Philosophy in the Tragic Age of the Greeks Quotes

“Words are but symbols for the relations of things to one another and to us; nowhere do they touch upon absolute truth.... Through words and concepts we shall never reach beyond the wall off relations, to some sort of fabulous primal ground of things.”
― Friedrich Nietzsche, Philosophy in the Tragic Age of the Greeks

“إننا نكفر عن ولادتنا مرة أولى بحياتنا ومرة ثانية بموتنا.”
― فريدريك نيتشه, الفلسفة في العصر المأساوي الإغريقي

“All modern philosophizing is political, policed by governments, churches, academics, custom, fashion, and human cowardice, all of which limit it to a fake learnedness.”
― Friedrich Nietzsche, Philosophy in the Tragic Age of the Greeks

“The everlasting and exclusive coming-to-be, the impermanence of everything actual, which constantly acts and comes-to-be but never is, as Heraclitus teaches it, is a terrible, paralyzing thought. Its impact on men can most nearly be likened to the sensation during an earthquake when one loses one's familiar confidence in a firmly grounded earth. It takes astonishing strength to transform this reaction into its opposite, into sublimity and the feeling of blessed astonishment.
(p.58)”
― Friedrich Nietzsche, Philosophy in the Tragic Age of the Greeks

“Greek philosophy seems to begin with an absurd notion, with the proposition that water is the primal origin and the womb of all things. Is it really necessary for us to take serious notice of this proposition? It is, and for three reasons. First, because it tells us something about the primal origin of all things; second, because it does so in language devoid of image or fable, and finally, because contained in it, if only embryonically, is the thought, "all things are one".”
― Friedrich Nietzsche, Philosophy in the Tragic Age of the Greeks

“There are people who are opposed to all philosophy and one does well to listen to them.”
― Friedrich Nietzsche, Philosophy in the Tragic Age of the Greeks

“The philosopher seeks to hear within himself the echoes of the world symphony and to re-project them in the form of concepts. While he is contemplative-perceptive like the artist, compassionate like the religious, a seeker of purposes and causalities like the scientist, even while he feels himself swelling into a macrocosm, he all the while retains a certain self-possession, a way of viewing himself coldly as a mirror of the world.
This is the same sense of self-possession which characterizes the dramatic artist who transforms himself into alien bodies and talks with their alien tongues and yet can project this transformation into written verse that exists in the outside world on its own. What verse is for the poet, dialectical thinking is for the philosopher. He grasps for it in order to get hold of his own enchantment, in order to perpetuate it.”
― Friedrich Nietzsche, Philosophy in the Tragic Age of the Greeks

“[I]t has been eagerly pointed out how much the Greeks could find and learn abroad, in the Orient, and how many different things they may easily have brought from there. Of course an odd spectacle resulted, when certain scholars brought together the alleged masters from the Orient and the possible disciples from Greece, and exhibited Zarathustra near Heraclitus, the Hindoos near the Eleates, the Egyptians near Empedocles, or even Anaxagoras among the Jews and Pythagoras among the Chinese. In detail little has been determined; but we should in no way object to the general idea, if people did not burden us with the conclusion that therefore Philosophy had only been imported into Greece and was not indigenous to the soil, yea, that she, as something foreign, had possibly ruined rather than improved the Greek. Nothing is more foolish than to swear by the fact that the Greeks had an aboriginal culture; no, they rather absorbed all the culture flourishing among other nations, and they advanced so far, just because they understood how to hurl the spear further from the very spot where another nation had let it rest.”
― Friedrich Nietzsche, Philosophy in the Tragic Age of the Greeks

“While each word of Heraclitus expresses the pride and the majesty of truth, but of truth grasped in intuitions rather than attained by the rope ladder of logic, while in Sibylline rapture Heraclitus gazes but does not peer, knows but does not calculate, his contemporary Parmenides stands beside him as counter-image, likewise expressing a type of truth-teller but one formed of ice rather than fire, pouring cold piercing light all around.”
― Friedrich Nietzsche, Philosophy in the Tragic Age of the Greeks

“for strength can originally demonstrate itself only in the form of speed.”
― Friedrich Nietzsche, Philosophy in the Tragic Age of the Greeks

