Quotes About Meaning

And finally, to call to mind the enormous influence which German philosophy--I hope you understand its right to inverted commas-

Modern Socialism wants to create a secular version of Jesuitism: everybody a perfect instrument. But the purpose remains to be discovered. What is it all for!

We have invented the concept "goal": in reality, goals are absent . . .

The philosopher is lacking who interprets the deed and does not merely transpose it.

A nihilist is a man who judges that the real world ought not to be, and that the world as it ought to be does not exist. According to this view, our existence (action, suffering, willing, feeling) has no meaning: this 'in vain' is the nihilists' pathos—an inconsistency on the part of the nihilists.

Thus do the gods justify the life of man: they themselves live it--the only satisfactory theodicy!

There are only necessities: there is no one who commands, no one who obeys, no one who transgresses. Once you know there are no purposes, you also know there is no accident; for only against a world of purposes does the word 'accident' have a meaning.

What matters is not eternal life, but eternal vivacity.

Remain true to the earth, my brethren, with the power of your virtue! Let your bestowing love and your knowledge be devoted to be the meaning of the earth! . . . Let it not fly away from the earthly and beat against eternal walls with its wings. . . . Lead, like me, the flown-away virtue back to the earth—yes, back to body and life: that it may give to the earth its meaning, a human meaning!

Innermost suffering makes the mind noble. Only that deepest, slow and extended pain that burns inside of us as firewood forces us to go down into our depths… I doubt that such a pain could ever make us feel better, but I know that it makes us deeper beings. It makes us ask more rigorous and deeper questions to ourselves… Trust in life has disappeared. Life itself has become a problem.

Nu viaÅ£a veÅŸnic? e important?, ci veÅŸnica însufleÅ£ire.

Why should one live? All is vain! To live- that is to thresh straw; to live- that is to burn oneself and yet not get warm.-

With regard to philosophical metaphysics, I always see increasing numbers who have attained to the negative goal, but as yet few who climb a few rungs backwards; one ought to look out, perhaps, over the last steps of the ladder, but not try to stand upon them.

The man consummatig his life dies his death triumphantly,surrounded by men filled with hope and making solmn vows, thus one should learn to die. Friedrich Nietzsche - thus spoke zarathustra.

Whoever does not know how to find the way to his ideal lives more frivolously and impudently than the man without an ideal.

Can an ass be tragic? To perish under a burden one can neither bear nor throw off? The case of the philosopher.

There are no moral phenomena at all, but only a moral interpretation of phenomena.

Ah, ye brethren, that God whom I created was human work and human madness, like all the Gods!

The human being first put values into things, in order to preserve itself—it created a meaning for things, a human's meaning! Therefore it calls itself 'human'—that is: the evaluator.

To judge the value of life by whether we find it now unpleasant or not — can a more wild, extravagant vanity be imagined?

Joys want the eternity of all things, they want deep, profound eternity!

What is the sign of every literary decadence ? That life no longer dwells in the whole. The word becomes sovereign and leaps out of the sentence, the sentence reaches out and obscures the meaning of the page, the page gains life at the expense of the whole—the whole is no longer a whole.

Nobody is responsible for being here in the first place, for being constituted in such and such a way, for being in these circumstances, in this environment. The fatality of our essence cannot be separated from the fatality of all that was and will be.

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