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Daily Inspiration Quote by Friedrich Nietzsche

"Every man is a creative cause of what happens, a primum mobile with an original movement"

About this Quote

Nietzsche loads a metaphysical grenade into an old theological phrase. The primum mobile, Aristotle's "first mover", was meant to secure a tidy cosmos: motion needs an origin, so posit a pure initiator outside the chain. Nietzsche steals the prestige of that concept and hands it to "every man", not to flatter the individual but to detonate the comfort of external guarantees. If each person is an "original movement", then there is no moral thermostat in the sky, no inherited script where your choices are merely footnotes to Providence, Nature, or History. Responsibility stops being an accounting system and becomes a creative problem.

The intent is polemical. Nietzsche is pushing against the 19th-century reflex to explain humans as products: of Christian sin, of rational duty, of bourgeois convention, of biology, of the herd. Calling each person a creative cause is a refusal of the alibi. It's also a rebuke to the modern habit of moralizing weakness into virtue: if you are a mover, your resentments and passivities are not tragic fate; they're authorship disguised as victimhood.

The subtext is less inspirational poster and more existential provocation. "Original movement" suggests self-overcoming: the capacity to initiate a new valuation rather than repeat inherited ones. It also hints at Nietzsche's suspicion of "free will" as a moral cudgel; he isn't defending a courtroom notion of choice so much as demanding a higher standard of agency, where living becomes an act of composition.

In context, this fits the broader project after the "death of God": once the old First Mover is gone, the burden and possibility of creation drop into human hands.

Quote Details

TopicFree Will & Fate
SourceHelp us find the source
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APA Style (7th ed.)
Nietzsche, Friedrich. (2026, January 16). Every man is a creative cause of what happens, a primum mobile with an original movement. FixQuotes. https://fixquotes.com/quotes/every-man-is-a-creative-cause-of-what-happens-a-133874/

Chicago Style
Nietzsche, Friedrich. "Every man is a creative cause of what happens, a primum mobile with an original movement." FixQuotes. January 16, 2026. https://fixquotes.com/quotes/every-man-is-a-creative-cause-of-what-happens-a-133874/.

MLA Style (9th ed.)
"Every man is a creative cause of what happens, a primum mobile with an original movement." FixQuotes, 16 Jan. 2026, https://fixquotes.com/quotes/every-man-is-a-creative-cause-of-what-happens-a-133874/. Accessed 12 Feb. 2026.

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Friedrich Nietzsche

Friedrich Nietzsche (October 15, 1844 - August 25, 1900) was a Philosopher from Germany.

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