Quotes Tagged "nietzsche"

The snake which cannot cast its skin has to die. As well the minds which are prevented from changing their opinions; they cease to be mind.

You would not enjoy Nietzsche, sir. He is fundamentally unsound.

If a man has character, he has also his typical experience, which always recurs.

A nation is a detour of nature to arrive at five or six great men- yes, and then to get around them.

It has gradually become clear to me what every great philosophy up till now has consisted of – namely, the confession of its originator, and a species of involuntary and unconscious autobiography; and moreover that the moral (or immoral) purpose in every philosophy has constituted the true vital germ out of which the entire plant has always grown.

One has to take a somewhat bold and dangerous line with this existence: especially as, whatever happens, we are bound to lose it.

I dislike Nietzsche because he likes the contemplation of pain, because he erects conceit into a duty, because the men whom he most admires are conquerors, whose glory is cleverness in causing men to die.

To recognize untruth as a condition of life--that certainly means resisting accustomed value feelings in a dangerous way; and a philosophy that risks this would by that token alone place itself beyond good and evil.

What Pascal overlooked was the hair-raising possibility that God might out-Luther Luther. A special area in hell might be reserved for those who go to mass. Or God might punish those whose faith is prompted by prudence. Perhaps God prefers the abstinent to those who whore around with some denomination he despises. Perhaps he reserves special rewards for those who deny themselves the comfort of belief. Perhaps the intellectual ascetic will win all while those who compromised their intellectual integrity lose everything. There are many other possibilities. There might be many gods, including one who favors people like Pascal; but the other gods might overpower or outvote him, à la Homer. Nietzsche might well have applied to Pascal his cutting remark about Kant: when he wagered on God, the great mathematician 'became an idiot.

Your educators can only be your liberators.

In good company one must never want to be entirely and solely right, which is what all pure logic wants [...].

Almighty God, I am sorry I am now an atheist, but have You read Nietzsche?

You took all that was most extraordinary, most hypothetical, and most vague, all that was beyond the understanding of the people, and thus You acted as though You did not love them at all—and who was this? The one who had come to give His life for them! Instead of taking control of human freedom, You intensified it and burdened man’s spiritual domain with its torments for ever. You desired man to have freedom of choice in love so that he would follow You freely, lured and captivated by You. Instead of the old immutable law, man should henceforth decide with a free heart what is good and what is evil, having only Your image before him as a guide—but didn’t it occur to You that in the end men would reject and dispute even Your image and Your truth if they were saddled with such a terrible burden as freedom of choice? They will cry out in the end that truth is not in You, for they could not have been left in worse confusion and torment than that in which You left them, bequeathing them so many problems and unresolved questions. So You Yourself sowed the seed of the destruction of Your own kingdom; blame no one else for this.

The final reward of the dead - to die no more

But I need solitude--which is to say, recovery, return to myself, the breath of a free, light, playful air.

It may be that until now there has been no more potent means for beautifying man himself than piety: it can turn man into so much art, surface, play of colors, graciousness that his sight no longer makes one suffer.---

This kind of renunciation, in fact, has often been the strength, born of necessity, of the world's disinherited, of those who do not fit in with their surroundings or with their own body or with their own race or tradition and who hope, by means of renunciation, to assure for themselves a future world where, to use a Nietzschean expression, the inversion of all values will occur.

O puro espírito é pura mentira. Enquanto o padre continuar a passar por ser uma espécie superior - o padre, esse negador, esse caluniador, esse envenenador da vida por profissão - , não há resposta para a pergunta: que é a verdade? A verdade fica logo colocada em cima da cabeça, se o advogado confesso do nada e da negação passa por ser o representante da verdade...

It is nobler to declare oneself wrong than to insist on being right --especially when one is right.

Spirit is life which itself cutteth into life: by its own torture doth it increase its own knowledge,--did ye know that before?