Dead are all gods: now we want the overman to live.
friedrich Nietzschequotes
1844 - 1900
It is difficult to name a philosopher, artist, or writer of the 20th century who was not influenced by German philosopher and classical scholar, Friedrich Nietzsche (1844-1900), who famously wrote, “God is dead.” While his works tend to evoke either passionate love or furious disgust, Nietzsche was called in his day a “man of limitless talent and profound imaginative insight.”
Though his name has been linked to Adolf Hitler and the Nazi Regime, largely due to his sister’s misrepresentation of him and his works as caretaker of his legacy after his death (The Will to Power), Nietzsche was always opposed to nationalism and antisemitism.
Known for his anti-Christian writing (The Antichrist), which foresaw the decline of traditional religion in modern society, he argued for self-awareness and identity as crafted by the individual, beyond the limitations of transcendental beliefs like God or the soul, in order to become one’s best self.
His works do not isolate one particular theme of thought, for he wrote extensively on many subjects such as history, truth, morality, language and consciousness, which greatly influenced Western philosophy with recurring concepts on nihilism, the “will to power,” eternal recurrence, and the Übermensch (Thus Spoke Zarathustra).
After suffering chronic pain his entire life due to migraines, half blindness, and the lingering effects of dysentery and diphtheria, Nietzsche collapsed from a mental breakdown on the streets of Turin, Italy, in 1889, and never recovered his mental lucidity. He lived for another ten years in the care of either family or asylums before he died of a stroke in 1900.
What good is all this free-thinking, modernity, and turncoat flexibility if at some gut level you are still a Christian, a Catholic, and even a priest!
There’s no defense against stupidity.
This woman is beautiful and clever: but how much cleverer she would have become if she were not beautiful!
The craving for equality can express itself either as a desire to pull everyone down to our own level (by belittling them, excluding them, tripping them up) or as a desire to raise ourselves up along with everyone else (by acknowledging them, helping them, and rejoicing in their success).
We are unknown to ourselves, we men of knowledge – and with good reason. We have never sought ourselves – how could it happen that we should ever find ourselves? It has rightly been said: “Where your treasure is, there will your heart be also”; our treasure is where the beehives of our knowledge are.
Wisdom – seems to the rabble a kind of escape, a means and a trick for getting well out of a wicked game. But the genuine philosopher – as it seems to us, my friends? – lives ‘unphilosophically’ and ‘unwisely,’ above all imprudently, and feels the burden and the duty of a hundred attempts and temptations of life – he risks himself constantly, he plays the wicked game.
game / philosopher / wisdom
It is invisible hands that torment and bend us the worst.
Here the spirit becomes a lion who would conquer his freedom and be master… Who is the great dragon whom the spirit will no longer call lord and go? ‘Thou shalt’ is the name of the great dragon. But the spirit of the lion says, ‘I will.
In letting God sit in judgment they judge themselves; in glorifying God they glorify themselves.