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Quote by Friedrich Nietzsche

“There are some who, from obtuseness or lack of experience, turn away from such phenomena as from 'folk-diseases,' with contempt or pity born of the consciousness of their own 'healthy- mindedness.' But of course such poor wretches have no idea how corpselike and ghostly their so-called 'healthy-mindedness' looks when the glowing life of the Dionysian revelers roars past them.”

Quote by Friedrich Nietzsche

Book:The Birth of Tragedy
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Work

The Birth of Tragedy

Friedrich Nietzsche's seminal work delves into the psychological and aesthetic aspects of tragedy, examining its role in human life and its influence on art and philosophy. more

Author

Friedrich Nietzsche
Friedrich Nietzsche

Friedrich Nietzsche was a German philosopher, cultural critic, poet, and writer whose works have had a profound impact on subsequent philosophy, literature, and thought. His ideas revolve around concepts such as the 'will to power', the 'Übermensch', and the 'eternal recurrence'. more

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Book:White Tears
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Book:The Renaissance: Studies in Art and Poetry
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“What modern art has to do in the service of culture is so to rearrange the details of modern life, so to reflect it, that it may satisfy the spirit. And what does the spirit need in the face of modern life? The sense of freedom. That naive, rough sense of freedom, which supposes man's will to be limited, if at all, only by a will stronger than his, he can never have again. The attempt to represent it in art would have so little verisimilitude that it would be flat and uninteresting. The chief factor in the thoughts of the modern mind concerning itself is the intricacy, the universality of natural law, even in the moral order. For us, necessity is not, as of old, a sort of mythological personage without us, with whom we can do warfare: it is a magic web woven through and through us, like that magnetic system of which modern science speaks, penetrating us with a network, subtler than our subtlest nerves, yet bearing in it the central forces of the world. Can art represent men and women in these bewildering toils so as to give the spirit at least an equivalent for the sense of freedom? Certainly, in Goethe's romances, and even more in the romances of Victor Hugo, there are high examples of modern art dealing thus with modern life, regarding that life as the modern mind must regard it, yet reflecting upon blitheness and repose. Natural laws we shall never modify, embarrass us as they may; but there is still something in the nobler or less noble attitude with which we watch their fatal combinations. In those romances of Goethe and Victor Hugo, in some excellent work done after them, this entanglement, this network of law, becomes the tragic situation, in which certain groups of noble men and women work out for themselves a supreme Denouement. Who, if he saw through all, would fret against the chain of circumstance which endows one at the end with those great experiences?”

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Book:The Renaissance: Studies in Art and Poetry
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