Christianity remains to this day the greatest misfortune of humanity.
Friedrich NietzscheRead
Hope in reality is the worst of all evils because it prolongs the torments of man.
Interpretation
What this quote means
Hope can lead to suffering by extending one's pain and desires.
Friedrich Nietzsche's quote suggests that hope, rather than being a positive force, can actually exacerbate human suffering. By fostering anticipation for a better future that may never come, hope can trap individuals in a cycle of longing and discontent, ultimately prolonging their torment rather than providing genuine solace or resolution.
Themes
HopeSufferingTormentPhilosophyNietzsche
In practice
Example use cases
During a philosophical discussion on the nature of hope and suffering.
More from Friedrich Nietzsche
All quotes βThat which does not kill us makes us stronger.
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 β as if happiness sat on the throne. Often, mud sits on the throne β 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.
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The anarchist and the Christian have a common origin.
Friedrich NietzscheRead
Christianity has taken the part of all the weak, the low, the botched; it has made an ideal out of antagonism to all the self preservative instincts of sound life; it has corrupted even the faculties of those natures that are intellectually most vigorous, by representing the highest intellectual values as sinful, as misleading, as full of temptation.
Friedrich NietzscheRead
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Most persons are so absorbed in the contemplation of the outside world that they are wholly oblivious to what is passing on within themselves. The premature death of millions is primarily traceable to this cause. Even among those who exercise care, it is a common mistake to avoid imaginary, and ignore the real dangers. And what is true of an individual also applies, more or less, to a people as a whole.
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A man who gives himself to be a possession of aliens leads a Yahoo life, having bartered his soul to a brute-master. He is not of them. He may stand against them, persuade himself of a mission, batter and twist them into something which they, of their own accord, would not have been.
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Indolence and melancholy: Each generates the other. If one can speak of such feeble passions as generating anything.
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