N Quotes
Browse famous quotes beginning with N. This page is a child index of the full Popular Quotes A-Z directory.
“Nietzche . . . he was a confirmed Life Force worshipper. It was he who raked up the Superman, who is as old as Prometheus; and the 20th century will run after this newest of the old crazes when it gets tired of the world, the flesh, and your humble servant.”
Source: The Collected Works of George Bernard Shaw: Plays, Novels, Articles, Letters and Essays: Pygmalion, Mrs. Warren’s Profession, Candida, Arms and The Man, Man and Superman, Caesar and Cleopatra, Androcles And The Lion, The New York Times Articles on War, Memories of Oscar Wilde and more
“Nietzche is right about christianity. It's the fucking hair shirt syndrome: always made me feel shame, guilt, always responding to duty and obligations to others --I view myself as weak, at the beck and call of others, obligated to them. Bullshit. "I am a man" -- as that book on judaism puts it. I need no one's permission anymore. I need not account to anyone. I owe them nothing; they are pushing old buttons, long out of date. I have proved my worth and earned my reward.”
Source: The Exegesis of Philip K. Dick
“Nietzsche ... argues that all that passes in the life of a society is ephemeral and banausic except for the presence of great personalities, of men like Goethe ... who seem to forge their own destinies, who seem to move unhampered by those burdens of existence which keep most men from rising above the vicissitudes of their daily toil.”
Source: Break-Out from the Crystal Palace: The Anarcho-Psychological Critique: Stirner, Nietzsche, Dostoevsky
“Nietzsche ... combines, in effect, Christ's harsh sayings: 'let the dead bury their dead' and 'narrow is the way which leadeth unto life'.”
“Nietzsche ... does not shy from conscious exaggeration and one-sided formulations of his thought, believing that in this way he can most clearly set in relief what in his vision and in his inquiry is different from the run-of-the-mill.”
Source: Nietzsche: The will to power as art
“Nietzsche, an infinitely harder and more courageous intellect, was incapable of any such confusion of ideas; he seldom allowed sentimentality to turn him from the glaring fact.”
Source: The Philosophy of Friedrich Nietzsche
“Nietzsche asked in 1882: 'What is the point of all the art of our works of art if we lose that higher art, the art of festivals?' The brief moment of intoxication lures us off the via dolorosa. Such spectacles also asserted the underlying continuity of European society since the Renaissance, despite steam engine, trainm and telegraph. Such was the confidence in the homology between the present day and a supposedly integrated and self-assured sixteenth century that people were still willing, in donning costumes, to turn themselves into living works of art. (This was the bourgeois response to the fantasy of the socialist Fourier, who thought people could become living artworks if they disrobed.) The contrast between the costumes and the black-and-white everyday garb of 1879, a way of dressing as if designed to be photographed, was sharp. Fourteen thousand citizens took part in Makart's extravaganza, 300,000 more looked on.”
Source: A History of Art History
“Nietzsche claimed that his genius was in his nostrils and I think that is a very excellent place for it to be.”
Source: I'm a born liar: a Fellini lexicon
“Nietzsche decía que lo que más nos aproxima es una persona es una despedida, porque el sentimiento y el juicio no desean marchar juntos al separarnos. El tren de la vida corre sin darnos cuenta que alguien más se fue y de que no hubo tiempo para despedirse”
Source: Un aficionado a las tormentas y otros textos al vuelo
“Nietzsche famously said "Whatever doesn't kill you makes you stronger." But what he failed to stress is that it almost kills you.”
“Nietzsche felt like Rommel, hiding behind The Cauldron at Gazala – waiting and biding his time while his enemies took their shots, holding his position. The impenetrable defense took down tank after tank until the enemy couldn’t fight any more. Then, a quick attack was mounted and Rommel took Torbuk in a single day. He chased the British to Egypt. That’s where Nietzsche was right now, mounting his offensive, ready to chase both God and the Norse. Oh, how he wanted vengeance on both fronts.”
Source: Operation Cosmic Teapot
“Nietzsche hablaba del poder de atracción que tiene sobre la persona todo aquello que le es opuesto, lo que aparentemente se encuentra en las antípodas de su ser. Lo asqueroso provoca al mismo tiempo una reacción de rechazo y de atracción, la necesidad de alejarse de ello y, al mismo tiempo, la incapacidad de hacerlo. La proyección de sentimientos negativos (odio, agresividad, desprecio) sobre un personaje o una situación supone a menudo el rechazo inconsciente a reconocerse en esa persona o en esa realidad, que en el fondo es una proyección de uno mismo.”
Source: Televisión subliminal: Socialización mediante comunicaciones inadvertidas
“Nietzsche had a little one-liner on how to choose a wife. He said, ''Are you willing to have a conversation with this woman for the next forty years?'' That's how to pick a wife.”
Source: Kurt Vonnegut: The Last Interview: And Other Conversations
“Nietzsche himself was a great moralist; his writings abound with value judgments about individuals, character types, modes of thinking, and national traits. It is as if he develops immoralist psychology in order to tame his own nature, to keep his own greatest vice in check.”
