The Birth of Tragedy

and set up the millennia-long belief in progress through reason, the monstrous equivalence of the true, the good and the beautiful, and the possibility of a total understanding and thus control of the world and of our own destinies. Historical accuracy, here even more than elsewhere in the book, may be at an ultimate discount. (Location 346)

For Nietzsche, every great positive manifestation of what is most valuable for human beings has a shady or at least inferior simulacrum. (Location 351)

Thus in our ordinary waking state there is no doubt that reason and reasoning are valuable activities. But they pertain to the world of illusion, or appearance, and are powerless to instruct us as to the nature of the real. (Location 352)

To say it once again: today I find it an impossible book – badly written, clumsy and embarrassing, its images frenzied and confused, sentimental, in some places saccharine-sweet to the point of effeminacy, uneven in pace, lacking in any desire for logical purity, so sure of its convictions that it is above any need for proof, and even suspicious of the propriety of proof, (Location 629)

From the start Christianity was, essentially and fundamentally, the embodiment of disgust and antipathy for life, merely disguised, concealed, got up as the belief in an ‘other’ or a ‘better’ life. Hatred of the ‘world’, the condemnation of the emotions, the fear of beauty and sensuality, a transcendental world invented the better to slander this one, basically a yearning for non-existence, for repose until the ‘sabbath of sabbaths’ – all of this, along with Christianity’s unconditional resolve to acknowledge only moral values, struck me as the most dangerous and sinister of all possible manifestations of a ‘will to decline’, at the very least a sign of the most profound affliction, fatigue, sullenness, exhaustion, impoverishment of life. (Location 690)

and Schopenhauer actually says that the gift of being able at times to see men and objects as mere phantoms or dream images is the mark of the philosophical capacity. Thus the man who is responsive to artistic stimuli reacts to the reality of dreams as does the philosopher to the reality of existence; he observes closely, and he enjoys his observation: for it is out of these images that he interprets life, out of these processes that he trains himself for life. (Location 793)