Neither Kierkegaard nor Nietzsche had the slightest interest in starting a movement – or a new system, a thought which would indeed have offended them. Both proclaimed, in Nietzsche's phrase, Follow not me, but you!
Both of us, me and Friedrich Nietzsche being writers, if we weren't capable of some strategic self-deception, we would have moved on to more lucrative careers long ago.
Nietzsche had a little one-liner on how to choose a wife. He said, ''Are you willing to have a conversation with this woman for the next forty years?'' That's how to pick a wife.
The only dance masters I could have were Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Walt Whitman and Nietzsche.
Monotheistic religions in the West have tended to conflate having a general orientation in life, having a specific theory of the world, having a sense of the positive meaningfulness of one's existence, and having a fixed set of rules for behavior, but these elements are in principle separable. . . . The "metaphysical need,". . . both Marx and Nietzsche held, is a historical phenomenon that arises under determinate circumstances, and could be expected to disappear under other circumstances that we could relatively easily envisage.
People try so hard to believe in leaders now, pitifully hard. But we no sooner get a popular reformer or politician or soldier or writer or philosopher -- a Roosevelt, a Tolstoi, a Wood, a Shaw, a Nietzsche, than the cross-currents of criticism wash him away. My Lord, no man can stand prominence these days. It's the surest path to obscurity. People get sick of hearing the same name over and over.
If in Nietzsche's thinking the prior tradition of Western thought is gathered and completed in a decisive respect, then the confrontation with Nietzsche becomes one with all Western thought hitherto.
Science is wonderful at destroying metaphysical answers, but incapable of providing substitute ones. Science takes away foundations without providing a replacement. Whether we want to be there or not, science has put us in the position of having to live without foundations. It was shocking when Nietzsche said this, but today it is commonplace; our historical position-and no end to it is in sight-is that of having to philosophise without 'foundations'.
I am convinced that when Nietzsche came to Switzerland and went insane, it was not because of venereal disease, though he did have this disease. Rather, it was because he understood that insanity was the only philosophic answer if the infinite-personal God does not exist.
You would not enjoy Nietzsche, sir. He is fundamentally unsound.
Atheism, true 'existential' atheism burning with hatred of a seemingly unjust or unmerciful God, is a spiritual state; it is a real attempt to grapple with the true God. … Nietzsche, in calling himself Antichrist, proved thereby his intense hunger for Christ.
Nietzsche, driven by the absolute demand of his existential truthfulness, could not abide the bourgeois world, even when its representative had human nobility.
And I quoted from Nietzsche: That which does not kill me, makes me stronger.
In August, 1900, [Friedrich] Nietzsche was laid to rest Nietzsche, as the apostle of atheism, heralded the darkest century the world has ever known.
Nietzsche himself was a great moralist; his writings abound with value judgments about individuals, character types, modes of thinking, and national traits. It is as if he develops immoralist psychology in order to tame his own nature, to keep his own greatest vice in check.
Nietzsche was so intelligent and advanced. And that's how I am. I'm the black, basketball-playing Nietzsche.
When I was writing Love and Lies, I was going over a lot of my old notes to see if there were any insights in them. I was obsessed with Friedrich Nietzsche, Søren Kierkegaard, Arthur Schopenhauer. These are not guys that you want to go to for understanding the nature of love. They clearly didn't get it.
No other German writer of comparable stature has been a more extreme critic of German nationalism than Nietzsche.
[Friedrich] Nietzsche said something marvellous, he said "Madness is not a consequence of uncertainty but of certainty", and this is fanaticism.
I would love to meet a philosopher like Nietzsche on a train or boat and to talk with him all night. Incidentally, I don't consider his philosophy long-lived. It is not so much persuasive as full of bravura.
