“ The darkening of the heavens over man has always increased in proportion to the growth of man's shame before man. ”
Friedrich Nietzsche, On the Genealogy of Morality (1887). copy citation
| Author | Friedrich Nietzsche |
|---|---|
| Source | On the Genealogy of Morality |
| Topic | growth shame |
| Date | 1887 |
| Language | English |
| Reference | |
| Note | Translated by Horace B. Samuel |
| Weblink | https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/The_Genealogy_of_Morals |
Context
“Entertaining, as I do, these thoughts, I am, let me say in parenthesis, fundamentally opposed to helping our pessimists to new water for the discordant and groaning mills of their disgust with life; on the contrary, it should be shown specifically that, at the time when mankind was not yet ashamed of its cruelty, life in the world was brighter than it is nowadays when there are pessimists. The darkening of the heavens over man has always increased in proportion to the growth of man's shame before man. The tired pessimistic outlook, the mistrust of the riddle of life, the icy negation of disgusted ennui, all those are not the signs of the most evil age of the human race: much rather do they come first to the light of day, as the swamp-flowers, which they are, when the swamp to which they belong, comes into existence—I mean the diseased refinement and moralisation, thanks to which the "animal man"”
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