Christianity remains to this day the greatest misfortune of humanity.
Friedrich NietzscheRead
Every true faith is infallible. It performs what the believing person hopes to find in it. But it does not offer the least support for the establishing of an objective truth. Here the ways of men divide. If you want to achieve peace of mind and happiness, have faith. If you want to be a disciple of truth, then search.
Interpretation
What this quote means
Faith provides subjective comfort but does not guarantee objective truth; seeking truth requires a different approach.
Friedrich Nietzsche's quote emphasizes the distinction between faith and objective truth. While faith can give individuals hope and peace of mind, it does not necessarily correlate with established truths in the world. Nietzsche suggests that those who seek happiness may rely on faith, whereas those who aspire to understand the deeper truths of existence must actively search for knowledge, indicating a dichotomy between emotional fulfillment and intellectual discovery.
Themes
FaithTruthPeaceHappinessBelief
In practice
Example use cases
This quote could be shared in a philosophical discussion group to illustrate the difference between faith and truth.
More from Friedrich Nietzsche
All quotes →That which does not kill us makes us stronger.
Friedrich NietzscheRead
Hope in reality is the worst of all evils because it prolongs the torments of man.
Friedrich NietzscheRead
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.
Friedrich NietzscheRead
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.
Friedrich NietzscheRead
The anarchist and the Christian have a common origin.
Friedrich NietzscheRead
Similar quotes
He was not bone and feather but a perfect idea of freedom and flight, limited by nothing at all
Richard BachRead
Slave camps under the flag of freedom, massacres justified by philanthropy or the taste of the superhuman, cripple judgment. On the day when crime puts on the apparel of innocence, through a curious reversal peculiar to our age, it is innocence that is called on to justify itself. The purpose of this essay is to accept and study that strange challenge.
Albert CamusRead
Possibly it had occurred to him the colossal significance of that light had now vanished forever. [...] It had seemed as close as a star to the moon. Now it was a green light on a dock. His count of enchanted objects had diminished by one.
F. Scott FitzgeraldRead
After everything that's happened, how can the world still be so beautiful? Because it is.
Margaret AtwoodRead
Sometimes I get the feeling that we're just a bunch of habits. The gestures we repeat over and over, they're just our need to be recognized. Without them, we'd be unidentifiable. We have to reinvent ourselves every minute.
Nicole KraussRead
Time is water, and the Venetians conquered both by building a city on water, and framed time with their canals. Or tamed time. Or fenced it in. Or caged it.
Joseph BrodskyRead