Christianity remains to this day the greatest misfortune of humanity.
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.
Interpretation
What this quote means
This quote critiques the nature of ambition and the pursuit of happiness, suggesting that the quest for power can lead to depravity and madness.
Friedrich Nietzsche's quote reflects on the chaotic and often irrational struggle for status and happiness among individuals. He uses the metaphor of 'clambering monkeys' to illustrate how people scramble over each other in a mad competition for the throne, which symbolizes success or happiness. Yet, Nietzsche provocatively points out that what people strive for may not be true happiness, but rather a muddy throne, suggesting that the pursuit of power and status can be ultimately disillusioning and foul. This highlights the absurdity and futility in the pursuit of superficial goals that society often idolizes.
Themes
AmbitionHappinessMadnessStatusNietzsche
In practice
Example use cases
In a philosophical discussion on the nature of success and its implications.
More from Friedrich Nietzsche
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Hope in reality is the worst of all evils because it prolongs the torments of man.
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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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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.
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