Christianity remains to this day the greatest misfortune of humanity.
Friedrich NietzscheRead
Hope in reality is the worst of all evils because it prolongs the torments of man.
Interpretation
What this quote means
Hope can lead to suffering by extending one's pain and desires.
Friedrich Nietzsche's quote suggests that hope, rather than being a positive force, can actually exacerbate human suffering. By fostering anticipation for a better future that may never come, hope can trap individuals in a cycle of longing and discontent, ultimately prolonging their torment rather than providing genuine solace or resolution.
Themes
HopeSufferingTormentPhilosophyNietzsche
In practice
Example use cases
During a philosophical discussion on the nature of hope and suffering.
More from Friedrich Nietzsche
All quotes βThat which does not kill us makes us stronger.
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 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.
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
Christianity has taken the part of all the weak, the low, the botched; it has made an ideal out of antagonism to all the self preservative instincts of sound life; it has corrupted even the faculties of those natures that are intellectually most vigorous, by representing the highest intellectual values as sinful, as misleading, as full of temptation.
Friedrich NietzscheRead
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By the law of Christ, every man is bound to love his neighbour as himself; but every servant is a neighbour of every civil lord; therefore every civil lord must love any of his servants as himself; but by natural instinct, every lord abhors slavery; therefore, by the law of charity, he is bound not to impose slavery on any brother in Christ.
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At the time of Galileo the Church remained much more reasonable than Galileo himself. The process against Galileo was reasonable and just.
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Monsters exist because they are part of the divine plan, and in the horrible features of those same monsters the power of the creator is revealed.
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We are not accusing you of being illegal, we are accusing you of being immoral.
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Day after day I read Freud, thinking myself to be very enlightened and scientific when, as a matter of fact, I was about as scientific as an old woman secretly poring over books about occultism, trying to tell her own fortune, and learning how to dope out the future form the lines in the palm of her hand. I don't know if I ever got very close to needing a padded cell: but if I ever had gone crazy, I think psychoanalysis would have been the one thing chiefly responsible for it.
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We were romantics in the 1990s and thought that communism was dead. But 10 years passed, and Putin came, and it became obvious that the process is reversible; that communism will, to varying degrees, return again and again.
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