Christianity remains to this day the greatest misfortune of humanity.
It is nothing but fanaticism and beautiful soulism to expect very much (or even, much only) from humanity when it has forgotten how to wage war.
Interpretation
What this quote means
Nietzsche critiques the unrealistic expectations of human nature in the context of conflict and war.
In this quote, Nietzsche highlights the naive belief that humanity can embody beauty and idealism while ignoring the brutal realities of life, particularly the darker aspects of human nature such as conflict and war. He suggests that expecting a higher moral standard from people who have become disconnected from the harsh truths of existence is an act of fanaticism, indicating that an understanding of our primal instincts is essential for genuine progress.
Themes
In practice
Example use cases
A speaker at a human rights conference might use this quote to emphasize the need for realism in expectations of human behavior.
More from Friedrich Nietzsche
All quotes βThat which does not kill us makes us stronger.
Hope in reality is the worst of all evils because it prolongs the torments of man.
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.
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.
The anarchist and the Christian have a common origin.
Similar quotes
There is a theory which states that if ever anyone discovers exactly what the Universe is for and why it is here, it will instantly disappear and be replaced by something even more bizarre and inexplicable.There is another theory which states that this has already happened.
For 179 years [The Book of Mormon] has been examined and attacked, denied and deconstructed, targeted and torn apart like perhaps no other religious history β perhaps like no other book in any religious history- and still, it stands.
She had acquired some of his gypsy ways, some of his nonchalance, his bohemian indiscipline. She had swung with him into the disorders of strewn clothes, spilled cigarette ashes, slipping into bed all dressed, falling asleep thus, indolence, timelessness...A region of chaos and moonlight. She liked it there.
We have all had the experience of finding that our reactions and perhaps even our deeds have denied beliefs we thought were ours.
By Jove the stranger and the poor are sent, and what to those we give, to Jove is lent.
For a long time the fear of seeming singular scared me away; but by degrees, as people became accustomed to me and my habits, and to such shadows of peculiarity as were engrained in my nature - shades, certainly not striking enough to interest, and perhaps not prominent enough to offend, but born in and with me, and no more to be parted with than my identity - but slow degrees I became a frequenter of this straight narrow path.