“The closer men wanted to get to the problem of how the definite could ever fall from the indefinite, the ephemeral from the eternal, the unjust from the just, the deeper grew the night.”
― Friedrich Nietzsche, Philosophy in the Tragic Age of the Greeks

“A period which suffers from a so-called high general level of liberal education but which is devoid of culture in the sense of a unity of style which characterizes all its life, will not quite know what to do with philosophy and wouldn’t, if the Genius of Truth himself were to proclaim it in the streets and the market places. During such times philosophy remains the learned monologue of the lonely stroller, the accidental loot of the individual, the secret skeleton in the closet, or the harmless chatter between senile academics and children”
― Friedrich Nietzsche, Philosophy in the Tragic Age of the Greeks

“If there is no priveleged being, if there is only one being, then we are also with a pluralism. Each expression of being becomes in its own way without reference or relation to any grounded being. No expression of being is in itself good or evil; there is no separate ordering principle for the world. Values and relations (such as good and evil) are selected from within life, and always from the point of view of some specific becoming.”
― Friedrich Nietzsche, Philosophy in the Tragic Age of the Greeks

“Everything that happens, happens in accordance with this strife, and it is just in the strife that eternal justice is revealed. It is a wonderful idea, welling up from the purest strings of Hellenism, the idea that strife embodies the everlasting sovereignty of strict justice, bound to everlasting laws. Only a Greek was capable of finding such an idea to be the fundament of a cosmology; it is Hesiod’s good Eris transformed into the cosmic principle; it is the contest-idea of the Greek individual and the Greek state, taken from the gymnasium and the palaestra, from the artist’s agon, from the contest between political parties and between cities — all transformed into universal application so that now the wheels of the cosmos turn on it.”
― Friedrich Nietzsche, Philosophy in the Tragic Age of the Greeks

“If philosophy ever manifested itself as helpful, redeeming, or prophylactic, it was in a healthy culture. The sick, it made even sicker.”
― Friedrich Nietzsche, Philosophy in the Tragic Age of the Greeks

“I am enjoying the pleasure,” said Kant, “of seeing a well-ordered totality creating itself, without the aid of arbitrary fictions, only by the impulse of ordered laws of motion, which is so similar to that world system which is our own, that I cannot keep from taking it to be the same. It seems to me that one might say at this point, without presumption, ‘Give me materiality and I shall build a world from it!”
― Friedrich Nietzsche, Philosophy in the Tragic Age of the Greeks

“The activity of the older philosophers, on the other hand (though they were quite unconscious of it) tended toward the healing and the purification of the whole. It is the mighty flow of Greek culture that shall not be impeded; the terrible dangers in its path shall be cleared away: thus did the philosopher protect and defend his native land. But later, beginning with Plato, philosophers became exiles, conspiring against their fatherland.”
― Friedrich Nietzsche, Philosophy in the Tragic Age of the Greeks

“Heraclitus was proud, and when a philosopher exhibits pride, it is a great pride indeed.”
― Friedrich Nietzsche, Philosophy in the Tragic Age of the Greeks

“Uma época que sofre daquilo a que se chama cultura geral, mas que não tem cultura nenhuma, nem na sua vida tem unidade de estilo, nunca saberá o que fazer com a filosofia, mesmo que ela seja proclamada nas estradas e nos mercados pelo gênio da Verdade em pessoa. Numa época assim, ela será muito mais o
monólogo erudito do passeante solitário, o roubo que o indivíduo faz por acaso, o segredo do quarto fechado ou a conversa inofensiva de velhos acadêmicos com crianças.”
― Friedrich Nietzsche, Philosophy in the Tragic Age of the Greeks

“The things themselves, which only the limited brains of men and animals believe fixed and stationary, have no real existence at all. They are the flashing and sparks of drawn swords, the glow of victory in the conflict of opposing qualities.”
― Friedrich Nietzsche, Philosophy in the Tragic Age of the Greeks

“In this world only play, play as artists and children engage in it, exhibits coming-to-be and passing away, structuring and destroying, without any moral additive, in forever equal innocence. And as children and artists play, so plays the ever-living fire. It constructs and destroys, all in innocence. Such is the game that the aeon plays with itself. Transforming itself into water and earth, it builds towers of sand like a child at the seashore, piles them up and tramples them down.”
― Friedrich Nietzsche, Philosophy in the Tragic Age of the Greeks