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I fear that, with our current veneration for the natural and the real, we have arrived at the opposite pole to all idealism, and have landed in the region of the waxworks.
Friedrich Nietzsche
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Interpretation

What this quote means

Nietzsche critiques society's obsession with the 'natural' and 'real', warning that it leads to a lack of idealism and authenticity.

In this quote, Friedrich Nietzsche expresses a concern that contemporary society's admiration for the tangible and realistic has pushed it away from the realm of idealism, reducing human experience to something artificial and lifeless, akin to waxworks. He suggests that this trend risks devaluing the richness of human imagination and aspiration, promoting a diminished worldview that fails to appreciate deeper truths and ideals.

Themes

IdealismRealismPhilosophyAuthenticityImagination

In practice

Example use cases

In a lecture about the importance of creativity and imagination in education.

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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.
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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.
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The anarchist and the Christian have a common origin.
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Quote by Friedrich Nietzsche | QuoteProject