The Birth of Tragedy and Other Writings Quotes

“All living things need an atmosphere, a mysterious mist, around them. If that veil be taken away and a religion, an art, or a genius condemned to revolve like a star without an atmosphere, we must not be surprised if it becomes hard and unfruitful, and soon withers. It is so with all great things “that never prosper without some illusion,” as Hans Sachs says in the Meistersinger.”
― Friedrich Nietzsche, The Birth of Tragedy and Other Writings

“Thus do the gods justify the life of man: they themselves live it—the only satisfactory theodicy!”
― Friedrich Nietzsche, The Birth of Tragedy and Other Writings

“It is only as an aesthetic phenomenon that existence and the world are eternally justified.”
― Friedrich Nietzsche, The Birth of Tragedy and Other Writings

“Nothing could be more opposed to the technique of our stage than the prologue in the drama of Euripides. For a single person to appear at the outset of the play telling us who he is, what precedes the action, what has happened thus far, yea, what will happen in the course of the play, would be designated by a modern playwright as a wanton and unpardonable abandonment of the effect of suspense. Everything that is about to happen is known beforehand; who then cares to wait for it actually to happen?”
― Friedrich Nietzsche, The Birth of Tragedy and Other Writings

“....could it be that the Greeks became more and more optimistic, superficial, and histrionic precisely in the period of dissolution and weakness — more and more ardent for logic and logicizing the world and thus more ‘cheerful’ and ‘scientific’? Could it be possible that, in spite of all ‘modern ideas’ and the prejudices of a democratic taste, the triumph of optimism, the gradual prevalence of rationality, practical and theoretical utilitarianism, no less than democracy itself which developed at the same time, might all have been symptoms of a decline of strength, of impending old age, and of physiological weariness?”
― Friedrich Nietzsche, The Birth of Tragedy and Other Writings

“And a people - or, for that matter, a human being - only has value to the extent that it is able to put the stamp of the eternal on its experiences; for in doing so it sheds, one might say, its worldliness and reveals its unconscious, inner conviction that time is relative and that the true meaning oflife is metaphysical.”
― Friedrich Nietzsche, The Birth of Tragedy and Other Writings

“We are to recognize that everything which comes into being must be prepared for painful destruction; we are forced to gaze into the terrors of individual existence – and yet we are not to freeze in horror: its meta- physical solace tears us momentarily out of the turmoil of changing figures.”
― Friedrich Nietzsche, The Birth of Tragedy and Other Writings

“We take pleasure in the negation of the hero, the supreme appearance of the Will, because he is, after all, mere appearance, and because the eternal life of the Will is not affected by his annihilation.”
― Friedrich Nietzsche, The Birth of Tragedy and Other Writings