a system. What is the use of giving a so-called coherence to Nietzsche’s ideas, for example, on the pretext that they revolve around a central motif? Nietzsche is a sum of attitudes, and it only diminishes him to comb his work for a will to order, a thirst for unity. A captive of his moods, he has recorded their variations. His philosophy, a meditation on his whims, is mistakenly searched by the scholars for the constants it rejects.

D

[edit]
  • Since Nietzsche frequently intends to shock his readers, they may be in a position to learn from him—providing they admit that what is shocking may also be true, and that one has not refuted a thinker by recognizing the shocking consequences of his thought.
  • Socrates was the plebeian dissector of an aristocratic society; Nietzsche is the aristocratic dissector of a plebeian society.
  • Nietzsche was a man with a noble vision of man's future. His own delicacy, integrity, and courage shine through his writing. He was also free of the crude racism which was to be an important element of fascism, and he had only contempt for political anti-Semitism. But the fact remains that in various ways Nietzsche influenced fascism. Fascism may have abused the words of Nietzsche, but his words are singularly easy to abuse.
    • Werner J. Dannhauser, "Nietzsche", in Leo Strauss and Joseph Cropsey, eds. History of political philosophy 3rd ed. (1987)
  • The spirit of scientific investigation never ceased to impress [Nietzsche] as uniquely favorable not only for achieving knowledge but also for furnishing an atmosphere of dryness and clarity within which a man of genuinely intellectual conscience might function.
  • Friedrich Nietzsche saw—through the mists of his contempt for all things English—an even more cosmic message in Darwin: God is dead. If Nietzsche is the father of existentialism, then perhaps Darwin deserves the title of grandfather.
    • Daniel Dennett, Darwin's Dangerous Idea (1995), Chap. 3 : Universal Acid
  • Nietzsche's Just So Stories are terrific (old-style and new-style). They are a mixture of brilliant and crazy, sublime and ignoble, devastatingly acute history and untrammeled fantasy. If Darwin's imagination was to some degree handicapped by his English mercantile heritage, Nietzsche's was even more handicapped by his German intellectual heritage, but those biographical facts (whatever they are) have no bearing on the current value of the memes whose birth each attended so brilliantly.
    • Daniel Dennett, Darwin's Dangerous Idea (1995), Chap. 16 : On the Origin of Morality
  • Only a professor of paradox could rank the obscure and dogmatic fragments of Heraclitus above the mellowed wisdom and the developed art of Plato. With all his philology, Nietzsche never quite penetrated to the spirit of the Greeks; never learned the lesson that moderation and self-knowledge (as taught by the Delphic inscriptions and the greater· philosophers) must bank, without extinguishing, the fires of passion and desire; that Apollo must limit Dionysus. Some have described Nietzsche as a pagan; but he was not that: neither Greek pagan like Pericles nor German pagan like Goethe; he lacked the balance and restraint that made these men strong. “I shall give back to men the serenity which is the condition of all culture,” he writes, but alas, how can one give what one has not? ...Foiled in his search for love, he turned upon woman with a bitterness unworthy of a philosopher, and unnatural in a man; missing parentage and losing friendship, he never knew that the finest moments of life come through mutuality and comradeship, rather than from domination and war. He did not live long enough, or widely enough, to mature his half-truths into wisdom. Perhaps if he had lived longer he would have turned his strident chaos into a harmonious philosophy. Truer of him than of the Jesus to whom he applied them, were his own words: “He died too early; he himself would have revoked his doctrine had he Teached” a riper age; “noble enough to revoke he was!” But death had other plans...He spoke with bitterness, but with invaluable sincerity; and his thought went through the clouds and cobwebs of the modern mind like cleansing lightning and a-rushing wind. The air of European philosophy is clearer and fresher now because Nietzsche wrote.

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  • In Nietzsche's view, the death of God must also spell the death of Man—that is to say, the end of a certain lordly, overweening humanism—if absolute power is not simply to be transplanted from the one to the other. Otherwise humanism will always be secretly theological. It will be a continuation of God by other means.
    • Terry Eagleton, Reason, Faith, and Revolution: Reflections on the God Debate (2009), Chapter 1. The Scum of the Earth
  • Nietzsche sought a new sort of aristocracy of super- or above-men, which would be the ultimate goal of civilized existence. The sources of this Nietzschean idea were several. Darwin's theory of evolution suggested to Nietzsche the notion of humanity as an evolving species, although Nietzsche emphatically rejected the concept of the superman or above-man as the outcome of a biological process; in a sense, the superman or above-man is a spiritualized form of Darwinism.
    • Alan Ebenstein, Hayek's Journey: The Mind of Friedrich Hayek (2003), Ch. 2. German and Viennese Intellectual Thought

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The degree of introspection achieved by Nietzsche had never been achieved by anyone, nor is it ever likely to be achieved again. ~ Sigmund Freud
  • Nietzsche was the first to release the desire to know from the sovereignty of knowledge itself: to re-establish the distance and exteriority that Aristotle cancelled.
  • The degree of introspection achieved by Nietzsche had never been achieved by anyone, nor is it ever likely to be achieved again.
    • Sigmund Freud, in remarks (28 October 1908), as reported in Freud, Adler, and Jung (1980) by Walter Arnold Kaufmann, p. 265
    • Variant: Freud several times said of Nietzsche that he had a more penetrating knowledge of himself than any other man who ever lived or was likely to live.
      • As reported in Freud, Adler, and Jung (1980) by Walter Arnold Kaufmann, p. 266 (part of this statement has sometimes been taken as a direct quote of Freud, rather than a summation of what he said).