Source: Break-Out from the Crystal Palace: The Anarcho-Psychological Critique: Stirner, Nietzsche, Dostoevsky
“Nietzsche inveighs against every sort of historical optimism; but he energetically repudiates the ordinary pessimism, which is the result of degenerate or enfeebled instincts of decadence. He preaches with youthful enthusiasm the triumph of a tragic culture, introduced by an intrepid rising generation, in which the spirit of ancient Greece might be born again. He rejects the pessimism of Schopenhauer, for he already abhors all renunciation; but he seeks a pessimism of healthiness, one derived from strength, from exuberant power, and he believes he has found it in the Greeks.”
“Nietzsche is a marvelous antidote to all fundamentally anti-Biblical efforts to turn mythology into a kind of Bible, and that is the project of the Jungians of this world, or to boil the Bible down to myth, and that is the project of more or less everyone else”
Source: The Girard Reader
“Nietzsche is absolutely correct, even more correct today than when he wrote it in Thus Spake Zarathustra: I looked all about me for human beings but all I saw were fragments, deformed creatures with too much eye or too much ear. This is what the modern culture of specialized intellect-the kind of one-sidedness that banausic utilitarianism alone can value-works so hard to produce.”
“Nietzsche is no more or less than the Schliemann of asceticisms. In the midst of the excavation sites, surrounded by the psychopathic rubble of millennia and the ruins of morbid palaces, he was completely right to assume the triumphant expression of a discoverer.”
Source: Du mußt dein Leben ändern
“Nietzsche, que era un cronopio como pocos, dijo que sólo los imbéciles no se contradicen tres veces al día. No hablaba de las falsas contradicciones que apenas se rasca un poco son hipocresía deliberada (el señor que da limosna en la calle y explota a cincuenta obreros en su fábrica de paraguas), sino de esa disponibilidad para latir con los cuatro corazones del pulpo cósmico que van cada uno por su lado y cada uno tiene su razón y mueve la sangre y sostiene el universo, ese camaleonismo que todo lector encontrará y amará o aborrecerá en este libro y en cualquier libro donde el poeta rehúsa el coleóptero.”
Source: Around the Day in Eighty Worlds
“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.”
Source: The Rebirth of Classical Political Rationalism: An Introduction to the Thought of Leo Strauss
“Nietzsche's phrase "God is dead" sparks controversy and strong reactions, while the Christian belief in Jesus' divinity and death is widely accepted without causing much disturbance.”
“Nietzsche's statement ("Whatever does not kill me makes me stronger") makes it sound like adversity itself makes you stronger. It doesn't. Inner strength comes only to those who /move forward/ in the face of adversity.”
Source: The Tools
“Nietzsche said that everyone tells themselves the story of their life. That's true about countries, too. We're constantly telling ourselves the American story.”
“Nietzsche said that the earth has been a madhouse long enough. Without contradicting him we might perhaps soften the expression, and say that philosophy has been long enough an asylum for enthusiasts.”
Source: The Genteel Tradition: Nine Essays
“Nietzsche said the newspaper had replaced the prayer in the life of the modern bourgeois , meaning that the busy, the cheap, the ephemeral, had usurped all that remained of the eternal in his daily life.”
Source: Closing of the American Mind
“Nietzsche said we will never rid ourselves of God because we have too much faith in grammar/language.
Lacan said because of the religious tenets of language, religion will triumph.
Chomsky, master linguist, says 'there are no skeptics. You can discuss it in a philosophy seminar but no human being can - in fact - be a skeptic.'
These musings shed light on Soren K's leap to faith idea. This is more nuanced than the circular leap of faith argument he's been wrongly accused of...
Soren is saying that, as we use the logic of language to express existence and purpose, we will always leap TO faith in a superior, all encompassing, loving force that guides our lives.
This faith does not negate our reason. It simply implies that the reasoning of this superior force is superior to our own. Edwin Abbott crystalizes this in Flatland.”
Source: Lecture Notes
“Nietzsche said without music, life would be a mistake. To me, without books, life would be a mistake.”
“Nietzsche saw in the Protestant ethic, in both its religious and secular (economic) forms, a final protest before the emergence into dominance of the ordered, bourgeois world of the 'last man' he who will pay any price in tedium for comfort and the absence of tension.”
Source: Break-Out from the Crystal Palace: The Anarcho-Psychological Critique: Stirner, Nietzsche, Dostoevsky
“Nietzsche saw that ultimately the problem of nihilism is the problem of what to do with time: Why keep investing in the future when there is no longer any transcendental guarantor, a positive end of time as ultimate reconciliation or redemption, ensuring a pay-off for this investment? Nietzsche's solution - his attempted overcoming of nihilism - consists in affirming the senselessness of becoming as such - all becoming, without reservation or discrimination.”
“Nietzsche says God is dead. Probably now God says Nietzsche is dead! The one that will die is religion, not the God! God will always live!”
