The Birth of Tragedy, passage 408

The assertion made a moment ago, that Euripides introduced the spectator on the stage to qualify him the better to pass judgment on the drama, will make it appear as if the old tragic art was always in a false relation to the spectator: and one would be tempted to extol the radical tendency of Euripides to bring about an adequate relation between art-work and public as an advance on Sophocles. But, as things are, "public" is merely a word, and not at all a homogeneous and constant quantity.

The Birth of Tragedy, passage 414

Euripides--and this is the solution of the riddle just propounded--felt himself, as a poet, undoubtedly superior to the masses, but not to two of his spectators: he brought the masses upon the stage; these two spectators he revered as the only competent judges and masters of his art: in compliance with their directions and admonitions, he transferred the entire world of sentiments, passions, and experiences, hitherto present at every festival representation as the invisible chorus on the spectators' benches, into the souls of his stage-heroes; he yielded to their demands when he also sought for these new characters the new word and the new tone; in their voices alone he heard the conclusive verdict on his work, as also the cheering promise of triumph when he found himself condemned as usual by the justice of the public.

The Birth of Tragedy, passage 231

When Archilochus, the first lyrist of the Greeks, makes known both his mad love and his contempt to the daughters of Lycambes, it is not his passion which dances before us in orgiastic frenzy: we see Dionysus and the Mænads, we see the drunken reveller Archilochus sunk down to sleep--as Euripides depicts it in the Bacchæ, the sleep on the high Alpine pasture, in the noonday sun:--and now Apollo approaches and touches him with the laurel.

The Birth of Tragedy, passage 758

It thereby seemed to us that precisely through this discharge the middle world of theatrical procedure, the drama generally, became visible and intelligible from within in a degree unattainable in the other forms of Apollonian art: so that here, where this art was as it were winged and borne aloft by the spirit of music, we had to recognise the highest exaltation of its powers, and consequently in the fraternal union of Apollo and Dionysus the climax of the Apollonian as well as of the Dionysian artistic aims.

The Birth of Tragedy, passage 54

He was twenty-four years and six months old when he took up his position as professor in Bale,--and it was with a heavy heart that he proceeded there, for he knew "the golden period of untrammelled activity" must cease.

The Birth of Tragedy, passage 33

The only abnormal thing about him, and something which we both inherited from our father, was short-sightedness, and this was very much aggravated in my brother's case, even in his earliest schooldays, owing to that indescribable anxiety to learn which always characterised him. When one listens to accounts given by his friends and schoolfellows, one is startled by the multiplicity of his studies even in his schooldays.

The Birth of Tragedy, passage 800

Whoso not only comprehends the word Dionysian, but also grasps his _self_ in this word, requires no refutation of Plato or of Christianity or of Schopenhauer--_he smells the putrefaction._"

The Birth of Tragedy, passage 677

Placed between India and Rome, and constrained to a seductive choice, the Greeks succeeded in devising in classical purity still a third form of life, not indeed for long private use, but just on that account for immortality. For it holds true in all things that those whom the gods love die young, but, on the other hand, it holds equally true that they then live eternally with the gods.

The Birth of Tragedy, passage 661

Accordingly, we see the opinions concerning the value of Greek contribution to culture degenerate since that time in the most alarming manner; the expression of compassionate superiority may be heard in the most heterogeneous intellectual and non-intellectual camps, and elsewhere a totally ineffective declamation dallies with "Greek harmony," "Greek beauty," "Greek cheerfulness." And in the very circles whose dignity it might be to draw indefatigably from the Greek channel for the good of German culture, in the circles of the teachers in the higher educational institutions, they have learned best to compromise with the Greeks in good time and on easy terms, to the extent often of a sceptical abandonment of the Hellenic ideal and a total perversion of the true purpose of antiquarian studies.

The Birth of Tragedy, passage 750

Even in such circumstances this metaphysical impulse still endeavours to create for itself a form of apotheosis (weakened, no doubt) in the Socratism of science urging to life: but on its lower stage this same impulse led only to a feverish search, which gradually merged into a pandemonium of myths and superstitions accumulated from all quarters: in the midst of which, nevertheless, the Hellene sat with a yearning heart till he contrived, as Græculus, to mask his fever with Greek cheerfulness and Greek levity, or to narcotise himself completely with some gloomy Oriental superstition.