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  • Nietzsche was not a social theorist, but a poet, a rebel, and innovator. His aristocracy was neither of birth nor of purse; it was of the spirit. In that respect Nietzsche was an anarchist, and all true anarchists were aristocrats.
  • In Vienna one could hear interesting lectures on modern German prose and poetry. One could read the works of the young iconoclasts in art and letters, the most daring among them being Nietzsche. The magic of his language, the beauty of his vision, carried me to undreamed-of heights. [...] I had to do my reading at the expense of much-needed sleep; but what was physical strain in view of my raptures over Nietzsche? The fire of his soul, the rhythm of his song, made life richer, fuller, and more wonderful for me.
  • The most disheartening tendency common among readers is to tear out one sentence from a work, as a criterion of the writer's ideas or personality. Friedrich Nietzsche, for instance, is decried as a hater of the weak because he believed in the Uebermensch. It does not occur to the shallow interpreters of that giant mind that this vision of the Uebermensch also called for a state of society which will not give birth to a race of weaklings and slaves.

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  • Nietzsche wanted to explode the framework of Occidental rationalism within which the competitors of Left and Right Hegelianism still moved. His antihumanism, continued by Heidegger and Bataille in two variations, is the real challenge for the discourse of modernity.
    • Jürgen Habermas, The Philosophical Discourse of Modernity (1985), Lecture 3 : Three Perspectives: Left Hegelians, Right Hegelians, and Nietzsche
  • The theory of a will to power operating in every event provides the framework within which Nietzsche explains how the fictions of a world comprised of entities and of goods arise, as well as the illusory identities of knowing and morally acting subjects; how, with the soul and self-consciousness, a sphere of inwardness is constituted; how metaphysics, science, and the ascetic ideal achieved dominance ― and, finally, how subject-centered reason owes this entire inventory to the occurrence of an unsalutary, masochistic inversion of the very core of the will to power. The nihilistic domination of subject-centered reason is conceived as the result and expression of a perversion of the will to power.
    • Jürgen Habermas, The Philosophical Discourse of Modernity (1985), Lecture 4 : The Entry into Postmodernity: Nietzsche as a Turning Point
  • If in Nietzsche's thinking the prior tradition of Western thought is gathered and completed in a decisive respect, then the confrontation with Nietzsche becomes one with all Western thought hitherto.
  • Nietzsche ... does not shy from conscious exaggeration and one-sided formulations of his thought, believing that in this way he can most clearly set in relief what in his vision and in his inquiry is different from the run-of-the-mill.
  • One indication of the importance of Nietzsche is the pantheon of major twentieth century intellectuals whom he influenced. He was an influence on Jean-Paul Sartre and Hermann Hesse, major writers, both of whom won Nobel Prizes. He was an influence on thinkers as diverse in their outlooks as Ayn Rand and Michel Foucault. Rand's politics are classically liberal -- while Foucault's are far Left, including a stint as a member of the French Communist Party. There is the striking fact that Nietzsche was an atheist, but he was an influence on Martin Buber, one of the most widely-read theologians of the twentieth century. And Nietzsche said harsh things about the Jews ... but he was nonetheless admired by Chaim Weizmann, a leader of the Zionist movement and first president of Israel.
    • Stephen Hicks, Nietzsche and the Nazis (2006, 2010), Ockham's Razor, ISBN: 9492262049, pp. 51-52
  • Nietzsche, the eloquent and menacing prophet of an impending catastrophe whose exact nature he did not quite define, expressed this crisis of expectations better than anyone else. His very mode of literary exposition, by means of a succession of poetic and prophetic aphorisms containing visionary intuitions or unargued truths, seemed a contradiction of the rationalist system-building discourse of philosophy which he claimed to practise. His enthusiastic admirers multiplied among middle-class (male) youth from 1890.
    For Nietzsche, the avant garde decadence, pessimism and nihilism of the 1880s was more than a fashion. They were 'the logical end-product of our great values and ideals'. Natural science, he argued, produced its own internal disintegration, its own enemies, an anti-science. The consequences of the modes of thought accepted by nineteenth-century politics and economics were nihilist. The culture of the age was threatened by its own cultural products. Democracy produced socialism, the fatal swamping of genius by mediocrity, strength by weakness - a note also struck, in a more pedestrian and positivistic key, by the eugenists. In that case was it not essential to reconsider all these values and ideals and the system of ideas of which they formed a part, for in any case the 'revaluation of all values' was taking place? Such reflections multiplied as the old century drew to its end. The only ideology of serious calibre which remained firmly committed to the nineteenth-century belief in science, reason and progress was Marxism, which was unaffected by disillusion about the present because it looked forward to the future triumph of precisely those 'masses' whose rise created so much uneasiness among middle-class thinkers.

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  • If you try to put yourself into the mood of someone who is always alone, as Nietzsche was, you realize that your own consciousness then begins to stare into your own face. You are always your own speaker and your own listener; you are always looking into your own light, into your own eyes. And then you can well personify consciousness as your daily partner.

