Christianity remains to this day the greatest misfortune of humanity.
Friedrich NietzscheRead
In those days it was possible for a Greek to flee from an over-abundant reality as though it were but the tricky scheming off the imagination-and to flee, not like Plato into the land of eternal ideas, into the workshop off the world-creator, feasting one's eyes on the unblemished unbreakable archetypes, but into the rigor mortis off the coldest emptiest concept off all, the concept of being.
Interpretation
What this quote means
Nietzsche critiques the tendency to escape reality by retreating into abstract ideas, suggesting that such an escape is ultimately empty.
In this quote, Friedrich Nietzsche reflects on the philosophical tendency of some thinkers, particularly the Greeks, to abandon the complexities and challenges of reality in favor of abstract ideas. Rather than seeking solace in the ideal forms proposed by Plato, Nietzsche argues that this retreat leads to an encounter with the starkness of existence itself, represented as the 'rigor mortis of the coldest emptiest concept.' He suggests that such escapism does not provide solution or fulfillment, but rather exposes the futility of ignoring the tangible world in favor of aloof conceptualizations.
Themes
PhilosophyRealityAbstractionExistenceNietzscheEscapism
In practice
Example use cases
In a speech about the importance of facing challenges head-on, one might reference Nietzsche's thoughts on reality versus abstraction.
More from Friedrich Nietzsche
All quotes →That which does not kill us makes us stronger.
Friedrich NietzscheRead
Hope in reality is the worst of all evils because it prolongs the torments of man.
Friedrich NietzscheRead
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.
Friedrich NietzscheRead
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.
Friedrich NietzscheRead
The anarchist and the Christian have a common origin.
Friedrich NietzscheRead
Similar quotes
If you know that life is basically going to be horrendously difficult, at best, and all but unlivable at worst, or possibly even unlivable, do you go on? And the choice to go on is the only thing that I think can be called hope. Because if hope isn't forced to encounter the worst possibility, then it's a lie.
Tony KushnerRead
The arc of the moral universe is long but it bends toward justice.
Martin Luther King, Jr.Read
The technocrat is the natural friend of the dictator—computers and dictatorship; but the revolutionary lives in the gap which separates technical progress from social totality, and inscribed there his dream of permanent revolution. This dream, therefore, is itself action, reality, and an effective menace to all established order; it renders possible what it dreams about.
Gilles DeleuzeRead
[A]s it must be admitted that the remedy under the Constitution lies where it has been marked out by the Constitution; and that no appeal can be consistently made from that remedy by those who were and still profess to be parties to it, but the appeal to the parties themselves having an authority above the Constitution or to the law of nature & of nature's God.
James MadisonRead
I can't believe that we would lie in our graves wondering if we had spent our living days well. I can't believe that we would lie in our graves dreaming of things that we might have been.
Dave MatthewsRead
Perhaps our only sickness is to desire a truth which we cannot bear rather than to rest content with the fictions we manufacture out of each other.
Lawrence DurrellRead