Christianity remains to this day the greatest misfortune of humanity.
Friedrich NietzscheRead
There are no beautiful surfaces without a terrible depth.
Interpretation
True beauty often comes from the struggle and complexity beneath the surface.
Friedrich Nietzsche's quote suggests that what appears beautiful on the surface often has a complex and sometimes painful depth. It highlights the idea that our most cherished aspects of life, such as art or relationships, may contain elements of struggle, difficulty, and profound insight that contribute to their beauty. Therefore, it encourages an appreciation for the deeper layers of experience, which can enhance our understanding of beauty in all forms.
In practice
In a discussion about art, one could use this quote to emphasize the importance of understanding the artist's struggles.
Christianity remains to this day the greatest misfortune of humanity.
That 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.
Lunatics have no age. If we were crazy, you and I, we might be a great deal younger.
Meditation on inevitable death should be performed daily. Every day one should meditate on being carried away by surging waves, falling from thousand-foot cliffs, dying of disease.
Why did people ask "What is it about?" as if a novel had to be about only one thing.
Among the basic freedoms to which men aspire that their lives might be full and uncramped, freedom from fear stands out as both a means and an end. A people who would build a nation in which strong, democratic institutions are firmly established as a guarantee against state-induced power must first learn to liberate their own minds from apathy and fear.
We are, all of us, exploring a world none of us understands...searching for a more immediate, ecstatic, and penetrating mode of living...for the integrity, the courage to be whole, living in relation to one another in the full poetry of existence. The struggle for an integrated life existing in an atmosphere of communal trust and respect is one with desperately important political and social consequences...Fear is always with us, but we just don't have time for it.
There are massive efforts on the part of the internet's corporate owners to try to direct it to become a technique of marginalisation and control.
Subscribe for the occasional hand-picked quote. No noise.