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  • The realization that our mental functioning is largely irrational was arrived at by several thinkers at the same time, including Friedrich Nietzsche, ... Freud, who was much influenced by both Darwin and Nietzsche ... was its most profound and articulate exponent.
  • The philosopher John Searle once told me that reading Nietzsche was like drinking cognac — a sip was good, but you didn't want to drink the whole bottle.
  • Nietzsche was the first major German philosopher who was not strongly influenced by Kant. Like Hegel and many other German philosophers, he was steeped in Goethe, but he was free of the fateful compulsion to reconcile Goethe with Kant.
  • Nietzsche's attack on belief in rationality and truth, his denial of morality rooted in religious belief, came to seem anything but misplaced. The Churches could not come out of this era untarnished. Yet neither the loss of belief nor fall in the numbers of followers of the main Christian denominations should be exaggerated or pre-dated. After two world wars that influence remained profound. For all their travails the Christian Churches survived the catastrophic first half of the twentieth century remarkably intact. Their main problems would come later.
  • Nietzsche may have been seriously wrong in his understanding of modernity: he may have mistaken one part of the story—the rise of secularism—for the whole tale; but few men have struggled as honestly with the problem of nihilism as he.
  • All in all, Nietzsche was an opponent of socialism, an opponent of nationalism, and an opponent of racial thinking. Apart from these bents of mind, he might have made an outstanding Nazi.
    • Ernst Krieck, Nazi theoretician (1882-1947), as quoted by Max Whyte, “The Uses and Abuses of Nietzsche in the Third Reich: Alfred Baeumler’s ‘Heroic Realism.’” Journal of Contemporary History Vol 43, no. 2 (2008), p. 188

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  • Nietzsche’s arrival in modern philosophy signaled an unprecedented necessity: “probity”, “intellectual conscience”, Enlightenment radicalized by a new bravery that scorns any comforts like God.
  • Strauss’ whole study indicates that noble nature as Nietzsche presents it—no, embodies it—replaces divine nature as Plato presents it.
  • The morality of Nietzsche is a mere innovation. The first is an advance because no one who did not admit the validity of the old maxim could see reason for accepting the new one, and anyone who accepted the old would at once recognize the new as an extension of the same principle. If he rejected it, he would have to reject it as a superfluity, something that went too far, not as something simply heterogeneous from his own ideas of value. But the Nietzschean ethic can be accepted only if we are ready to scrap traditional morals as a mere error and then to put ourselves in a position where we can find no ground for any value judgments at all.
    • C. S. Lewis, in The Abolition of Man (1943) Chapter 2. The Way
  • Friederich Nietzsche, the mad philosopher of the nineteenth century of the Christian Era, who caught wild glimpses of truth, but who, before he was done, reasoned himself around the great circle of human thought and off into madness.
    • Jack London, in The Iron Heel (in a footnote written by a future historian)

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  • What Nietzsche portrays is aristocratic self-assertion; what Homer and the sagas show are forms of assertion proper to and required by a certain role. The self becomes what it is in heroic societies only through its role; it is a social creation, not an individual one. Hence when Nietzsche projects back on to the archaic past his own nineteenth-century individualism, he reveals that what looked like an historical enquiry was actually an inventive literary construction. Nietzsche replaces the fictions of the Enlightenment individualism, of which he is so contemptuous, with a set of individualist fictions of his own. From this is it does not follow that one could not be an undeceived Nietzschean; and the whole importance of being a Nietzschean does after all lie in the triumph of being finally undeceived, being, as Nietzsche put it, truthful at last. It is simply, one might be tempted to conclude, that any would-be true Nietzschean will after all have to go further than Nietzsche.
  • There are critics who see in all this proof that Nietzsche showed signs of insanity from early manhood, but as a matter of fact it was his abnormally accurate vision and not a vision gone awry, that made him stand so aloof from his fellows. In the vast majority of those about him he saw the coarse metal of sham and pretense beneath the showy gilding of learning. ... It was inevitable that he should perceive the difference between his own fanatical striving for the truth and the easy dependence upon precedent and formula which lay beneath their booming bombast.
    • H. L. Mencken, The Philosophy of Friedrich Nietzsche (1908), p. 27-28
  • The reader who cares to go into the matter further will find Nietzsche elbowing other sages in a multitude of places. […] Stirner's chief work, Der Einzige und sein Eigentum, was first published in 1844, the year of Nietzsche's birth, and in its strong plea for the emancipation of the individual there are many ideas and even phrases that were later voiced by Nietzsche: "What is good and what is evil? I myself am my own rule, and I am neither good nor evil. Neither word means anything to me… Between the two vicissitudes of victory and defeat swings the fate of the struggle—master or slave!… Egoism, not love, must decide." […] But there is a considerable gulf between Stirner and Nietzsche, even here. The former's plea is for absolute liberty for all men, great and small. The latter is for liberty only in the higher castes: the chandala he would keep in chains. Therefore, if Nietzsche actually got anything from Stirner, it certainly did not enter unchanged into the ultimate structure of his system.
  • By the middle of the [Eighteenth] century what Nietzsche was later to call a transvaluation of all values was in full blast. Nothing sacred was spared—not even the classical spirit that had been the chief attainment of the Renaissance—and of the ideas and attitudes that were attacked not many survived. It was no longer necessary to give even lip service to the old preposterous certainties, whether theological or political, aesthetic or philosophical. In France, Voltaire, Rousseau and Diderot were making a bonfire of all the ancient Christian superstitions; in England Gibbon was preparing to revive the long dormant art of history and Adam Smith was laying the foundations of the new science of economics; in Germany Kant was pondering an ethical scheme that that would give the Great Commandment a rational basis.
  • Nietzsche's dynamic contradictiousness has served as a source for the kind of static, somnolent, undiscriminating, sceptical tolerance which seems to be expressed by the claim to have stopped believing in sin. Readiness to question everything mutates mysteriously into a pose of equal indifference to all possible answers. Can this be more than pose? That it often is a pose, lasting only till the owner's moral corns happen to be trodden on, is by now a common observation. (The shocked immoralist in Tom Stoppard's play Professional Foul is a nice case.) But this is not just an unfair joke by satirists. What else could the undiscriminating position be? It is scarcely possible to vindicate it as a stern attempt to stand by one's moral principles, and remain indifferent in the face of all temptation to do otherwise.
    • Mary Midgley, Wickedness (1984), Chap. 2 : Intelligibility and Immoralism

