Christianity remains to this day the greatest misfortune of humanity.
Friedrich NietzscheRead
Even the most beautiful scenery is no longer assured of our love after we have lived in it for three months, and some distant coast attracts our avarice: possessions are generally diminished by possession.
Interpretation
Familiarity can diminish our appreciation for beauty and value.
This quote by Friedrich Nietzsche highlights the idea that prolonged exposure to beautiful or valuable things can lead to a loss of appreciation for them. When we first encounter something beautiful, it captivates us, but over time, our affection may wane as we take it for granted and instead become drawn to distant or new desires, illustrating the paradox of possession where having something can lessen its perceived value.
In practice
This quote can be used in a discussion about how we often take our relationships for granted.
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 — as if happiness sat on the throne. Often, mud sits on the throne — 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.
The world being unworthy to receive the Son of God directly from the hands of the Father, he gave his Son to Mary for the world to receive him from her.
True penitence condemns to silence. What a man is ready to recall he would be willing to repeat.
Once you experience Third World poverty, you're really changed forever, if you're at all open to it, because we're all united in our common humanity. And we are so made as to feel something for people who are in pain. It's not possible to be human and to be unaffected by what you see in the third world.
Once you have become permanently startled, as I am, by the realization that we are a social species, you tend to keep an eye out for the pieces of evidence that this is, by and large, good for us.
The cause of freedom is not the cause of a race or a sect, a party or a class - it is the cause of humankind, the very birthright of humanity.
I will have nothing to do with a God who cares only occasionally. I need a God who is with us always, everywhere, in the deepest depths as well as the highest heights. It is when things go wrong, when good things do not happen, when our prayers seem to have been lost, that God is most present. We do not need the sheltering wings when things go smoothly. We are closest to God in the darkness, stumbling along blindly.
Subscribe for the occasional hand-picked quote. No noise.