Christianity remains to this day the greatest misfortune of humanity.
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.
Interpretation
What this quote means
This quote critiques the nature of ambition and the pursuit of happiness, suggesting that the quest for power can lead to depravity and madness.
Friedrich Nietzsche's quote reflects on the chaotic and often irrational struggle for status and happiness among individuals. He uses the metaphor of 'clambering monkeys' to illustrate how people scramble over each other in a mad competition for the throne, which symbolizes success or happiness. Yet, Nietzsche provocatively points out that what people strive for may not be true happiness, but rather a muddy throne, suggesting that the pursuit of power and status can be ultimately disillusioning and foul. This highlights the absurdity and futility in the pursuit of superficial goals that society often idolizes.
Themes
AmbitionHappinessMadnessStatusNietzsche
In practice
Example use cases
In a philosophical discussion on the nature of success and its implications.
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
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
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
Similar quotes
Whereas a lot of Buddhism concerns itself with stages of enlightenment, various precepts and moral codes, and even power structures and hierarchies, Zen is just like, 'Shut up, sit down, and observe your thoughts - oh, and by the way, what you perceive as you' doesn't actually exist.' I loved the minimalist approach of it.
Mark MansonRead
Being human is itself difficult, and therefore all kinds of settlements (except dream cities) have problems. Big cities have difficulties in abundance, because they have people in abundance.
Jane JacobsRead
Realism is not a matter of any fidelity to an empirical reality, but of the discursive conventions by which and for which a sense of reality is constructed.
John FiskeRead
If one tries to think about history, it seems to me - it's like looking at a range of mountains. And the first time you see them, they look one way. But then time changes, the pattern of light shifts. Maybe you've moved slightly, your perspective has changed. The mountains are the same, but they look very different.
Robert HarrisRead
Old elephants limp off to the hills to die; old Americans go out to the highway and drive themselves to death with huge cars.
Hunter S. ThompsonRead
It was never what I wanted to buy that held my heart's hope. It was what I wanted to be.
Lois Mcmaster BujoldRead