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 Dionysian life task needs the hardness of the hammer and one of its first essentials is without doubt the joy to be found even in destruction.
Not doubt, certainty is what drives one insane.
no one talks more passionately about his rights than he who in the depths of his soul doubts whether he has any
Belief in truth begins with doubting all that has hitherto been believed to be true.
"Belief in the truth commences with the doubting of all those "truths" we once believed."
Whoever regards human beings as a herd and flees them as swiftly as he can will no doubt be overtaken by them and impaled on theirhorns.
Historical refutation as the definitive refutation.- In former times, one sought to prove that there is no God - today one indicates how the belief that there is a God arose and how this belief acquired its weight and importance: a counter-proof that there is no God thereby becomes superfluous.- When in former times one had refuted the 'proofs of the existence of God' put forward, there always remained the doubt whether better proofs might not be adduced than those just refuted: in those days atheists did not know how to make a clean sweep.
One should not go into churches if one wants to breathe pure air.
Truth will have no gods before it.- The belief in truth begins with the doubt of all truths in which one has previously believed.
It is not doubt,is certitude that drives you mad.
Only great pain is, as the teacher of great suspicion, the ultimate liberator of the spirit...I doubt whether such pain improves us-but I do know it deepens us.
A vocation makes us unthinking; that is its greatest blessing. For it is a bulwark behind which we are permitted to withdraw whencommonplace doubts and cares assail us.
Whoever deliberately attempts to insure confidentiality with another person is usually in doubt as to whether he inspires that person's confidence in him. One who is sure that he inspires confidence attaches little importance to confidentiality.
It is only great pain--that slow, sustained pain that takes its time, in which we are, as it were, burned with smoldering green firewood--that forces us philosophers to sink to our ultimate profundity and to do away with all the trust, everything good-natured, veil-imposing, mild and middling, on which we may have previously based our humanity. I doubt that such a pain makes us 'better'--but I know that it makes us deeper.