Friedrich Nietzsche
Written in Genoa in the month of January 1882, Book Four of The Gay Science by Friedrich Nietzsche opens with a poem entitled 'Sanctus Januarius', meaning both Holy January and Saint Januarius. The dedication can be read in various ways, both as a reference to the symbolic importance of the saint as well as the particular month of January in Nietzsche's biography. Walter Kaufmann's footnote to the English translation of the passage underscores that the use of Sanctus Januarius is as a symbol for Nietzsche's restored intellectual and literary output after years of wandering across Europe. Thus, 'Sanctus Januarius' honors the miracular transformation of deadened life into liquid blood again, which is the leitmotif of the contents of the fourth book of the Gay Science that values becoming a 'Yes-sayer' to everything one is fated to.
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Famous quotes by friedrich nietzsche:
“The idealist is incorrigible: if he is expelled from his heaven, he makes an ideal out of hell.”
—Friedrich Nietzsche (1844–1900)
“You must await your thirst and allow it to become complete: otherwise you will never discover your spring, which can never be anyone else’s!”
—Friedrich Nietzsche (1844–1900)
“One who does not know how to discover the pathway to his ideal lives more frivolously and impudently than the man without an ideal.”
—Friedrich Nietzsche (1844–1900)
“We are no longer Christians: we have outgrown Christianity not because we have been too remote from it but rather because we have been too close—it is precisely our more stringent and more fastidious piety that forbids us to remain Christians nowadays.”
—Friedrich Nietzsche (1844–1900)
“I do not know what the spirit of a philosopher could more wish to be than a good dancer. For the dance is his ideal, also his fine art, finally also the only kind of piety he knows, his ‘divine service.’”
—Friedrich Nietzsche (1844–1900)