Christianity remains to this day the greatest misfortune of humanity.
Friedrich NietzscheRead
The mother of excess is not joy but joylessness.
Interpretation
What this quote means
Excess arises from a lack of true joy, indicating that true satisfaction comes from contentment rather than overindulgence.
Friedrich Nietzsche's quote suggests that indulgence and excess are often a response to a deeper feeling of joylessness. When individuals lack genuine happiness or fulfillment, they may seek to compensate through excessive behaviors, yet such attempts ultimately do not lead to true joy. Instead, it is the absence of joy that breeds a cycle of excess, highlighting the importance of finding true contentment rather than seeking it through excess.
Themes
ExcessJoyJoylessnessHappinessNietzsche
In practice
Example use cases
In a discussion about finding balance in oneβs life, one could use this quote to emphasize the dangers of excess.
More from Friedrich Nietzsche
All quotes βThat 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 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
Similar quotes
We're all going to die, all of us, what a circus!
Charles BukowskiRead
It is possible to argue that the really influential book is not that which converts ten millions of casual readers, but rather that which converts the very few who, at any given moment, succeed in seizing power. Marx and Sorel have been influential in the modern world, not so much because they were best-sellers (Sorel in particular was not at all a widely read author), but because among their few readers were two men, called respectively Lenin and Mussolini.
Aldous HuxleyRead
When God's righteousness is mentioned in the gospel, it is God's action of declaring righteous the unrighteous sinner who has faith in Jesus Christ. The righteousness by which a person is justified (declared righteous) is not his own but that of another, Christ.
Martin LutherRead
A man's memory may almost become the art of continually varying and misrepresenting his past, according to his interest in the present.
George SantayanaRead
If everyone was satisfied with himself, there would be no heroes.
Mark TwainRead
The first forty years of life give us the text; the next thirty supply the commentary on it.
Arthur SchopenhauerRead