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  • In the coarsest sense, to say that Nietzsche's style is important is to say that his writing is unusual and idiosyncratic. This in turn is just to say that his works do not exhibit the features we have been accustomed to expect of philosophical treatises. And, forgetting that philosophical treatises themselves have been written in the most various styles imaginable, this has often been taken to show that Nietzsche's works are not, in some sense, philosophical.
    • Alexander Nehamas, Nietzsche: Life as Literature, Ch. 1, The Most Multifarious Art of Style
  • The one reaction Nietzsche cannot tolerate is indifference, and this is what his use of hyperbole is designed to eliminate.
  • Loyalty to life, according to Nietzsche, begins in the resolve to seek life's principle with itself and not in something outside it—not, for example, in a God or supernature that, by being conceived as all that life is not—infinite, eternal, changeless, perfect goodness, perfect plenitude—stands as antithetical to life.
    • David L. Norton, Personal Destinies: A Philosophy of Ethical Individualism (1976), p. 80

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  • Along with ignoring the French Revolution, one of the most telling features of the new books on atheism [cf. new atheism ] is their consistent refusal to engage Nietzsche, who, if read correctly, ought to make atheists squirm far more than he has ever caused discomfit to believers. ¶ First, he turned the critical methods of the Enlightenment against their inventors and showed that Enlightened faith in progress was just as illusory as belief in an afterlife. Second, he demanded that a critical philosophy stop pretending to be a substitute religion (he shrewdly called Hegelian idealism “insidious theology”). Third, he insisted on the indissoluble bond between Christian doctrine and Christian morality and poured contempt on novelists like George Eliot for supposing otherwise [...] ¶ Perhaps this why Nietzsche said in Ecce Homo, “the most serious Christians have always been well disposed toward me.” For they at least, unlike Dawkins, Harris, Daniel Dennett and Christopher Hitchens, can see that after Nietzsche a moral critique of the Christian God has become impossible, for it denies the very presupposition that makes its own critique possible. Like Abraham asking if the Lord God of justice could not himself do justice, protest atheism must accept the very norms that Nietzsche showed are essential to the meaning of belief. In Nietzsche alone one reads what the world really looks like si Deus non sit [if God does not exist].
  • It will be seen by the discriminating that Nietzsche in... bidding his renaissant aristocrats to ignore morality in favour of their own individual needs was, in reality, allotting them a difficult task, and one that from the moral point of view is often commended. Yet the distinction must be insisted upon that an individually determined adjustment of means to ends is contrary to the very spirit of popular morality, however externally it may appear to be high morality. For the aristocrat in determining his own mode of life specifically repudiates any universal value in it. He not only does not accept the common mode of life, but he has no desire to make his own mode common. That, in fact, is the distinction between the aristocrat and the demagogue turned tyrant. The mark of the plebeian raised to power is that he desires his values to become universal. He desires all men to say, do, think and feel as he says, does, thinks and feels. But the true aristocrat desires that all men shall be like himself free, self-ruling, self-choosing. But this reticence and self-denial are also difficult to maintain in the face of popular sophistry. Nietzsche, however, makes it clear that war against popular sophistry is the normal condition of the aristocrat. To develop individual power there is needed a long purpose and a great resistance; and what resistance can be greater than that offered by the multitude? Hence, in one sense, the multitude with their gods are indispensable to the creation of the powerful man. As a sort of battlefield and place of exercise, the populace serve the needs of the aristocrat.

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  • Friedrich Nietzsche. It's easy to see why his sociopathic ravings would have inspired so many repugnant movements of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, including fascism, Nazism, Bolshevism, the Ayn Randian fringe of libertarianism, and the American alt-Right and neo-Nazi movements today. Less easy to see is why he continues to be a darling of the academic humanities. True, he was a punchy stylist, and, as his apologists note, he extolled the individual superman rather than a master race. But as Bertrand Russell pointed out in A History of Western Philosophy, the intellectual content is slim: it “might be stated more simply and honestly in the one sentence: ‘I wish I had lived in the Athens of Pericles or the Florence of the Medici’.”
  • There is nothing more wrong and misleading than thinking that Nietzsche embodied the bourgeois (or even petty bourgeois) anthropological response to Marx's anthropological solution, defined as proletarian. The anthropological solution that Nietzsche proposes is, on the contrary, consciously post-bourgeois, because it dissolves all the previous 'ethical contents” of bourgeois society itself. [...] Nietzsche's is an ethics of the all-sided valorisation of the individual, and at the same time an ethics that no longer has ethics as its reference point, as in Hegel. Nietzsche no longer has ethics as his reference point, because his proclamation of the death of God is also a proclamation of the demise of any bourgeois or proletarian ethics. His is an ethic of the individual, or rather of the mature (too mature) stage of modern individuality.

