Christianity remains to this day the greatest misfortune of humanity.
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.
Interpretation
Nietzsche suggests that our reasoning can distort the truth we perceive through our senses.
In this quote, Friedrich Nietzsche posits that while our senses accurately perceive the world as it changes, our rational minds often misinterpret these sensory experiences. Reason can lead us to draw incorrect conclusions from the evidence our senses provide, highlighting a tension between what we perceive and what we think we know.
In practice
This quote can be used in a philosophical discussion about the nature of reality.
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 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.
The anarchist and the Christian have a common origin.
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.
For in every adult there dwells the child that was, and in every child there lies the adult that will be.
If I was freer than I had ever been in my life, I was not yet entirely free, for I still hung on to an idea that had been set deep in me by all my schooling so far: I was a bright boy and I ought to make something out of myself... something else that would be a cut or two above my humble origins.
It seems to me a worthy goal: try to create a representation of consciousness that's durable and truthful, i.e., that accounts, somewhat, for all the strange, tiny, hard-to-articulate, instantaneous, unwilled things that actually go on in our minds in the course of a given day, or even a given moment.
We used to look at each other and say, 'We play the same game with the same rules, the same bat, the same ball, the same field. What the hell does color have to do with it? You don't play with color. You play with talent.'
While a modicum of consciousness may have had survivalist properties during an immemorial chapter of our evolution β so one theory goes β this faculty soon enough became a seditious agent working against us β¦ we need to hamper our consciousness for all we are worth or it will impose upon us a too clear vision of what we do not want to see β¦ Consciousness has forced us into the paradoxical position of striving to be unself-conscious of what we are β hunks of spoiling flesh on disintegrating bones
Influence is to be measured, not by the extent of surface it covers, but by its kind.
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