Christianity has done its utmost to close the circle and declared even doubt to be sin. “Wherever there is madness there is also a grain of genius and wisdom… All superior men who were irresistibly drawn to throw off the yoke of any kind of morality and to frame new laws had, if they were not actually mad, no alternative but to make themselves or pretend to be mad.”ġ9.
“Amazingly, the most obvious question fails to occur to our scholars: what is their work, their hurry, their painful frenzy supposed to be for?” Nietzsche quotations from Human, All Too Human (1878)ġ8. This is a hard sight for man to see for, though he thinks himself better than the animals because he is human, he cannot help envying them their happiness – what they have, a life neither bored nor painful, is precisely what he wants, yet he cannot have it because he refuses to be like an animal…”ĩ. “Consider the cattle, grazing as they pass you by: they do not know what is meant by yesterday or today, they leap about, eat, rest, digest, leap about again, and so from morn till night and from day to day, fettered to the moment and its pleasure or displeasure, and thus neither melancholy nor bored. Life has not been devised by morality: it wants deception, it lives on deception.Ĩ. Haste is universal because everyone is in flight from himself.”ħ. “We labor at our daily work more ardently and thoughtlessly than is necessary to sustain our life because it is even more necessary not to have leisure to stop and think. “One has to take a somewhat bold and dangerous line with this existence: especially as, whatever happens, we are bound to lose it.”Ħ. The course gets rave reviews, and if you’re interested in Nietzsche it might be just what you’re looking for.ĥ. If you’re looking to go beyond his quotations to learn about his actual philosophy, we’ve created a quick 6-part introductory course on Nietzsche’s greatest ideas, covering everything from his influential distinction between the Apollonian and Dionysian, his perspectival theory of knowledge, and his infamous proclomation that God is dead, to his critique of traditional morality, his introduction of the eternal recurrence and the Übermensch, and his theory of the will to power. And, while Nietzsche’s aphorisms are great, his philosophical ideas - taken as a whole - are even better. However, the consumption of Nietzsche’s work one quotation at a time can mean that understanding his broader philosophical project is difficult. It is my ambition to say in ten sentences what everyone else says in a whole book - what everyone else does not say in a whole book. This probably wouldn’t have upset Nietzsche too much, considering he states the following: The consequence of this is that Nietzsche’s aphorisms often appear on the internet independently, removed from their original context. However, far from laying out his ideas in clear, structured, organized form, in the majority of his works Nietzsche prefers to challenge his readers with pithy aphorisms and provocative, seemingly disconnected passages.
Though hardly read during his own (sane) lifetime, Nietzsche has become a dominant intellectual force in today’s popular culture, with many of his brilliant and provocative statements floating around the internet in various meme forms.
He dedicated much of his work to dissecting and answering the following question: in a post-God world, how can we move beyond the outdated moralities derived from religion to establish new, healthy foundations for value, beauty, and meaning? Writing across a broad range of topics, Nietzsche was primarily concerned with facing up to the problem of nihilism. Friedrich Nietzsche was a 19th-century German philosopher best known for his brilliant, provocative aphorisms and his infamous declaration that God is dead.
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