The Birth Of Tragedy Quotes
"The day happened to be the anniversary of the birth of Frederick-William IV., then King of Prussia, and the peal of the local church-bells... was, by a happy coincidence, just timed to greet my brother on his entrance into the world."
"Bring me this, my beloved child, that I may consecrate it unto the Lord."
"Strength, robustness, lively dispositions, and a cheerful outlook on life, were among the qualities which every one was pleased to observe in them."
"The sorrow which hung as a cloud over our branch of the family was our father's death, as the result of a heavy fall, at the age of thirty-eight."
"To be able to live at all, he had to interpose the shining dream-birth of the Olympian world between himself and them."
"The Greek knew and felt the terrors and horrors of existence: to be able to live, he had to create these gods."
"But how seldom is the naïve—that complete absorption, in the beauty of appearance—attained!"
"The beauteous appearance of the dream-worlds, in the production of which every man is a perfect artist, is the presupposition of all plastic art."
"There is an ancient story that king Midas hunted in the forest a long time for the wise Silenus, the companion of Dionysus, without capturing him."
"To die early is worst of all for them, the second worst is—some day to die at all."
"Who could fail to see in this description that lyric poetry is characterised as an imperfectly attained art?"
"The subject, the desiring individual who furthers his own egoistic ends, can be conceived only as the adversary, not as the origin of art."
"Only as an aesthetic phenomenon is existence and the world eternally justified."
"Melody is therefore primary and universal, and as such may admit of several objectivations, in several texts."
"The word, the picture, the concept here seeks an expression analogous to music."
"The entire comedy of art is not at all performed for our betterment and culture."
"The wise and enthusiastic satyr is at the same time the dumb man in contrast to the god."
"Art saves him, and through art life saves him—for herself."
"The Dionysian man resembles Hamlet: both have for once seen into the true nature of things."
"In the rapture of the Dionysian state, there is a lethargic element, wherein all personal experiences are submerged."
"In the presence of the Greeks, everything self-achieved, sincerely admired, and apparently quite original, seemed all of a sudden to lose life and color."
"The Greeks, as charioteers, hold in their hands the reins of our own and of every culture."
"There would have been no science if it had only been concerned about that one naked goddess and nothing else."
"He who has experienced in himself the joy of a Socratic perception... will find no stimulus more forcible than the desire to complete that conquest."
"In spite of fear and pity, we are the happy living beings, not as individuals, but as the one living being, with whose procreative joy we are blended."
"The history of the rise of Greek tragedy now tells us with luminous precision that the tragic art of the Greeks was really born of the spirit of music."
"We are to perceive how all that comes into being must be ready for a sorrowful end; we are compelled to look into the terrors of individual existence."
"This extraordinary antithesis... has become manifest to only one of the great thinkers."
"The struggle, the pain, the destruction of phenomena, now appear to us as something necessary."
"Tragedy sets a sublime symbol, namely the myth between the universal authority of its music and the receptive Dionysian hearer."
"A people is worth just as much only as its ability to impress on its experiences the seal of eternity."
"Greek art and especially Greek tragedy delayed above all the annihilation of myth."
"A man is worth just as much as his ability to impress on his experiences the seal of eternity."
"The Dionysian, with its primitive joy experienced in pain itself, is the common source of music and tragic myth."
"The contrary happens when a people begins to comprehend itself historically and to demolish the mythical bulwarks around it."
"Tragic myth, in so far as it really belongs to art, fully participates in the transfiguring metaphysical purpose of all art."
"The Dionysian song rises to us to let us know that the German knight still dreams his primitive Dionysian myth."
"Music and tragic myth are equally the expression of the Dionysian capacity of a people, and are inseparable from each other."
"Both transfigure a region in the delightful accords of which all dissonance, just like the terrible picture of the world, dies charmingly away."
"The Dionysian, as compared with the Apollonian, exhibits itself as the eternal and original artistic force."