The Birth of Tragedy from the Spirit of Music, published in 1872 when Nietzsche was a twenty-seven-year-old professor at Basel, argues that Greek tragedy arose from the union of two opposed artistic drives, which he names after the gods Apollo and Dionysus. The Apollonian is the drive toward clear form, measure and individuation, whose physiological analogue is the dream, in which every person is a perfect artist of images.
Author
Friedrich Nietzsche
Frequently Cited
“SUPPOSING that Truth is a woman--what then”
“He who fights with monsters should be careful lest he thereby become a monster. And if thou gaze long into an abyss, the abyss will also gaze into thee”
“Insanity in individuals is something rare--but in groups, parties, nations, and epochs it is the rule”
“What is good?--Whatever augments the feeling of power, the will to power, power itself, in man”
“What is best of all is for ever beyond your reach: not to be born, not to _be_, to be _nothing._ The second best for you, however, is soon to die”
“for only as an _æsthetic phenomenon_ is existence and the world eternally _justified”
“God is dead! God remains dead! And we have killed him”
“Could it be possible! This old saint in the forest hath not yet heard of it, that GOD IS DEAD”
“I TEACH YOU THE SUPERMAN. Man is something that is to be surpassed. What have ye done to surpass man”
“Man is a rope stretched between the animal and the Superman—a rope over an abyss”
“That which does not kill me, makes me stronger”
The Gay Science, also translated as The Joyful Wisdom, is Nietzsche's book of convalescence, experiment, and dangerous cheerfulness. Its aphorisms and songs range across knowledge, art, women, morality, religion, science, friendship, self-creation, health, and style.
Thus Spoke Zarathustra: A Book for All and None is a philosophical prose-poem in four parts, written in the cadences of Luther's Bible. Its hero borrows the name of the ancient Persian prophet Zoroaster, whom Nietzsche chose because the first moralist should be the one to overturn morality.
Subtitled 'Prelude to a Philosophy of the Future', Beyond Good and Evil was Nietzsche's attempt to restate in plain argumentative prose, divided into 296 numbered sections and a closing poem, the ideas that Thus Spoke Zarathustra had put in prophetic form. The preface opens by supposing that truth is a woman and that dogmatic philosophers, with their clumsy seriousness, have never known how to win her.
On the Genealogy of Morality is Nietzsche's most sustained inquiry into the historical and psychological origins of moral values. In three treatises he asks where good and evil came from, how guilt and bad conscience developed, and what ascetic ideals do for priests, philosophers, artists, scientists, and sufferers.
Ecce Homo is Nietzsche's late self-interpretation, part autobiography, part literary self-defense, part philosophical performance. Its chapter headings are famously outrageous: why he is so wise, clever, and a destiny; why he writes such good books.
The Antichrist is Nietzsche's most direct assault on Christianity as a moral and cultural force. It argues that Christianity reverses life-affirming values, sanctifies weakness, elevates pity, falsifies psychology, and turns resentment into virtue.
Twilight of the Idols is Nietzsche in compressed diagnostic form. Subtitled How to Philosophize with a Hammer, it tests inherited idols by sounding them for hollowness.