Daniel’s Reviews > The Birth of Tragedy > Status Update

“Must the tragic man in that culture, trained through his self-education for seriousness and terror, not inevitably yearn for a new art of metaphysical consolation; Tragedy?”

“That eye that had never glowed with the sweet madness of artistic inspiration - turned upon tragedy. Let us imagine that this eye had failed to gaze with pleasure into the abysses of the Dionysiac - what would it see in what Plato called the 'divine and praiseworthy art of tragedy?”

“The chorus master was the object of untiring praise: indeed, there were some who would have killed themselves to learn more from him, had they not known that the tragic poet was just as dead as tragedy itself.”

“He saw the god, with whose suffering he had already identified, walking on to the stage. He involuntarily translated the entire image of the god that was trembling before his soul to that masked figure, and dissolved its reality into a ghostly unreality.”

“But in so far as the subject is an artist, he is already liberated from his individual will and has become a medium through which the only truly existent subject celebrates his redemption through illusion.”

“An ethical deity, demands moderation from his followers and, in order to maintain it, self-knowledge. And thus the admonitions 'Know thyself and "Nothing to excess!' coexist with the aesthetic necessity of beauty, while hubris and excess are considered the truly hostile spirits of the non-Apolline realm.”

“I had always sensed hostility to life, a furious, vindictive distaste for life itself: for all life is
based on appearance, art, deception, point of view, the necessity of perspective and error.”