The Birth of Tragedy, passage 789

'Hellenism and Pessimism' had been a more unequivocal title: namely, as a first lesson on the way in which the Greeks got the better of pessimism,--on the means whereby they _overcame_ it. Tragedy simply proves that the Greeks were _no_ pessimists: Schopenhauer was mistaken here as he was mistaken in all other things. Considered with some neutrality, the _Birth of Tragedy_ appears very unseasonable: one would not even dream that it was _begun_ amid the thunders of the battle of Wörth.

The Birth of Tragedy, passage 792

The two decisive _innovations_ of the book are, on the one hand, the comprehension of the _Dionysian_ phenomenon among the Greeks (it gives the first psychology thereof, it sees therein the One root of all Grecian art); on the other, the comprehension of Socratism: Socrates diagnosed for the first time as the tool of Grecian dissolution, as a typical decadent. 'Rationality' _against_ instinct! 'Rationality' at any price as a dangerous, as a life-undermining force!

The Birth of Tragedy, passage 185

And so the spectator will perhaps stand quite bewildered before this fantastic exuberance of life, and ask himself what magic potion these madly merry men could have used for enjoying life, so that, wherever they turned their eyes, Helena, the ideal image of their own existence "floating in sweet sensuality," smiled upon them.

The Birth of Tragedy, passage 454

Like Plato, Euripides undertook to show to the world the reverse of the "unintelligent" poet; his æsthetic principle that "to be beautiful everything must be known" is, as I have said, the parallel to the Socratic "to be good everything must be known." Accordingly we may regard Euripides as the poet of æsthetic Socratism.

The Birth of Tragedy, passage 149

Accordingly, the man susceptible to art stands in the same relation to the reality of dreams as the philosopher to the reality of existence; he is a close and willing observer, for from these pictures he reads the meaning of life, and by these processes he trains himself for life.

The Birth of Tragedy, passage 301

Nature, on which as yet no knowledge has been at work, which maintains unbroken barriers to culture--this is what the Greek saw in his satyr, which still was not on this account supposed to coincide with the ape.

The Birth of Tragedy, passage 485

But Plato, the thinker, thereby arrived by a roundabout road just at the point where he had always been at home as poet, and from which Sophocles and all the old artists had solemnly protested against that objection.

The Birth of Tragedy, passage 276

Much more celebrated than this political explanation of the chorus is the notion of A. W.

The Birth of Tragedy, passage 243

The true song is the expression of the whole of this mingled and divided state of mind."

The Birth of Tragedy, passage 365

What distinguishes the Aryan representation is the sublime view of _active sin_ as the properly Promethean virtue, which suggests at the same time the ethical basis of pessimistic tragedy as the _justification_ of human evil--of human guilt as well as of the suffering incurred thereby.

The Birth of Tragedy, passage 124

Of course, apart from all precipitate hopes and faulty applications to matters specially modern, with which I then spoiled my first book, the great Dionysian note of interrogation, as set down therein, continues standing on and on, even with reference to music: how must we conceive of a music, which is no longer of Romantic origin, like the German; but of _Dionysian_?...

The Birth of Tragedy, passage 519

He who once makes intelligible to himself how, after the death of Socrates, the mystagogue of science, one philosophical school succeeds another, like wave upon wave,--how an entirely unfore-shadowed universal development of the thirst for knowledge in the widest compass of the cultured world (and as the specific task for every one highly gifted) led science on to the high sea from which since then it has never again been able to be completely ousted; how through the universality of this movement a common net of thought was first stretched over the entire globe, with prospects, moreover, of conformity to law in an entire solar system;--he who realises all this, together with the amazingly high pyramid of our present-day knowledge, cannot fail to see in Socrates the turning-point and vortex of so-called universal history.

The Birth of Tragedy, passage 323

This enchantment is the prerequisite of all dramatic art. In this enchantment the Dionysian reveller sees himself as a satyr, _and as satyr he in turn beholds the god,_ that is, in his transformation he sees a new vision outside him as the Apollonian consummation of his state. With this new vision the drama is complete.

The Birth of Tragedy, passage 777

Let no one believe that the German spirit has for ever lost its mythical home when it still understands so obviously the voices of the birds which tell of that home. Some day it will find itself awake in all the morning freshness of a deep sleep: then it will slay the dragons, destroy the malignant dwarfs, and waken Brünnhilde--and Wotan's spear itself will be unable to obstruct its course!

The Birth of Tragedy, passage 175

But if we observe how, under the pressure of this conclusion of peace, the Dionysian power manifested itself, we shall now recognise in the Dionysian orgies of the Greeks, as compared with the Babylonian Sacæa and their retrogression of man to the tiger and the ape, the significance of festivals of world-redemption and days of transfiguration. Not till then does nature attain her artistic jubilee; not till then does the rupture of the _principium individuationis_ become an artistic phenomenon.

