Friedrich Nietzsche Play Quotations

We think that play and fairytales belong to childhood - how shortsighted that is! As though we would want at any time in our life to live without play and fairytales! We give these things other names, to be sure, and feel differently about them, but precisely this is the evidence that they are the same things, for the child too regards play as his work and fairy tales as his truth. The brevity of life ought to preserve us from a pedantic division of life into different stages - as though each brought something new...

A man should not play the coward to his deeds. He should not repudiate them once he has performed them. Pangs of conscience are indecent.

Man is very well defended against himself... The actual fortress is inaccessible, even invisible to him, unless his friends and enemies play the traitor and conduct him in by a secret path.

I speak and the child plays: who can be more serious than we are?

I know no other way to associate with great tasks than as play: as a sign of greatness, this is an essential presupposition.

I am a prelude to better players, O my brothers! An example! Follow my example!

Around the hero everything turns into a tragedy, around the demigod, a satyr-play, and around God--what? perhaps a "world"?

Assuming that rapture is nature's play with man, the Dionysian artist's creative activity is the play with rapture.

Men should learn to live with the same seriousness with which children play.

The devotion of the greatest is to encounter risk and danger, and play dice for death.

I love him who is ashamed when the dice fall in his favour, and who then asketh: "Am I a dishonest player?" - for he is willing to succumb.

All great men are play actors of their own ideal.

That the world is a divine game and beyond good and evil:Min this the Vedanta philosophy and Heraclitus are my predecessors.

To escape boredom, man works either beyond what his usual needs require, or else he invents play, that is, work that is designed to quiet no need other than that for working in general.

The hypocrite who always plays one and the same part ceases at last to be a hypocrite.