Quotes About Nietzsche

Faith in oneself is a condition of our ability to promise, and since, as Nietzsche said, man can be defined by his capacity to promise, faith is one of the conditions of human existence.

Tim Keller writes, "When the church as a whole is no longer seen as speaking to questions that transcend politics, and when it is no longer united by a common faith that transcends politics, then the world sees strong evidence that Nietzsche, Freud, and Marx were right, that religion is really just a cover for people wanting to get their way in the world."13

As a society, we seem to be flying too close to the flame, looking for stimulation—we are bored audiences more attuned to fantasy than to reality, in danger of falling completely into the abyss about which Nietzsche warned us.

Nietzsche's criticism can be reduced to one proposition: modern man has been trying to preserve biblical morality while abandoning biblical faith. That is impossible.

Nietzsche was not an Existentialist. Existentialism emerged out of the conflict between Nietzsche and Kierkegaard, the Danish religious writer.

But I must say, if you could vulgarize what Nietzsche says you [would] arrive at what is going on all the time in the social sciences: the destruction of the whole, of every possibility of distinguishing responsibly between high and low, good and bad.

So I believe then that the primary motive, the most intelligible motive of the doctrine of eternal return in Nietzsche is to make intelligible nature as humanly willed and not given. And the whole difficulty in Nietzsche's philosophy, I believe, is concentrated in this point.

Nietzsche is never boring. He is always interesting, exciting, thrilling, glittering, breathtaking. He possesses a kind of brilliance and tempo which I believe was unknown in former times.

In a sense, all political use of Nietzsche is a perversion of his teaching. Nevertheless, what he said was read by political men and inspired them. He is as little responsible for fascism as Rousseau is responsible for Jacobinism. This means, however, that he is as much responsible for fascism as Rousseau was for Jacobinism.

Nietzsche's atheism is characterized by an element of gratitude; it is not simply a rebellion.

Nietzsche] refers to two great events which in modern times were made to prevent a radical deepening of human thought: Jesuitism in the 17th century and the democratic enlightenment in the 18th and 19th. But there are two men (in each case one man) who opposed these reactionary things. In the case of Jesuitism, it was Pascal; in the case of the democratic enlightenment, it is Nietzsche.

It was against 'history,' against the belief that 'history' can decide any question, that progress can ever make superfluous the discussion of the primary questions [...] that [Nietzsche] reasserted hypothetically the doctrine of eternal return.

The emancipation of the scholars and scientists from philosophy is according to [Nietzsche] only a part of the democratic movement, i.e. of the emancipation of the low from subordination to the high. …The plebeian character of the contemporary scholar or scientist is due to the fact that he has no reverence for himself.

This is Nietzsche's fundamental problem: to find a way back to nature, but on the basis of the modern difficulty of conceiving of nature as the standard.

So the knower whom Nietzsche has in mind has not, like Kant, the stark heaven above himself and to that one could say [also] the moral law within him, because he is beyond good and evil. But precisely because he is a knower in this sense he has a very exacting morality, a morality indeed beyond good and evil.

Nietzsche is aware that nothing which is not eternal can satisfy a thinking man. In Marx there is not a trace of that, and that is the great superiority of Nietzsche.

Nietzsche does not believe that one can return to the ancient ideas. But [he does believe that] someone [who] enacts [a] revolt against the modern ideas reveals a higher instinct than [those who show smug] satisfaction with the modern ideas.

See, the trouble with Nietzsche, besides his being a real killjoy, is that he thinks like a spoiled seven-year-old who doesn't want to share his sandbox toys—" "Sam!

Please stop putting quotes from Nietzsche at the end of your emails. Five years ago you were laughing your guts out over American Pie 2. What — suddenly you've magically turned into Noam Chomsky?

For Nietzsche, one of the dangers of the men of ressentiment is that they will achieve their ultimate form of revenge, which is to turn happy people into unhappy people like themselves—to shove their misery into the faces of the happy so that in due course the happy "start to be ashamed of their happiness and perhaps say to one another: 'It's a disgrace to be happy!

As one of the consequences of the death of God, Friedrich Nietzsche foresaw that people could find themselves stuck in cycles of Christian theology with no way out. Specifically that people would inherit the concepts of guilt, sin and shame but would be without the means of redemption which the Christian religion also offered.

The definition of morality: Morality is the idiosyncrasy of decadents having the hidden desire to revenge themselves upon life - and being successful.

A curious thought experiment. . . Nietzsche's message to us was to live life in such a way that we would be willing to repeat the same life eternally

Like Nietzsche, I believe that without music, life would be a mistake. Nothing but silence says it better.