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No other German writer of comparable stature has been a more extreme critic of German nationalism than Nietzsche.

Walter Kaufmann

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Walter Kaufmann
Age: 59 †
Born: 1921
Born: July 1
Died: 1980
Died: September 4
Philosopher
Poet
Translator
University Teacher
Writer
Freiburg/Breisgau
Walter Arnold Kaufmann
David Dennis
Critics
Nietzsche
Writer
Comparable
Stature
Nationalism
Critic
German
Extreme
Extremes

More quotes by Walter Kaufmann

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The deepest difference between religions is not that between polytheism and monotheism.
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Life ceases to be so oppressive: we are free to give our own lives meaning and purpose, free to redeem our suffering by making something of it.
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Reason may not always tell us what to believe, but it can help us on what we shouldn't believe.
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Those who believe in God because their experience of life and the facts of nature prove his existence must have led sheltered lives and closed their hearts to the voice of their brothers' blood.
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Faith means intense, usually confident, belief that is not based on evidence sufficient to command assent from every reasonable person.
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It does not follow that the meaning must be given from above that life and suffering must come neatly labeled that nothing is worth while if the world is not governed by a purpose.
Walter Kaufmann
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When Hegel later became a man of influence' he insisted that the Jews should be granted equal rights because civic rights belong to man because he is a man and not on account of his ethnic origins or his religion.
Walter Kaufmann
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There is thus a certain plausibility to Nietzsche's doctrine, though it is dynamite. He maintains in effect that the gulf separating Plato from the average man is greater than the cleft between the average man and a chimpanzee.
Walter Kaufmann
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Job's forthright indictment of the injustice of this world is surely right. The ways of the world are weird and much more unpredictable than either scientists or theologians generally make things look.
Walter Kaufmann
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Thirdly, even if we assume that the world is governed by purpose, we need only add that this purpose - or, if there are several, at least one of them - is not especially intent on preventing suffering, whether it is indifferent to suffering or actually rejoices in it.
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Here an attempt is made to explain suffering: the outcaste of traditional Hinduism is held to deserve his fetched fate it is a punishment for the wrongs he did in a previous life.
Walter Kaufmann
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It is widely assumed, contrary to fact, that theism necessarily involves the two assumptions which cannot be squared with the existence of so much suffering, and that therefore, per impossibile, they simply have to be squared with the existence of all this suffering, somehow.
Walter Kaufmann
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Man stands alone in the universe, responsible for his condition, likely to remain in a lowly state, but free to reach above the stars.
Walter Kaufmann
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The problem of suffering is: why is there the suffering we know?
Walter Kaufmann
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It was also Hegel who established the view that the different philosophic systems that we find in history are to be comprehended in terms of development and that they are generally one-sided because they owe their origins to a reaction against what has gone before.
Walter Kaufmann
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Paul substituted faith in Christ for the Christlike life.
Walter Kaufmann
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Words signify man's refusal to accept the world as it is.
Walter Kaufmann
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Success is no proof of virtue. In the case of a book, quick acclaim is presumptive evidence of a lack of substance and originality.
Walter Kaufmann
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The refusal to belong to any school of thought, the repudiation of the adequacy of any body of beliefs whatever, and especially of systems, and a marked dissatisfaction with traditional philosophy as superficial, academic, and remote from life-that is the heart of existentialism.
Walter Kaufmann
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Rabbi Zusya said that on the Day of Judgment, God would ask him, not why he had not been Moses, but why he had not been Zusya.
Walter Kaufmann