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  • Nietzsche, the child of a Lutheran pastor, radicalized this argument, painting all of Christianity—indeed all of Western religion, going back to Judaism—as a slave morality, the psychic revolt of the lower orders against their betters. Before there was religion or even morality, there was the sense and sensibility of the master class. The master looked upon his body—its strength and beauty, its demonstrated excellence and reserves of power—and saw and said that it was good. ... The modern residue of that slave revolt, Nietzsche makes clear, is found not in Christianity, or even in religion, but in the nineteenth-century movements for democracy and socialism ...
    • Corey Robin, "Garbage and Gravita", The Nation (June 7, 2010)
  • Part of Nietzsche's worry was philosophical: How was it possible in a godless world, naturalistically conceived, to deem anything of value? But his concern was also cultural and political. Because of democracy, which was “Christianity made natural,” the aristocracy had lost “its naturalness”—that is, the traditional vindication of its power. How then might a hierarchy of excellence, aesthetic and political, re-establish itself, defend itself against the mass—particularly a mass of workers—and dominate that mass? [...] Nietzsche's response to that challenge was not to revert or resort to a more objective notion of value: that was neither possible nor desirable. Instead, he embraced one part of the modern understanding of value—its fabricated nature—and turned it against its democratic and Smithian premises. Value was indeed a human creation, Nietzsche acknowledged, and as such could just as easily be conceived as a gift, an honorific bestowed by one man upon another. “Through esteeming alone is there value,” Nietzsche has Zarathustra declare; “to esteem is to create.” Value was not made with coarse and clumsy hands; it was enacted with an appraising gaze, a nod of the head signifying a matchless abundance of taste. It was, in short, aristocratic.
    • Corey Robin, "Nietzsche’s Marginal Children: On Friedrich Hayek", The Nation (May 7, 2013)
  • In spite of Nietzsche's criticism of the romantics, his outlook owes much to them; it is that of aristocratic anarchism, like Byron's, and one is not surprised to find him admiring Byron. He attempts to combine two sets of values which are not easily harmonized: on the one hand he likes ruthlessness, war, and aristocratic pride; on the other hand, he loves philosophy and literature and the arts, especially music. Historically, these values coexisted in the Renaissance; Pope Julius II, fighting for Bologna and employing Michelangelo, might be taken as the sort of man whom Nietzsche would wish to see in control of governments. It is natural to compare Nietzsche with Machiavelli, in spite of important differences between the two men. As for the differences: Machiavelli was a man of affairs, whose opinions had been formed by close contact with public business, and were in harmony with his age; he was not pedantic or systematic, and his philosophy of politics scarcely forms a coherent whole; Nietzsche, on the contrary, was a professor, an essentially bookish man, and a philosopher in conscious opposition to what appeared to be the dominant political and ethical trends of his time. The similarities, however, go deeper. Nietzsche's political philosophy is analogous to that of The Prince (not The Discourses), though it is worked out and applied over a wider field. Both Nietzsche and Machiavelli have an ethic which aims at power and is deliberately anti-Christian, though Nietzsche is more frank in this respect. What Caesar Borgia was to Machiavelli, Napoleon was to Nietzsche: a great man defeated by petty opponents.
  • Nietzsche's objection to Christianity is that it caused acceptance of what he calls 'slave morality'. It is curious to observe the contrast between his arguments and those of the French philosophes who preceded the Revolution. They argued that Christian dogmas are untrue; that Christianity teaches submission to what is deemed to be the will of God, whereas self-respecting human beings should not bow before any higher Power; and that the Christian Churches have become the allies of tyrants, and are helping the enemies of democracy to deny liberty and continue to grind the faces of the poor. Nietzsche is not interested in the metaphysical truth of either Christianity or any other religion; being convinced that no religion is really true, he judges all religions entirely by their social effects. He agrees with the philosophes in objecting to submission to the supposed will of God, but he would substitute for it the will of earthly 'artist-tyrants'. Submission is right, except for these supermen, but not submission to the Christian God. As for the Christian Churches' being allies of tyrants and enemies of democracy, that, he says, is the very reverse of the truth. The French Revolution and Socialism are, according to him, essentially identical in spirit with Christianity; to all alike he is opposed, and for the same reason: that he will not treat all men as equal in any respect whatever.
  • Speaking of Spinoza he [Nietzsche] says: "How much of personal timidity and vulnerability does this masquerade of a sickly recluse betray!" Exactly the same may be said of him, with the less reluctance since he has not hesitated to say it of Spinoza. It is obvious that in his day-dreams he is a warrior, not a professor; all the men he admires were military. His opinion of women, like every man's, is an objectification of his own emotion towards them, which is obviously one of fear. "[Thou goest to woman?] Forget not thy whip"—but nine women out of ten would get the whip away from him, and he knew it, so he kept away from women, and soothed his wounded vanity with unkind remarks.

