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
A book calls for pen, ink, and a writing desk; today the rule is that pen, ink, and a writing desk call for a book.
We do not belong to those who only get their thought from books, or at the prompting of books, -- it is our custom to think in the open air, walking, leaping, climbing, or dancing on lonesome mountains by preference, or close to the sea, where even the paths become thoughtful.
It is my ambition to say in ten sentences what others say in a whole book.
In the whole of the New Testament there is not one joke, that fact alone would invalidate any book.
The so-called paradoxes of an author, to which a reader takes exception, often exist not in the author's book at all, but rather in the reader's head.
No one can draw more out of things, books included, than he already knows. A man has no ears for that to which experience has given him no access.
Someone who does not write books, who thinks a lot, and who lives in unsatisfying society will usually be a good letter- writer.
If that glad message of your Bible were written in your faces, you would not need to demand belief in the authority of that book in such stiff-necked fashion.
How can anyone become a thinker unless he spends at least a third of every day away from passions, people, and books?
In Russia there is an emigration of intelligence: émigrés cross the frontier in order to read and to write good books. But in doing so they contribute to making their fatherland, abandoned by spirit, into the gaping jaws of Asia that would like to swallow our little Europe.
A book full of brilliance imparts some of it even to its opponents.
We criticize a man or a book most sharply when we sketch out their ideal.
Books for all the world are always foul-smelling books: the smell of small people clings to them.
One receives as reward for much ennui, despondency, boredom -such as a solitude without friends, books, duties, passions must bring with it -those quarter-hours of profoundest contemplation within oneself and nature. He who completely entrenches himself against boredom also entrenches himself against himself: he will never get to drink the strongest refreshing draught from his own innermost fountain.