Felix Champagne > Felix's Quotes

“Without myth, however, every culture loses its healthy creative natural power: it is only a horizon encompassed with myth that rounds off to unity a social movement.”
― Friedrich Nietzsche, The Birth of Tragedy

“Language can never adequately render the cosmic symbolism of music, because music stands in symbolic relation to the primordial contradiction and primordial pain in the heart of the primal unity, and therefore symbolizes a sphere which is beyond and prior to all phenomena. Rather, all phenomena, compared with it, are merely symbols: hence language, as the organ and symbol of phenomena, can never by any means disclose the innermost heart of music; language, in its attempt to imitate it, can only be in superficial contact with music; while all the eloquence of lyric poetry cannot bring the deepest significance of the latter one step nearer to us.”
― Friedrich Nietzsche, The Birth of Tragedy

“Every culture that has lost myth has lost, by the same token, its natural healthy creativity. Only a horizon ringed about with myths can unify a culture. The forces of imagination and the Apollonian dream are saved only by myth from indiscriminate rambling. The images of myth must be the daemonic guardians, ubiquitous but unnoticed, presiding over the growth of the child's mind and interpreting to the mature man his life and struggles.”
― Friedrich Nietzsche, The Birth of Tragedy

“Around the hero everything becomes a tragedy; around the demigod everything becomes a satyr-play; and around God everything becomes — what? perhaps a 'world'?”
― Friedrich Nietzsche, The Birth of Tragedy

“Why does Homer give us descriptions so much more vivid than all the poets. Because he sees so much more around him. We speak about poetry so abstractly because we all tend to be poor poets. The aesthetic phenomenon is fundamentally simple: if someone simply possesses the capacity to see a living game going on continually and to live all the time surrounded by hordes of ghosts, then the man is a poet; if someone simply feels the urge to change himself and to speak out from other bodies and souls, then that person is a dramatist.”
― Friedrich Nietzsche, The Birth of Tragedy

“You have your way. I have my way. As for the right way, the correct way, and the only way, it does not exist.”
― Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche

“He who has a why to live for can bear almost any how.”
― Friedrich Nietzsche

“I cannot believe in a God who wants to be praised all the time.”
― Friedrich Nietzsche

“The snake which cannot cast its skin has to die. As well the minds which are prevented from changing their opinions; they cease to be mind.”
― Friedrich Nietzsche

“In individuals, insanity is rare; but in groups, parties, nations and epochs, it is the rule.”
― Friedrich Nietzsche

“No one can construct for you the bridge upon which precisely you must cross the stream of life, no one but you yourself alone.”
― Friedrich Nietzsche

“Is man merely a mistake of God's? Or God merely a mistake of man?”
― Friedrich Nietzsche

“I am a forest, and a night of dark trees: but he who is not afraid of my darkness, will find banks full of roses under my cypresses.”
― Friedrich Nietzsche, Thus Spoke Zarathustra

“Thoughts are the shadows of our feelings -- always darker, emptier and simpler.”
― Friedrich Nietzsche

“The higher we soar the smaller we appear to those who cannot fly.”
― Friedrich Nietzsche, Thus Spoke Zarathustra

“A thinker sees his own actions as experiments and questions--as attempts to find out something. Success and failure are for him answers above all.”
― Friedrich Nietzsche

“The true man wants two things: danger and play. For that reason he wants woman, as the most dangerous plaything.”
― Freidrich Neitzsche

“We have art in order not to die of the truth.”
― Friedrich Nietzsche

“There are no beautiful surfaces without a terrible depth.”
― Friedrich Nietzsche

“you must be ready to burn yourself in your own flame;
how could you rise anew if you have not first become ashes?”
― Friedrich Nietzsche, Thus Spoke Zarathustra

“That which is done out of love is always beyond good and evil.”
― Nietzsche

“God is dead. God remains dead. And we have killed him. How shall we comfort ourselves, the murderers of all murderers? What was holiest and mightiest of all that the world has yet owned has bled to death under our knives: who will wipe this blood off us? What water is there for us to clean ourselves? What festivals of atonement, what sacred games shall we have to invent? Is not the greatness of this deed too great for us? Must we ourselves not become gods simply to appear worthy of it?”
― Friedrich Nietzsche

“Ah, women. They make the highs higher and the lows more frequent.”
― Friedrich Nietzsche

“Meaning and morality of One's life come from within oneself. Healthy, strong individuals seek self expansion by experimenting and by living dangerously. Life consists of an infinite number of possibilities and the healthy person explores as many of them as posible. Religions that teach pity, self-contempt, humility, self-restraint and guilt are incorrect. The good life is ever changing, challenging, devoid of regret, intense, creative and risky.”
― Friedrich Nietzsche

“One must shed the bad taste of wanting to agree with many. "Good" is no longer good when one's neighbor mouths it. And how should there be a "common good"! The term contradicts itself: whatever can be common always has little value. In the end it must be as it is and always has been: great things remain for the great, abysses for the profound, nuances and shudders for the refined, and, in brief, all that is rare for the rare.”
― Friedrich Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil

“It is the business of the very few to be independent; it is a privilege of the strong. And whoever attempts it, even with the best right, but without being OBLIGED to do so, proves that he is probably not only strong, but also daring beyond measure. He enters into a labyrinth, he multiplies a thousandfold the dangers which life in itself already brings with it; not the least of which is that no one can see how and where he loses his way, becomes isolated, and is torn piecemeal by some minotaur of conscience. Supposing such a one comes to grief, it is so far from the comprehension of men that they neither feel it, nor sympathize with it. And he cannot any longer go back! He cannot even go back again to the sympathy of men!”
― Friedrich Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil

“The strength of a person's spirit would then be measured by how much 'truth' he could tolerate, or more precisely, to what extent he needs to have it diluted, disguised, sweetened, muted, falsified.”
― Friedrich Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil

“The maturity of man—that means, to have reacquired the seriousness that one had as a child at play”
― Friedrich Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil

“Let old ones go. Dont be a memory-monger!
Once you were young──now you are even younger.”
― Friedrich Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil

“Swallow your poison, for you need it badly.”
― Friedrich Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil