Quotes About Philosophy

Conditions for God.-1' God himself cannot subsist without wise men, said Luther, and with good reason ; but God can still less subsist without unwise men,-good Luther did not say that!

Freedoers are at disadvantage compared with freethinkers because people suffer more obviously from the consequences of deeds than from those of thoughts.

Naked have I seen both of them, the greatest man and the smallest man. All too similar are they still to each other. Verily, even the greatest found I all too human.

Suppose that pleasure and pain are so intertwined that whoever wants as much as possible of the one must also have as much as possible of the other – that whoever wants to know 'rejoicing to heaven' must be prepared for 'grieving onto death' as well? And such might be the case! At least so the Stoics believed, who were consistent when they sought as little pleasure as possible, that life might afford them as little pain as possible.

The ascetic ideal has an aim - this goal is, putting it generally, that all the other interests of human life should, measured by its standard, appear petty and narrow; it explains epochs, nations, men, in reference to this one end; it forbids any other interpretation, any other end; it

It is my fate to have to be the first decent human being. I have a terrible fear that I shall one day be pronounced holy.

Friedrich Nietzsche

Diese räucherigen, stubenwarmen, verbrauchten, vergrünten, vergrämelten Seelen - wie könnte ihr Neid mein Glück ertragen!

Hat man sein Warum des Lebens, so verträgt man sich fast mit jedem Wie. Der Mensch strebt nicht nach Glück; nur der Engländer tut das.

WE are unknown, we knowers, ourselves to ourselves: this has its own good reason.

My formula for greatness in a human being is amor fati: that one wants nothing to be different, not forward, not backward, not in all eternity. Not merely bear what is necessary, still less conceal it — all idealism is mendaciousness in the face of what is necessary — but love it.

I want to learn more and more to see as beautiful what is necessary in things; then I shall be one of those who make things beautiful. Amor fati: let that be my love henceforth! I do not want to wage war against what is ugly…And all in all and on the whole: some day I wish to be only a Yes-sayer.

Nihilism stands at the door: whence comes this uncanniest of all guests?

The perfect woman is a higher type of humanity than the perfect man, and also something much rarer. The natural history of animals furnishes grounds in support of this theory.

Preaching morals is as easy as giving reasons for morals is difficult

Plato's objection to the older art--that it is the imitation of a phantom and hence belongs to a sphere even lower than the empirical world--could certainly not be directed against the new art; and so we find Plato endeavoring to transcend reality and to represent the idea which underlies this pseudo-reality.

An einem Philosophen ist es eine Nichtswürdigkeit zu sagen »das Gute und das Schöne sind eins«; fügt er gar noch hinzu »auch das Wahre«, so soll man ihn prügeln. Die Wahrheit ist häßlich. Wir haben die Kunst, damit wir nicht an der Wahrheit zugrunde gehn.

Plato has given to all posterity the model of a new art form, the model of the novel --which may be described as an infinitely enhanced Aesopian fable, in which poetry holds the same rank in relation to dialectical philosophy as this same philosophy held for many centuries in relation to theology: namely the rank of ancilla .

Everyone who enjoys supposes that the tree was concerned with the fruit, but it was really concerned with the seed.?In this lies the difference between all those who create and those who enjoy.

In every age the wisest have passed the identical judgement on life: it is worthless.

The faith in the categories of reason is the cause of nihilism. We have measured the value of the world according to categories that refer to a purely fictitious world.

Ésta es la fórmula de nuestra felicidad: un sí, un no, una línea recta, una meta...

the illusion of the artistic rendering of a nerve stimulus into images is, if not the mother, then at least the grandmother of every concept. In

Quiere esto decir que todos esos grandes sabios no sólo han sido decadentes, sino que ni siquiera han sido sabios?