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  • Nietzsche was personally more philosophical than his philosophy. His talk about power, harshness, and superb immorality was the hobby of a harmless young scholar and constitutional invalid. He did not crave in the least either wealth or empire. What he loved was solitude, nature, music, books. But his imagination, like his judgment, was captious; it could not dwell on reality, but reacted furiously against it. Accordingly, when he speaks of the will to be powerful, power is merely an eloquent word on his lips. It symbolises the escape from mediocrity. What power would be when attained and exercised remains entirely beyond his horizon. What meets us everywhere is the sense of impotence and a passionate rebellion against it.
  • At the University of Basel Professor Eucken often served with Nietzsche on the examining committee of candidates for the doctorate in classical philology. On such occasions, if the student appeared to be getting the worst of it in the verbal contest, Nietzsche would be observed to become more and more nervous until, finally, he could contain himself no longer and would break in with leading questions: "I suppose you mean so-and-so?" or "Do you not believe this or that?" until he got the student to say just about what he should have said in the first place. Professor Eucken does not regard the widespread influence of Nietzsche as altogether evil, believing he should not be held responsible for all the vagaries and extravagances of his devotees. The reason of Nietzsche's popularity, according to Eucken, is his strong individualism; for the Germans, in spite of governmental control and the Social Democracy, are pronounced individualists in character. The German will insist upon having his own house, his own seat, his own opinion.
  • I think he sets a certain standard, let's say a standard of seriousness. (Q: Doesn't he seem intolerant to you, even merciless?) Sontag: He's very vehement, yes. Kafka too was very vehement, and he excluded a great deal, in his life and in his work. These are people whose lives I find exemplary in some respect-their thoughts, their ideas, their work, their seriousness.
    • 1987 interview in Conversations with Susan Sontag edited by Leland Poague (1995)
  • Owing to its radical anti-egalitarianism Nietzsche's vision of a possible future is in a sense more profoundly political than Marx' vision. Like the typical Continental European conservative Nietzsche saw in communism only the completion of democratic egalitarianism and of the liberalistic demand for freedom which is not a "freedom for" but only a "freedom from." But in contradistinction to those conservatives he held that conservatism as such is doomed, since all merely defensive positions, all merely backward looking endeavors are doomed. The future seemed to be with democracy and nationalism. Both were regarded by Nietzsche as incompatible with what he held to be the task of the twentieth century.
    • Leo Strauss, "Philosophy as Rigorous Science and Political Philosophy", Interpretation: A Journal of Political Philosophy 2, no. 1 (1971)
  • Nietzsche's criticism can be reduced to one proposition: modern man has been trying to preserve biblical morality while abandoning biblical faith. That is impossible.
    • Leo Strauss, "Progress or Return? The Contemporary Crisis in Western Civilization", Modern Judaism 1 (1981)
  • It is certainly not an overstatement to say that no one has ever spoken so greatly and so nobly of what a philosopher is as Nietzsche.
    • Leo Strauss, "Existentialism", lecture delivered in 1956, published in Interpretation, Spring 1995, Vol. 22, No. 3

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  • Friedrich Nietzsche, the famous atheist and ardent enemy of religion and Christianity, knew more about the power the idea of God than many faithful Christians.
    • Paul Tillich, The Shaking of the Foundations (1948), Chapter 6. The Escape From God
  • Nietzsche knew of the ambiguity in all life. He knew of the creative and destructive elements which are always present in every life process. If you want to find out about his idea of God, do not look first to his statement that "God is dead." Read instead the last fragments of The Will to Power, which is a collection of fragments. It is not a book in itself. The last fragment describes the divine demonic character of life in formulations which show the ambiguity, the greatness, and the destructiveness of life. He asks us to affirm this life in its great ambiguity. Out of this he then has another kind of God, a God in which the demonic underground, the Dionysian underground, is clearly visible. The victory of the element of rationality or of meaning is not as clear as in other philosophers like Kant or Hegel, Hume or Locke, but there is an opening up of vitality, and its half-creative, half-destructive power.
  • This divergence and perversion of the essential question is most striking in what goes today by the name of philosophy. There would seem to be only one question for philosophy to resolve: What must I do? Despite being combined with an enormous amount of unnecessary confusion, answers to the question have at any rate been given within the philosophical tradition on the Christian nations. For example, in Kant's Critique of Practical Reason, or in Spinoza, Schopenhauer and specially Rousseau. But in more recent times, since Hegel's assertion that all that exists is reasonable, the question of what one must do has been pushed to the background and philosophy has directed its whole attention to the investigation of things as they are, and to fitting them into a prearranged theory. This was the first step backwards. The second step, degrading human thought yet further, was the acceptance of the struggle for existence as a basic law, simply because that struggle can be observed among animals and plants. According to this theory the destruction of the weakest is a law which should not be opposed. And finally, the third step was taken when the childish originality of Nietzsche´s half-crazed thought, presenting nothing complete or coherent, but only various drafts of immoral and completely unsubstantiated ideas, was accepted by the leading figures as the final word in philosophical science. In reply to the question: what must we do? the answer is now put straightforwardly as: live as you like, without paying attention to the lives of others. If anyone doubted that the Christian world of today has reached a frightful state of torpor and brutalization (not forgeting the recent crimes committed in the Boers and in China, which were defended by the clergy and acclaimed as heroic feats by all the world powers), the extraordinary success of Nietzsche's works is enough to provide irrefutable proof of this. Some disjointed writings, striving after effect in a most sordid manner, appear, written by a daring, but limited and abnormal German, suffering from power mania. Neither in talent nor in their basic argument to these writings justify public attention. In the days of Kant, Leibniz, or Hume, or even fifty years ago, such writings would not only have received no attention, but they would not even have appeared. But today all the so called educated people are praising the ravings of Mr. N, arguing about him, elucidating him, and countless copies of his works are printed in all languages.
    • Leo Tolstoy, What is Religion : Of What Does its Essence Consist? (1902), Ch. 11
  • The whole world knows that virtue consists in the subjugation of one's passions, or in self-renunciation. It is not just the Christian world, against whom Nietzsche howls, that knows this, but it is an eternal supreme law towards which all humanity has developed, including Brahmanism, Buddhism, Confucianism, and the ancient Persian religion. And suddenly a man appears who declares that he is convinced that self-renunciation, meekness, submissiveness and love are all vices that destroy humanity (he has in mind Christianity, ignoring all the other religions). One can understand why such a declaration baffled people at first. But after giving it a little thought and failing to find any proof of the strange propositions, any rational person ought to throw the books aside and wonder if there is any kind of rubbish that would not find a publisher today. But this has not happened with Nietzsche´s books. The majority of pseudo-enlightened people seriously look into the theory of the übermensch, and acknowledge its author to be a great philosopher, a descendant of Descartes, Leibniz and Kant. And all this has come about because the majority of pseudo-enlightened men of today object to any reminder of virtue, or to its chief premise: self-renunciation and love—virtues that restrain and condemn the animal side of their life. They gladly welcome a doctrine, however incoherently and disjointedly expressed, of egotism and cruelty, sanctioning the idea of personal happiness and superiority over the lives of others, by which they live.
    • Leo Tolstoy, What is Religion : Of What Does its Essence Consist? (1902), Ch. 11
  • It would certainly not be difficult to unearth in Nietzsche’s voluminous works a few pages which, outside their context, might serve to illustrate any preconceived thesis, particularly within the framework of a global exegesis which, parenthetically, would be quite useful to the works of Nietzsche, which are more obscure than profound. This is what the anarchists of Western Europe did, who hastened to consider Nietzsche one of them and who received a cruel rebuff: the philosopher of the master’s morality rejected them with all the rudeness he was capable of. It is clear to the reader, we hope, that we find sterile such a literary and textual attitude towards the writings rich in paradoxes of the recently deceased German thinker, whose aphorisms are often contradictory and in general allow for dozens of interpretations. The natural road towards a correct clarification of Nietzschean philosophy is the analysis of the social base that gave birth to this complex product. The present article strove to carry out an analysis of this kind. The base revealed itself to be rotten, pernicious, and poisoned. From which this conclusion: let them invite us as much as they want to dive in all confidence into Nietzscheism, to breathe deeply in his works the fresh air of proud individualism. We will not answer these appeals and, without fearing facile reproaches of narrowness and exclusivism, will reply with skepticism the way Nathaniel did in the gospel: “Can anything good come out of Nazareth?”
  • Probably no one as skillfully as Nietzsche has managed to appeal to the wild instincts that are dormant in man, and on the other hand to outrage at himself all the lofty feelings that we owe to the higher element in us. This way of writing ensured Nietzsche a huge number of readers.
    • Kazimierz Twardowski, "Fryderyk Nietzsche". In Lewicki, Witold (ed.). Przełom, R. 1, Vienna, 8 June 1885, no. 2-3, p. 77.