“Nietzsche says that as soon as he had read a single page of Schopenhauer, he knew he would read every page of him and pay heed to every word, even to the errors he might find. Every intellectual aspirant will be able to name men whom he has read in this way.”
Source: Friedrich Nietzsche (English Edition)
“Nietzsche says that we will live the same life, over and over again. God - I'll have to sit through the Ice Capades again.”
“Nietzsche says very clearly all the way through his career that if you want to define human nature the first thing you must say is that human beings insist on value--we see the world through value colored eyes. We do not know how to look at things neutrally, value-free. So, it's not a question of giving up all values, it's simply a question of which values.”
Source: Will to Power: The Philosophy of Friedrich Nietzsche
“Nietzsche seems sometimes to replace the "transcendence" which stands at the center of traditional accounts the existence of a transcendent God, or, failing that, a transcendental viewpoint with that of a continually transcending activity. ... There is no single, final perspective, but given any one perspective, we can always go beyond it.”
“Nietzsche talked about “good and bad” in the context of nobility. The nobles regarded the exceptional as good and the mediocre as bad. When the “good and bad” of the nobility was replaced by the “good and evil” of the mob, exceptionalism was declared evil, and mediocrity was sanctified. The holy mediocrities are now everywhere. The kingdom of mediocrity is absolute … absolute shit!”
Source: The Wolf Tamers: How They Made the Strong Weak
“Nietzsche tended to equate the memorable with the painful.”
Source: The Western Canon: The Books and School of the Ages
“Nietzsche viewed morality as an evolving weapon wielded by one group against another for self-interested reasons. There’s no doubt that Nietzsche is correct that no absolute moral code can be established since there is no absolute, objective, unambiguous standard to which to appeal, and upon which everyone would agree. However, rational morality at least gives us a framework to which all rational people can subscribe, and that’s as good as it can ever get.”
Source: Kill Religion!: The Deserved Death of Faith
“Nietzsche warned that the tarantulas want to fill the world “with the storms of their justice.” Their “Will to Equality” has become the basis for a false system of valuation. Today’s tarantulas are better known as “social justice warriors.” They are, in Nietzsche’s words: “against all that hath power.” But this outcry against power masks the tarantulas’ very own lust for power.”
“Nietzsche was not an atheist, any more than the Buddha was.* Anyone who reads the Night Song and the Dance Song in Zarathustra will recognize that they spring out the same emotion as the Vedic or Gathic hymns or the Psalms of David. The idea of the Superman is a response to the need for salvation in precisely the same way that Buddhism was a response to the 'three signs'.”
Source: The Outsider
“Nietzsche was personally more philosophical than his philosophy. His talk about power, harshness, and superb immorality was the hobby of a harmless young scholar and constitutional invalid.”
Source: The Essential Santayana: Selected Writings
“Nietzsche was so intelligent and advanced. And that's how I am. I'm the black, basketball-playing Nietzsche.”
“Nietzsche was stupid and abnormal.”
“Nietzsche was the one who did the job for me. At a certain moment in his life,the idea came to him of what he called 'the love of your fate.' Whatever your fate is, whatever the hell happens, you say, 'This is what I need.' It may look like a wreck, but go at it as though it were an opportunity, a challenge. If you bring love to that moment--not discouragement--you will find the strength is there. Any disaster you can survive is an improvement in your character, your stature, and your life. What a privilege! This is when the spontaneity of your own nature will have a chance to flow.
Then, when looking back at your life, you will see that the moments which seemed to be great failures followed by wreckage were the incidents that shaped the life you have now. You’ll see that this is really true. Nothing can happen to you that is not positive. Even though it looks and feels at the moment like a negative crisis, it is not. The crisis throws you back, and when you are required to exhibit strength, it comes.”
Source: A Joseph Campbell Companion: Reflections on the Art of Living
“Nietzsche's 'perspectivalism' was expressly directed against the 'laughable juxtaposition of "man and world"'. But 'absolutist' accounts, too, typically try to demonstrate that human beings are integral components of the world these accounts articulate - that, for example, we are simply material bodies subject to the same natural processes as everything else.”
“Nietzsche's accomplishment is that he permits us to see corruption from the inside.”
“Nietzsche's break with Schopenhauer rests on precisely this point; it is a matter of knowing whether the will is unitary or multiple.”
“Nietzsche's ideas and plans: for example, the idea of giving up the whole wretched academic world to form a secular monastic community.”
Source: Nietzsche: An Introduction to the Understanding of His Philosophical Activity
“Nietzsche's my favorite. He's just insane.”
“Nietzsche's vision of the superman is of someone who's able to control and tame his passions and turn them into something richer than raw emotion and raw feeling. I think the best writing does that too. Untamed passion basically results in bad writing or bad polemics, which so many writers and public intellectuals are vulnerable to.”
“Nietzsche, driven by the absolute demand of his existential truthfulness, could not abide the bourgeois world, even when its representative had human nobility.”
Source: Nietzsche: An Introduction to the Understanding of His Philosophical Activity