The Birth of Tragedy, passage 366

The misery in the essence of things--which the contemplative Aryan is not disposed to explain away--the antagonism in the heart of the world, manifests itself to him as a medley of different worlds, for instance, a Divine and a human world, each of which is in the right individually, but as a separate existence alongside of another has to suffer for its individuation.

The Birth of Tragedy, passage 151

And perhaps many a one will, like myself, recollect having sometimes called out cheeringly and not without success amid the dangers and terrors of dream-life: "It is a dream! I will dream on!" I have likewise been told of persons capable of continuing the causality of one and the same dream for three and even more successive nights: all of which facts clearly testify that our innermost being, the common substratum of all of us, experiences our dreams with deep joy and cheerful acquiescence.

The Birth of Tragedy, passage 741

All our hopes, on the contrary, stretch out longingly towards the perception that beneath this restlessly palpitating civilised life and educational convulsion there is concealed a glorious, intrinsically healthy, primeval power, which, to be sure, stirs vigorously only at intervals in stupendous moments, and then dreams on again in view of a future awakening.

The Birth of Tragedy, passage 169

Anent these immediate art-states of nature every artist is either an "imitator," to wit, either an Apollonian, an artist in dreams, or a Dionysian, an artist in ecstasies, or finally--as for instance in Greek tragedy--an artist in both dreams and ecstasies: so we may perhaps picture him, as in his Dionysian drunkenness and mystical self-abnegation, lonesome and apart from the revelling choruses, he sinks down, and how now, through Apollonian dream-inspiration, his own state, _i.e._, his oneness with the primal source of the universe, reveals itself to him _in a symbolical dream-picture_.

The Birth of Tragedy, passage 729

While the critic got the upper hand in the theatre and concert-hall, the journalist in the school, and the press in society, art degenerated into a topic of conversation of the most trivial kind, and æsthetic criticism was used as the cement of a vain, distracted, selfish and moreover piteously unoriginal sociality, the significance of which is suggested by the Schopenhauerian parable of the porcupines, so that there has never been so much gossip about art and so little esteem for it.

The Birth of Tragedy, passage 288

It is indeed an "ideal" domain, as Schiller rightly perceived, upon--which the Greek satyric chorus, the chorus of primitive tragedy, was wont to walk, a domain raised far above the actual path of mortals. The Greek framed for this chorus the suspended scaffolding of a fictitious _natural state_ and placed thereon fictitious _natural beings._ It is on this foundation that tragedy grew up, and so it could of course dispense from the very first with a painful portrayal of reality.

The Birth of Tragedy, passage 755

Perhaps many a one will be of opinion that this spirit must begin its struggle with the elimination of the Romanic element: for which it might recognise an external preparation and encouragement in the victorious bravery and bloody glory of the late war, but must seek the inner constraint in the emulative zeal to be for ever worthy of the sublime protagonists on this path, of Luther as well as our great artists and poets.

The Birth of Tragedy, passage 621

Here the "poet" comes to his aid, who knows how to provide him with abundant opportunities for lyrical interjections, repetitions of words and sentences, etc.,--at which places the singer, now in the purely musical element, can rest himself without minding the words.

The Birth of Tragedy, passage 754

Our opinion of the pure and vigorous kernel of the German being is such that we venture to expect of it, and only of it, this elimination of forcibly ingrafted foreign elements, and we deem it possible that the German spirit will reflect anew on itself.

The Birth of Tragedy, passage 224

But this interpretation is of little service to us, because we know the subjective artist only as the poor artist, and in every type and elevation of art we demand specially and first of all the conquest of the Subjective, the redemption from the "ego" and the cessation of every individual will and desire; indeed, we find it impossible to believe in any truly artistic production, however insignificant, without objectivity, without pure, interestless contemplation.

The Birth of Tragedy, passage 803

Prior to myself there is no such translation of the Dionysian into the philosophic pathos: there lacks the _tragic wisdom,_--I have sought in vain for an indication thereof even among the _great_ Greeks of philosophy, the thinkers of the two centuries _before_ Socrates. A doubt still possessed me as touching _Heraclitus,_ in whose proximity I in general begin to feel warmer and better than anywhere else.

The Birth of Tragedy, passage 477

Something very absurd, with causes that seemed to be without effects, and effects apparently without causes; the whole, moreover, so motley and diversified that it could not but be repugnant to a thoughtful mind, a dangerous incentive, however, to sensitive and irritable souls.

