"Admiration for a quality or an art can be so strong that it deters us from striving to possess it"
About this Quote
Nietzsche is diagnosing a perverse kind of reverence: the sort that flatters the admirer while quietly keeping them impotent. Admiration, in this frame, is not a warm recognition of excellence but a psychological strategy. You elevate a quality or an art into something almost sacred, then use that elevation as evidence that it was never meant for you. The compliment becomes a cage.
The line works because it turns a virtue into a vice without changing any of the surface vocabulary. “Admiration” sounds generous, cultured, even aspirational. Nietzsche’s twist is that it can be a form of self-protection: if greatness is sublime, distant, and rare, your failure to pursue it can be recast as humility or respect. The subtext is unsparing: sometimes we worship precisely to avoid the risk of becoming.
This fits Nietzsche’s broader assault on moral postures that smuggle weakness in as righteousness. In his late-19th-century context, he’s pushing against a European culture thick with inherited ideals, canonization, and “good taste” that can function as a brake on self-overcoming. He’s also poking at the modern habit of becoming a connoisseur of other people’s genius - the spectator who knows enough to praise, not enough to produce.
The intent is goading. He’s telling you to interrogate your aesthetic awe: is it a ladder you’re climbing, or a story you’re telling yourself so you don’t have to climb at all?
The line works because it turns a virtue into a vice without changing any of the surface vocabulary. “Admiration” sounds generous, cultured, even aspirational. Nietzsche’s twist is that it can be a form of self-protection: if greatness is sublime, distant, and rare, your failure to pursue it can be recast as humility or respect. The subtext is unsparing: sometimes we worship precisely to avoid the risk of becoming.
This fits Nietzsche’s broader assault on moral postures that smuggle weakness in as righteousness. In his late-19th-century context, he’s pushing against a European culture thick with inherited ideals, canonization, and “good taste” that can function as a brake on self-overcoming. He’s also poking at the modern habit of becoming a connoisseur of other people’s genius - the spectator who knows enough to praise, not enough to produce.
The intent is goading. He’s telling you to interrogate your aesthetic awe: is it a ladder you’re climbing, or a story you’re telling yourself so you don’t have to climb at all?
Quote Details
| Topic | Wisdom |
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