20 quotes
The educator shall help the young to educate themselves in opposition to the age.
An Essay on the Aristocratic Radicalism of Friedrich Nietzsche (1889)
We need only think of the number of talented men who sooner or later make their apologies and concessions to philistinism, so as to be permitted to exist.
An Essay on the Aristocratic Radicalism of Friedrich Nietzsche (1889)
The society of the Culture-Philistines makes life a burden to exceptional men.
An Essay on the Aristocratic Radicalism of Friedrich Nietzsche (1889)
Greatness has nothing to do with results or with success.
An Essay on the Aristocratic Radicalism of Friedrich Nietzsche (1889)
The great man is not the child of his age but its step-child.
An Essay on the Aristocratic Radicalism of Friedrich Nietzsche (1889)
Those [Christians] had left to love on earth were then: brothers and sisters in hatred, whom they called then: brothers and sisters in love.
An Essay on the Aristocratic Radicalism of Friedrich Nietzsche (1889)
What is public opinion? It is private indolence.
An Essay on the Aristocratic Radicalism of Friedrich Nietzsche (1889)
Instead of trying to educate the human race, they should imitate the pedagogues of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, who concentrated their efforts on the education of a single person.
An Essay on the Aristocratic Radicalism of Friedrich Nietzsche (1889)
The loathing of mankind is a force that surprises and overwhelms one, fed by hundreds of springs concealed his subconsciousness. One only detects its presence after having long entertained it unawares.
An Essay on the Aristocratic Radicalism of Friedrich Nietzsche (1889)
Why you exist, says Nietzsche with Søren Kierkegaard, nobody in the world can tell you in advance; but since you do exist, try to give your existence a meaning by setting up for yourself as lofty and noble a goal as you can.
An Essay on the Aristocratic Radicalism of Friedrich Nietzsche (1889)
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.
An Essay on the Aristocratic Radicalism of Friedrich Nietzsche (1889)
He maintains that culture shows itself above all else in a unity of artistic style running through every expression of a nation's life. On the other hand, the fact of having learnt much and knowing much is, as he points out, neither a necessary means to culture nor a sign of culture; it accords remarkably well with barbarism, that is to say, with want of style or a motley hotchpotch of styles.
An Essay on the Aristocratic Radicalism of Friedrich Nietzsche (1889)
History, in [Nietzsche’s] view, belongs to him who is fighting a great fight, and who needs examples, teachers and comforters, but cannot find them among his contemporaries. Without history the mountain chain of great men’s great moments, which runs through millennia, could not stand clearly and vividly before me.
An Essay on the Aristocratic Radicalism of Friedrich Nietzsche (1889)
Under the dominion of the priests our earth became the ascetic planet; a squalid den careering through space, peopled by discontented and arrogant creatures, who were disgusted with life, abhorred their globe as a vale of tears, and who in their envy and hatred of beauty and joy did themselves as much harm as possible.
An Essay on the Aristocratic Radicalism of Friedrich Nietzsche (1889)
Since fresh examples and proofs could always be found of the alleged relation between guilt and punishment: if you behave in such and such a way, it will go badly with you. Now, as it generally does go badly, the allegation was constantly confirmed; and thus popular morality, a pseudo- science on a level with popular medicine, continually gained ground.
An Essay on the Aristocratic Radicalism of Friedrich Nietzsche (1889)
The masses are only to be regarded as one of three things: either as copies of great personalities, bad copies, clumsily produced in a poor material, or as foils to the great, or finally as their tools
An Essay on the Aristocratic Radicalism of Friedrich Nietzsche (1889)
It appears to [Nietzsche] that the modern age has produced for imitation three types of man … First, Rousseau’s man, the Titan who raises himself … and in his need calls upon holy nature. Then Goethe’s man … a spectator of the world … [Third] Schopenhauer’s man … voluntarily takes upon himself the pain of telling the truth.
An Essay on the Aristocratic Radicalism of Friedrich Nietzsche (1889)
Nietzsche asks how it has come about that so prodigious a contradiction can exist as that between the lack of true culture and the self-satisfied belief in actually possessing the only true one and he finds the answer in the circumstance that a class of men has come to the front which no former century has known, and to which (in 1873) he gave the name of “Culture-Philistines.”
An Essay on the Aristocratic Radicalism of Friedrich Nietzsche (1889)
What has here happened is that the instinct of cruelty, which has turned inwards, has become self-torture, and all man’s animal instincts have been reinterpreted as guilt towards God. Every Nay man utters to his nature, to his real being, he flings out as a Yea, an affirmation of reality applied to God’s sanctity
An Essay on the Aristocratic Radicalism of Friedrich Nietzsche (1889)
For long ages, too, no notice whatever was taken of the criminal’s “sin”; he was regarded as harmful, not guilty, and looked upon as a piece of destiny; and the criminal on his side took his punishment as a piece of destiny which had overtaken him, and bore it with the same fatalism … In general we may say that punishment tames the man, but does not make him “better.”
An Essay on the Aristocratic Radicalism of Friedrich Nietzsche (1889)