V

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  • Nietzsche does not favor reckless, anarchic action. The model of the artist, and more specifically the musician, is important. Rhythm is of the essence; timing of notes, of actions, allows for a style that is cohesive, even if not uniform. The music that emerges comes out over time, it becomes and develops slowly into a whole that is effective if timed well. Again Nietzsche sees that artists, especially musicians and poets, have such a talent. And to the extent that a writer writes poetically, he also shares in this talent.
    • Diego A. von Vacano, The Art of Power: Machiavelli, Nietzsche and the Making of Aesthetic Political Theory (2007, Lanham, Maryland: Lexington Books, pp. 99-100)
  • In Nietzsche and [Jakob] Burckhardt the German language had its last great voices of the old Goethean individualism amid the triumphant Bismarck era of statism and mechanized material power. . . . Nietzsche remains unequaled in anticipating out ever-increasing need today for the full, unmechanized personality.
  • The two leitmotifs of the present writer's Metapolitics: From the Romantics to Hitler, 1941, were the rival outlooks of Nietzsche, Wagner: Nietzsche as the voice warning Germany against nationalism, anti-Semitism, herd-collectivism; Wagner as the voice teaching Hitler his Aryan racism, anti-parliamentary leadership-cult, anti-aristocratic cult of the collective "folk." . . . Nietzsche's was the only voice in the 1880's to say that Richard Wagner's folk-romanticism and anti-Semitism would make his German nationalist disciples "the destroyers of both German and European culture."