The Birth of Tragedy, passage 47

My brother was the first who ever manifested such enthusiastic affection for Schopenhauer and Wagner, and he was also the first of that numerous band of young followers who ultimately inscribed the two great names upon their banner. Whether Schopenhauer and Wagner ever really corresponded to the glorified pictures my brother painted of them, both in his letters and other writings, is a question which we can no longer answer in the affirmative.

The Birth of Tragedy, passage 656

It may at last, after returning to the primitive source of its being, venture to stalk along boldly and freely before all nations without hugging the leading-strings of a Romanic civilisation: if only it can learn implicitly of one people--the Greeks, of whom to learn at all is itself a high honour and a rare distinction.

The Birth of Tragedy, passage 791

An 'idea'--the antithesis of 'Dionysian _versus_ Apollonian'--translated into metaphysics; history itself as the evolution of this 'idea'; the antithesis dissolved into oneness in Tragedy; through this optics things that had never yet looked into one another's face, confronted of a sudden, and illumined and _comprehended_ through one another: for instance, Opera and Revolution.

The Birth of Tragedy, passage 793

Throughout the whole book a deep hostile silence on Christianity: it is neither Apollonian nor Dionysian; it _negatives_ all _æsthetic_ values (the only values recognised by the _Birth of Tragedy),_ it is in the widest sense nihilistic, whereas in the Dionysian symbol the utmost limit of _affirmation_ is reached. Once or twice the Christian priests are alluded to as a 'malignant kind of dwarfs,' as 'subterraneans.'"

The Birth of Tragedy, passage 397

He who has perceived the material of which the Promethean tragic writers prior to Euripides formed their heroes, and how remote from their purpose it was to bring the true mask of reality on the stage, will also know what to make of the wholly divergent tendency of Euripides.

The Birth of Tragedy, passage 384

The philosophy of wild and naked nature beholds with the undissembled mien of truth the myths of the Homeric world as they dance past: they turn pale, they tremble before the lightning glance of this goddess--till the powerful fist[16] of the Dionysian artist forces them into the service of the new deity.

The Birth of Tragedy, passage 90

A few weeks later: and he found himself under the walls of Metz, still wrestling with the notes of interrogation he had set down concerning the alleged "cheerfulness" of the Greeks and of Greek art; till at last, in that month of deep suspense, when peace was debated at Versailles, he too attained to peace with himself, and, slowly recovering from a disease brought home from the field, made up his mind definitely regarding the "Birth of Tragedy from the Spirit of _Music."_--From music?

The Birth of Tragedy, passage 497

Optimistic dialectics drives, _music_ out of tragedy with the scourge of its syllogisms: that is, it destroys the essence of tragedy, which can be explained only as a manifestation and illustration of Dionysian states, as the visible symbolisation of music, as the dream-world of Dionysian ecstasy.

The Birth of Tragedy, passage 107

What if it was madness itself, to use a word of Plato's, which brought the _greatest_ blessings upon Hellas? And what if, on the other hand and conversely, at the very time of their dissolution and weakness, the Greeks became always more optimistic, more superficial, more histrionic, also more ardent for logic and the logicising of the world,--consequently at the same time more "cheerful" and more "scientific"?

The Birth of Tragedy, passage 690

Here there interpose between our highest musical excitement and the music in question the tragic myth and the tragic hero--in reality only as symbols of the most universal facts, of which music alone can speak directly.

The Birth of Tragedy, passage 505

Before this could be perceived, before the intrinsic dependence of every art on the Greeks, the Greeks from Homer to Socrates, was conclusively demonstrated, it had to happen to us with regard to these Greeks as it happened to the Athenians with regard to Socrates.

The Birth of Tragedy, passage 718

Of course, our æsthetes have nothing to say about this return in fraternal union of the two art-deities to the original home, nor of either the Apollonian or Dionysian excitement of the hearer, while they are indefatigable in characterising the struggle of the hero with fate, the triumph of the moral order of the world, or the disburdenment of the emotions through tragedy, as the properly Tragic: an indefatigableness which makes me think that they are perhaps not æsthetically excitable men at all, but only to be regarded as moral beings when hearing tragedy.

The Birth of Tragedy, passage 739

Let us ask ourselves whether the feverish and so uncanny stirring of this culture is aught but the eager seizing and snatching at food of the hungerer--and who would care to contribute anything more to a culture which cannot be appeased by all it devours, and in contact with which the most vigorous and wholesome nourishment is wont to change into "history and criticism"?