Christianity remains to this day the greatest misfortune of humanity.
Friedrich NietzscheRead
The worst readers are those who behave like plundering troops: they take away a few things they can use, dirty and confound the remainder, and revile the whole.
Interpretation
What this quote means
This quote critiques readers who only take superficial knowledge from texts and dismiss the rest as worthless.
Friedrich Nietzsche's quote highlights a common issue in how some individuals approach literature and knowledge. Rather than absorbing and understanding the entirety of a text, these 'worst readers' extract only what seems immediately useful to them, while disregarding or misinterpreting the broader context, thus undermining the value of the text as a whole. Nietzsche warns that this approach not only reflects a limited understanding but also leads to a degradation of knowledge itself.
Themes
ReadingKnowledgeLiteratureUnderstandingLearning
In practice
Example use cases
In a discussion about educational methods, this quote can emphasize the importance of deep reading.
More from Friedrich Nietzsche
All quotes βThat 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 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.
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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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