Friedrich Nietzsche
Saturday, 12 October 2024Nietzsche's Daybreak (also translated as 'The Dawn') was released in 1881, and was once referred to as a book written for psychologists. It consists of 575 aphorisms.
He who is punished is never he who performed the deed. He is always the scapegoat.
Daybreak - Thoughts on the Prejudices of Morality (1881). 252
Nietzsche Quotes
The despairing. - Christianity possesses the hunters instinct for all those who can by one means or another be brought to despair - of which only a portion of mankind is capable. It is constantly on their track, it lies in wait for them. Pascal attempted the experiment of seeing whether, with the aid of the most incisive knowledge, everyone could not be brought to despair: the experiment miscarried, to his twofold despair.
Daybreak, s. 64
Nietzsche Quotes
The compassionate Christian. - The reverse side of Christian compassion for the suffering of one's neighbor is a profound suspicion of all the joy of one's neighbor, of his joy in all that he wants to do and can.
Daybreak, s. 80
Nietzsche Quotes
Doubt as sin. - Christianity has done its utmost to close the circle and declared even doubt to be sin. One is supposed to be cast into belief without reason, by a miracle, and from then on to swim in it as in the brightest and least ambiguous of elements: even a glance towards land, even the thought that one perhaps exists for something else as well as swimming, even the slightest impulse of our amphibious nature- is sin! And notice that all this means that the foundation of belief and all reflection on its origin is likewise excluded as sinful. What is wanted are blindness and intoxication and an eternal song over the waves in which reason has drowned.
Daybreak, s. 89
Nietzsche Quotes
Other fears, other securities. - Christianity had brought into life a quite novel and limitless perilousness, and therewith quite novel securities, pleasures, recreations and evaluations of all things. Our century denies this perilousness, and does so with a good conscience: and yet it continues to drag along with it the old habits of Christian security, Christian enjoyment, recreation, evaluation! It even drags them into its noblest arts and philosophies! How worn out and feeble, how insipid and awkward, how arbitrarily fanatical and, above all, how insecure all this must appear, now that the fearful antithesis to it, the omnipresent fear of the Christian for his eternal salvation, has been lost.
Daybreak, s. 57
Nietzsche Quotes
Historical refutation as the definitive refutation. - In former times, one sought to prove that there is no God - today one indicates how the belief that there is a God arose and how this belief acquired its weight and importance: a counter-proof that there is no God thereby becomes superfluous.- When in former times one had refuted the 'proofs of the existence of God' put forward, there always remained the doubt whether better proofs might not be adduced than those just refuted: in those days atheists did not know how to make a clean sweep.
Daybreak, s. 95
Nietzsche Quotes
Man and things. - Why does man not see things? He is himself standing in the way: he conceals things.
Daybreak, s. 483
Nietzsche Quotes
Just beyond experience! - Even great spirits have only their five fingers breadth of experience - just beyond it their thinking ceases and their endless empty space and stupidity begins.
Daybreak, s. 564
Nietzsche Quotes
Not enough! - It is not enough to prove something, one also has to seduce or elevate people to it. That is why the man of knowledge should learns how to speak his wisdom: and often in such a way that it sounds like folly!
Daybreak, s. 330
Nietzsche Quotes
Gardener and garden. - Out of damp and gloomy days, out of solitude, out of loveless words directed at us, conclusions grow up in us like fungus: one morning they are there, we know not how, and they gaze upon us, morose and gray. Woe to the thinker who is not the gardener but only the soil of the plants that grow in him!
Daybreak, s. 382
Nietzsche Quotes
The vain. - We are like shop windows in which we are continually arranging, concealing or illuminating the supposed qualities other ascribe to us - in order to deceive ourselves.
Daybreak, s. 385
Nietzsche Quotes
It is not things, but opinions about things that have absolutely no existence, which have so deranged mankind!
Daybreak, s. 563
Nietzsche Quotes
The surest way to corrupt a youth is to instruct him to hold in higher esteem those who think alike than those who think differently.
The Dawn, Sec. 297
Nietzsche Quotes
It is not enough to prove something, one has also to seduce or elevate people to it. That is why the man of knowledge should learn how to speak his wisdom: and often in such a way that it sounds like folly!
Daybreak - Thoughts on the Prejudices of Morality (1881). 330
Nietzsche Quotes
Punishment. - A strange thing, our kind of punishment! It does not cleanse the offender, it is no expiation: on the contrary, it defiles more than the offense itself.
Daybreak,s. 236
Nietzsche Quotes
Friedrich Nietzsche Quote of the Day
Saturday, 12 October 2024If the Christian dogmas of a revengeful God, universal sinfulness, election by divine grace and the danger of eternal damnation were true, it would be a sign of weak-mindedness and lack of character not to become a priest, apostle or hermit and, in fear and trembling, to work solely on one's own salvation; it would be senseless to lose sight of one's eternal advantage for the sake of temporal comfort. If we may assume that these things are at any rate believed true, then the everyday Christian cuts a miserable figure; he is a man who really cannot count to three, and who precisely on account of his spiritual imbecility does not deserve to be punished so harshly as Christianity promises to punish him.Human, all too Human, p. 116, RJ Hollingdale transl.