Friedrich Nietzsche
Saturday, 14 September 2024
Nietzsche'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.
Remedium amoris. - The cure for love is still in most cases that ancient radical medicine: love in return.
Daybreak, s. 415
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
For those who need consolation no means of consolation is so effective as the assertion that in their case no consolation is possible: it implies so great a degree of distinction that they at once hold up their heads again.
Daybreak - Thoughts on the Prejudices of Morality (1881). 380
Nietzsche Quotes
One has attained to mastery when one neither goes wrong nor hesitates in the performance.
Daybreak - Thoughts on the Prejudices of Morality (1881). 537
Nietzsche Quotes
What is wanted -- whether this is admitted or not -- is nothing less than a fundamental remolding, indeed weakening and abolition of the individual: one never tires of enumerating and indicting all that is evil and inimical, prodigal, costly, extravagant in the form individual existence has assumed hitherto, one hopes to manage more cheaply, more safely, more equitably, more uniformly if there exist only large bodies and their members.
Dawn, "Second Book," aphorism 132 (1881)
Nietzsche Quotes
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.
Daybreaks, p. 95 R J Hollingdale transl.
Nietzsche Quotes
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.
Daybreaks, p. 89, R J Hollingdale transl.
Nietzsche Quotes
The Christian church is an encyclopaedia of prehistoric cults and conceptions of the most diverse origin, and that is why it is so capable of proselytizing: it always could, and it can still go wherever it pleases and it always found, and always finds something similar to itself to which it can adapt itself and gradually impose upon it a Christian meaning. It is not what is Christian in it, but the universal heathen character of its usages, which has favored the spread of this world-religion; its ideas, rooted in both the Jewish and the Hellenic worlds, have from the first known how to raise themselves above national and racial niceties and exclusiveness as though these were merely prejudices. One may admire this power of causing the most various elements to coalesce, but one must not forget the contemptible quality that adheres to this power: the astonishing crudeness and self-satisfiedness of the church's intellect during the time it was in process of formation, which permitted it to accept any food and to digest opposites like pebbles.
Daybreaks. p. 70, R J Hollingdale transl.
Nietzsche Quotes
Really unreflective people are now inwardly without Christianity, and the more moderate and reflective people of the intellectual middle class now possess only an adapted, that is to say marvelously simplified Christianity. A god who in his love arranges everything in a manner that in the end will be best for us; a god who gives to us and takes from us our virtue and our happiness, so that as a whole all is meet and fit and there is no reason for us to take life sadly, let alone exclaim against it; in short, resignation and modest demands elevated to godhead -- that is the best and most vital thing that still remains of Christianity. But one should notice that Christianity has thus crossed over into a gentle moralism: it is not so much "God, freedom and immortality" that have remained, as benevolence and decency of disposition, and the belief that in the whole universe too benevolence and decency of disposition prevail: it is the euthanasia of Christianity.
Daybreaks, p. 92, R J Hollingdale transl.
Nietzsche Quotes
How good bad music and bad reasons sound when we are marching into battle against an enemy.
Dawn, "Fifth Book," aphorism 557, "Into Battle Against an Enemy," (1881).
Nietzsche Quotes
It is not things, but opinions about things that have absolutely no existence, which have so deranged mankind!
Daybreak
Nietzsche Quotes
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
Nietzsche Quotes
He who lives as children live - who does not struggle for his bread and does not believe that his actions possess any ultimate significance - remains childlike.
Daybreak - Thoughts on the Prejudices of Morality (1881). 280
Nietzsche Quotes
Morality makes stupid. - Custom represents the experiences of men of earlier times as to what they supposed useful and harmful - but the sense for custom (morality) applies, not to these experiences as such, but to the age, the sanctity, the indiscussability of the custom. And so this feeling is a hindrance to the acquisition of new experiences and the correction of customs: that is to say, morality is a hindrance to the development of new and better customs: it makes stupid.
Daybreak, s. 19
Nietzsche Quotes
Whoever has overthrown an existing law of custom has always first been accounted a bad man: but when, as did happen, the law could not afterwards be reinstated and this fact was accepted, the predicate gradually changed; - history treats almost exclusively of these bad men who subsequently became good men!
Daybreak,s. 20
Nietzsche Quotes
Friedrich Nietzsche Quote of the Day
Saturday, 14 September 2024"Sins" are indispensable to every society organized on an ecclesiastical basis; they are the only reliable weapons of power; the priest lives upon sins; it is necessary to him that there be "sinning."The Antichrist (1888)
