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.
Meanwhile the mind, from pleasure less, Withdraws into its happiness; The mind, that ocean where each kind Does straight its own resemblance find; Yet it creates, transcending these, Far other worlds, and other seas; Annihilating all that's made To a green thought in a green glade ... Such was that happy garden-state.
The more materialistic science becomes, the more angels shall I paint. Their wings are my protest in favor of the immortality of the soul.
I do not think of God theistically, that is, as a being, supernatural in power, who dwells beyond the limits of my world. I rather experience God as the source of life willing me to live fully, the source of love calling me to love wastefully and to borrow a phrase from the theologian, Paul Tillich, as the Ground of being, calling me to be all that I can be.
I try to very hard to avoid a situation where I would be eating cat or dog; I've managed to gracefully avoid that. It's hypocritical of me and an arbitrary line, but one that I have managed to avoid crossing.
To insult someone we call him 'bestial. For deliberate cruelty and nature, 'human' might be the greater insult.
Destiny is a lie. Destiny is justification for atrocity. It is the means by which murderers armour themselves against reprimand. It is a word intended to stand in place of ethics, denying all moral context.
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