Christianity remains to this day the greatest misfortune of humanity.
Friedrich NietzscheRead
In the beautiful, man sets himself up as the standard of perfection; in select cases he worships himself in it. Man believes that the world itself is filled with beauty -he forgets that it is he who has created it. He alone has bestowed beauty upon the world -alas! only a very human, an all too human, beauty.
Interpretation
What this quote means
The quote reflects on humanity's tendency to see themselves as the source of beauty in the world, often neglecting the fact that beauty is subjective and created by human perception.
Friedrich Nietzsche argues that humans often set themselves as the standard for beauty, mistakenly believing they created beauty in the world. This self-centered perspective leads to a flawed understanding of beauty as an attribute that exists independently from human perception and interpretation. Nietzsche emphasizes the limitations of this human-centric view, suggesting that the beauty we see is merely a projection of our own humanity, rather than an objective truth of the world.
Themes
BeautyHuman PerceptionNietzscheSubjectivitySelf-Centeredness
In practice
Example use cases
During a philosophy class discussing the nature of beauty and perception.
More from Friedrich Nietzsche
All quotes →That which does not kill us makes us stronger.
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Hope in reality is the worst of all evils because it prolongs the torments of man.
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Watch them clamber, these swift monkeys! They clamber over one another and thus drag one another into the mud and the depth. They all want to get to the throne: that is their madness — as if happiness sat on the throne. Often, mud sits on the throne — and often the throne also on mud. Mad they all appear to me, clambering monkeys and overardent. Foul smells their idol, the cold monster: foul, they smell to me altogether, these idolators.
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Reason is the cause of our falsification of the evidence of the senses. In so far as the senses show becoming, passing away, change, they do not lie.
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The anarchist and the Christian have a common origin.
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