Friedrich Nietzsche
Friedrich Nietzsche
Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzschewas a German philosopher, cultural critic, poet and Latin and Greek scholar whose work has exerted a profound influence on Western philosophy and modern intellectual history. He began his career as a classical philologist before turning to philosophy. He became the youngest ever to hold the Chair of Classical Philology at the University of Basel in 1869, at the age of 24. Nietzsche resigned in 1879 due to health problems that plagued him most of his life, and...
NationalityGerman
ProfessionPhilosopher
Date of Birth15 October 1844
CityRocken, Germany
CountryGermany
The Refinement of Shame. People are not ashamed to think something foul, but they are ashamed when they think these foul thoughts are attributed to them.
We are more pained when one of our friends is guilty of something shameful than when we do it ourselves.
Inexperienced girls flatter themselves with the notion that it is in their power to make a man happy.
The man who meets with a failure attributes this failure rather to the ill will of another than to fate.
Every tradition grows continually more venerable, and the more remote its origins, the more this is lost sight of. The veneration paid the tradition accumulates from generation to generation, until it at last becomes holy and excites awe.
Whoever thinks much and to good purpose easily forgets his own experiences, but not the thoughts which these experiences have called forth.
It has therewith come to be recognized that the history of moral valuations is at the same time the history of an error, the error of responsibility, which is based upon the error of the freedom of will.
Without the errors which lie in the assumption of morality, man would have remained an animal.
Compulsion precedes morality, indeed morality itself is compulsion for a time, to which one submits for the avoidance of pain.
An important species of pleasure, and therewith the source of morality, arises out of habit.
We become aware, however, that all customs, even the hardest, grow pleasanter and milder with time, and that the severest way of life may become a habit and therefore a pleasure.
To be moral, correct, and virtuous is to be obedient to an old established law and custom.
Insects sting, not from malice, but because they want to live. It is the same with critics; they desire our blood not our pain.
Praise is more obtrusive than a reproach.