W

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The faith men formerly invested in God they would now invest in barbaric "brotherhoods with the aim of the robbery and exploitation of the non-brothers." ~ Tom Wolfe.
Nietzsche did not think that the ideal of truthfulness went into retirement when its metaphysical origins were discovered, and he did not suppose, either, that truthfulness could be detached from a concern for the truth. Truthfulness as an ideal retains its power, and so far from his seeing truth as dispensable or malleable, his main question is how it can be made bearable. ~ Bernard Williams
  • Nietzsche, like other young men of great intellectual gifts, was debilitated by the effects of masturbation.
    • Richard Wagner, as quoted by Siegfried Mandel in the Introduction to Nietzsche by Lou Salmoé (University of Illinois press, 2001), page 55
  • In 1870 Nietzsche knew that nihilism stood at the door; now it is with us. Despair for mankind is nearly universal. What hope is there? The current protest of youth is basically a rebellion against a nihilistic society, but what comes next?
    • Lancelot Law Whyte, The Universe of Experience: A Worldview Beyond Science and Religion (1974)
  • I don't see Nietzsche as the sort of philosopher whose views you just adopt: there are all sorts of problems with his positive views about the future, about politics, and so on. I see him in the same way that Foucault saw him, as a sort of resource. Foucault said that there isn't any one Nietzsche: everybody gets out of him what they find most helpful. I'm also convinced, from my own experience, that you get most out of him when you've got part of the way there on some path of your own. I think it's arriving at some thoughts of my own which turned out to be not dissimilar to things that Nietzsche had developed in greater depth that has greatly increased my interest in him. I do think that his genealogies are very remarkable constructions, and deserve our attention and respect. But of course they go beyond the metaphysical psychology of Kantian moralism. They also extend much more generally to the sources of our moral conceptions and their associated metaphysical models.
    • Bernard Williams, interview in Key Philosophers in Conversation (1999) edited by Andrew Pyle
  • Although Nietzsche was keenly alive to what concerns the deniers, he was an opponent of them. The indifference to truthfulness which they encourage would be for him merely an aspect of nihilism. When he discovered that the values of truth and truthfulness, such as the resistance to self-deception and to comforting mythologies, were not self-justifying and not given simply with the concept of truth—unless the concept of truth is itself inflated into providing some metaphysical teleology of human existence, of the kind that he rejected in Platonism—he did not settle for a demure civic conversation in the style of Richard Rorty's ironist, or saunter off with the smug nod that registers a deconstructive job neatly done. He was aware that his own criticisms and exposures owed both their motivation and their effect to the spirit of truthfulness. His aim was to see how far the values of truth could be revalued, how they might be understood in a perspective quite different from the Platonic and Christian metaphysics which had provided their principal source in the West up to now.
  • Anyone who can understand that the Buddhist idea of Nirvana is not merely negative, and that the Buddha himself who (like the Superman) 'looks down on suffering humanity like a hillsman on the planes' is not an atheistic monster, will instantly see how this misses the point. Nietzsche was not an atheist, any more than the Buddha was. Anyone who reads the Night Song and the Dance Song in Zarathustra will recognize that they spring out of the same emotion as the Vedic or Gathic hymns or the Psalms of David. The idea of the Superman is a response to the need for salvation in precisely the same way that Buddhism was a response to the 'three signs'.
  • Nietzsche's great concept of Yea-saying gave him a notion of purpose that is seen as positive. Nietzsche, in short, was a religious mystic.
  • Nietzsche was used to being alone. He regarded it as being part of destiny of the man of genius. His hero, Schopenhauer, convinced him of it when he was barely twenty, and although he came later to reject Schopenhauer, he never rebelled against his destiny of aloneness.
    • Colin Wilson in The Outsider, Chapter Five The Pain Threshold
  • The rather more dubious side of Nietzsche's 'evolutionism' is his glorification of the warrior -- particularly when, as an exemplification of the warrior-hero, he chooses an archetypal 'spoilt brat' like cesare Borgia. Nietzsche's own physical weakness and consequent inability to escape the atmosphere of the study leads him to take a rather unrealistic view of the man of action.
    • Colin Wilson in Rudolf Steiner: The Man and His Vision, p. 87
  • Nietzsche was not an atheist, any more than the Buddha was.
    • Colin Wilson in The Outsider, Chapter Five The Pain Threshold
  • Both Nietzsche and Marx did their greatest work seeking to explain the mystery. The term both used was "decadence."
    But if there was decadence, what was decaying? Religious faith and moral codes that had been in place since time was, said Nietzsche, who in 1882 made the most famous statement in modern philosophy — "God is dead" — and three startlingly accurate predictions for the twentieth century. He even estimated when they would begin to come true: about 1915. (1) The faith men formerly invested in God they would now invest in barbaric "brotherhoods with the aim of the robbery and exploitation of the non-brothers." Their names turned out, in due course, to be the German Nazis and the Russian Communists. (2) There would be "wars such as have never been waged on earth." Their names turned out to be World War I and World War II. (3) There no longer would be Truth but, rather, "truth" in quotation marks, depending upon which concoction of eternal verities the modem barbarian found most useful at any given moment. The result would be universal skepticism, cynicism, irony, and contempt. The First World War began in 1914 and ended in 1918. On cue, as if Nietzsche were still alive to direct the drama, an entirely new figure, with an entirely new name, arose in Europe: that embodiment of skepticism, cynicism, irony, and contempt, the Intellectual.
    • Tom Wolfe, "In the Land of the Rococo Marxists," Harpers Monthly (June 2000)

Z

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  • The tragedy of Friedrich Nietzsche's life was that it happened to be a one-man show, a monodrama wherein no other actor entered upon the stage. As the acts of the play precipitate themselves like an avalanche before our eyes, the solitary fighter stands alone beneath the louring skies of destiny—not a soul is at his side to succour him; no woman is there to soften by her ever-present sympathy the stresses of the atmosphere. Every action takes its birth in him, and its repercussions are felt by him alone. The few figures which, at the outset, creep by in the shadow of his person, accompany his heroic enterprise with gestures of dumb astonishment and fear; soon they glide away and vanish as if faced by some danger. Not one person ventures to enter wholeheartedly into the innermost sanctum of Nietzsche's destiny; the poet-philosopher is doomed to speak, to struggle, to suffer alone. He converses with no one, and no one has anything to say to him. What is even more terrible is that none hearken to his voice.
    • Stefan Zweig, The Struggle with the Daemon: Holderlin, Kleist, and Nietzsche (1925), translated by Eden and Cedar Paul
  • Nietzsche was not a poseur, nor was he represented as a hero during his lifetime. Since his death, many who claim to be his disciples have pictured him as an archetypal hero. Defiant carriage of the head; a lofty brow furrowed with sombre thoughts; thick, wavy hair, clustering down to the strong column of the neck; two falcon eyes beneath bushy eyebrows; every feature of this masterful countenance taut with willpower, health and strength—such is the portrait usually given of him. Like a second Vercingetorix, he is shown with a heavy moustache falling manfully over the hard-set lips which surmount a prominent chin, and involuntarily the image called up is that of the barbarian warrior, a Viking of the Teutonic north striding forward sword in hand to victory, his hunting horn slung over his shoulder and a spear within easy reach. It is thus that our sculptors and painters delight in portraying him, a Germanic superman, a Prometheus bound, hoping thereby to render this great recluse more accessible to men of little faith who, corrupted by school books and stage presentations, are incapable of detecting tragedy unless it is draped in theatrical trappings. But genuine tragedy is never theatrical, and the true portrait of Nietzsche is far less picturesque than busts and paintings of him would have us believe.
    • Stefan Zweig, The Struggle with the Daemon: Holderlin, Kleist, and Nietzsche (1925), translated by Eden and Cedar Paul

See also

[edit]

Works about Nietzsche

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