Grigoris Nietzsche > Grigoris's Quotes

“Life is the flight of the alone to the alone.”
― Plotinus

“I am striving to give back the Divine in myself to the Divine in the All.”
― Plotinus

“Beauty is no quality in things themselves: It exists merely in the mind which contemplates them; and each mind perceives a different beauty.”
― David Hume, Of the Standard of Taste and Other Essays

“That I can read and be happy while I am reading, is a great blessing.”
― Anthony Trollope

“Instead of proving himself in his first book as an unswerving follower of Schopenhauer – as has so often been taken for granted – Nietzsche discovers in Greek art a bulwark against Schopenhauer’s pessimism. One can oppose the shallow optimism of so many Western thinkers and yet refuse to negate life. Schopenhauer’s negativistic pessimism is rejected along with the superficial optimism of the popular Hegelians and Darwinists: one can face the terrors of history and nature with unbroken courage and say Yes to life.”
― Walter Kaufmann, Nietzsche: Philosopher, Psychologist, Antichrist

“Man stands alone in the universe, responsible for his condition, likely to remain in a lowly state, but free to reach above the stars.”
― Walter Kaufmann, Existentialism from Dostoevsky to Sartre

“Knowing yourself is the beginning of all wisdom.”
― Aristotle

“What is a friend? A single soul dwelling in two bodies.”
― Aristotle

“A traveler who had seen many countries, peoples and several of the earth’s continents was asked what attribute he had found in men everywhere. He said: “They have a propensity for laziness.” To others, it seems that he should have said: “They are all fearful. They hide themselves behind customs and opinions.” In his heart every man knows quite well that, being unique, he will be in the world only once and that there will be no second chance for his oneness to coalesce from the strangely variegated assortment that he is: he knows it but hides it like a bad conscience – why? From fear of his neighbor, who demands conformity and cloaks himself with it. But what is it that forces the individual to fear his neighbor, to think and act like a member of a herd, and to have no joy in himself? Modesty, perhaps, in a few rare cases. For the majority it is idleness, inertia, in short that propensity for laziness of which the traveler spoke. He is right: men are even lazier than they are fearful.”
― NIETZSCHE FRIEDRICH WILHELM

“The story of the meaning of existence is a long one. Its origins are Greek, pre-Christian. As we have seen suffering was used as a way of proving the injustice of existence, but at the same time as a way of finding a higher and divine justification for it. (It is blameworthy because it suffers, but because it suffers it is atoned for and redeemed.)”
― Gilles Deleuze, Nietzsche and Philosophy

“[N]egative nihilism is replaced by reactive nihilism, reactive nihilism ends in passive nihilism. From God to God's murderer, from God's murderer to the last man.”
― Gilles Deleuze, Nietzsche and Philosophy

“Nietzsche then speaks of the "eternal joy of becoming ... that joy which includes even joy in destroying", "The affirmation of passing away and destroying, which is the decisive feature of a Dionysian philosophy”
― Gilles Deleuze, Nietzsche and Philosophy

“The test of successful education is not the amount of knowledge that pupils take away from school, but their appetite to know and their capacity to learn.”
― Richard Livingstone

“Time brought its revenges, and for the wrong-doing of existence all things paid the penalty of death.”
― Anaximander, Fragments

“To what purpose should I trouble myself in searching out the secrets of the stars, having death or slavery continually before my eyes?”
― Anaximenes

“I had to philosophize. Otherwise, I could not live in this world.”
― Edmund Husserl

“I must achieve internal consistency.”
― Edmund Husserl

“Existential envy which is directed against the other person’s very nature, is the strongest source of ressentiment. It is as if it whispers continually: “I can forgive everything, but not that you are— that you are what you are—that I am not what you are—indeed that I am not you.” This form of envy strips the opponent of his very existence, for this existence as such is felt to be a “pressure,” a “reproach,” and an unbearable humiliation. In the lives of great men there are always critical periods of instability, in which they alternately envy and try to love those whose merits they cannot but esteem. Only gradually, one of these attitudes will predominate. Here lies the meaning of Goethe’s reflection that “against another’s great merits, there is no remedy but love.”
― Max Scheler

“Books - the best antidote against the marsh-gas of boredom and vacuity.”
― George Steiner

“when a language dies, a way of understanding the world dies with it, a way of looking at the world. ”
― Steiner G

“In January 1821, Thomas Jefferson wrote John Adams to “encourage a hope that the human mind will some day get back to the freedom it enjoyed 2000 years ago.” This wish for a return to the era of philosophy would put Jefferson in the same period as Titus Lucretius Carus, thanks to whose six-volume poem De Rerum Naturum (On the Nature of Things) we have a distillation of the work of the first true materialists: Leucippus, Democritus, and Epicurus. These men concluded that the world was composed of atoms in perpetual motion, and Epicurus, in particular, went on to argue that the gods, if they existed, played no part in human affairs. It followed that events like thunderstorms were natural and not supernatural, that ceremonies of worship and propitiation were a waste of time, and that there was nothing to be feared in death.”
― Christopher Hitchens, The Portable Atheist: Essential Readings for the Nonbeliever

“What was Aristotle’s life?’ Well, the answer lay in a single sentence: ‘He was born, he thought, he died.’ And all the rest is pure anecdote.”
― Martin Heidegger

“Reading is merely a surrogate for thinking for yourself; it means letting someone else direct your thoughts. Many books, moreover, serve merely to show how many ways there are of being wrong, and how far astray you yourself would go if you followed their guidance. You should read only when your own thoughts dry up, which will of course happen frequently enough even to the best heads; but to banish your own thoughts so as to take up a book is a sin against the holy ghost; it is like deserting untrammeled nature to look at a herbarium or engravings of landscapes.”
― Arthur Schopenhauer, Essays and Aphorisms

“The safest way of not being very miserable is not to expect to be very happy.”
― Arthur Schopenhauer

“Buying books would be a good thing if one could also buy the time to read them; but as a rule the purchase of books is mistaken for the appropriation of their contents.”
― Arthur Schopenhauer, Counsels and Maxims

“The shortness of life, so often lamented, may be the best thing about it.”
― Arthur Schopenhauer

“One can never read too little of bad, or too much of good books: bad books are intellectual poison; they destroy the mind.

In order to read what is good one must make it a condition never to read what is bad; for life is short, and both time and strength limited.”
― Arthur Schopenhauer, Essays and Aphorisms

“If we were not all so interested in ourselves, life would be so uninteresting that none of us would be able to endure it.”
― Arthur Schopenhauer

“I know some who are constantly drunk on books as other men are drunk on whiskey.”
― H.L. Mencken

“Nietzsche, an infinitely harder and more courageous intellect, was incapable of any such confusion of ideas; he seldom allowed sentimentality to turn him from the glaring fact.”
― H.L. Mencken, The Philosophy of Friedrich Nietzsche