Christianity remains to this day the greatest misfortune of humanity.
Friedrich NietzscheRead
One will seldom go wrong if one attributes extreme actions to vanity, average ones to habit, and pretty ones to fear.
Interpretation
What this quote means
Actions are often motivated by vanity, habit, or fear, and recognizing these motivations can help us understand human behavior.
In this quote, Friedrich Nietzsche suggests that human actions can typically be categorized based on underlying motivations. Extreme actions are often driven by vanity, indicating a desire for recognition or approval; average actions stem from habit, reflecting the routines and comforts we cling to; and aesthetically pleasing actions are motivated by fear, suggesting a deeper emotional response to the world around us. This analysis invites us to reflect on the complexity of human intentions and behavior.
Themes
ActionsVanityHabitFearMotivationsHuman Behavior
In practice
Example use cases
This quote can be used in a psychology class discussion about motivations behind human actions.
More from Friedrich Nietzsche
All quotes →That which does not kill us makes us stronger.
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Hope in reality is the worst of all evils because it prolongs the torments of man.
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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 — 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.
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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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