Life & Mortality Quote by Friedrich Nietzsche

Nietzsche doesn’t romanticize suicide here; he weaponizes it as a thought experiment that keeps you alive. The line’s sting is its inversion of moral common sense: what society treats as the ultimate despair becomes, in his phrasing, “consoling.” Not because death is attractive, but because the mere availability of an exit can blunt panic. When the mind is trapped in a bad night - insomnia, anguish, the claustrophobia of being stuck with yourself - imagining a door you could open restores a sliver of agency. It’s existential pressure relief.

That’s the subtext: control. Nietzsche’s philosophy is allergic to passive suffering dressed up as virtue. He distrusts the religious or sentimental mandate to endure at any cost, because it turns pain into a moral performance. By contrast, this sentence treats endurance as tactical. You get through the night not by pretending life is good, but by acknowledging how bad it can get and still choosing, repeatedly, to remain.

The craft is coldly effective. “Always” and “many a bad night” make misery routine, not exceptional; the tone refuses melodrama. The phrase “to think of suicide” keeps the act at a distance, locating the consolation in contemplation, not execution. Read in the context of Nietzsche’s lifelong battle with illness, isolation, and the late-19th-century crisis of faith he helped name, the line lands as a secular coping method: no providence, no comforting story - just the grim freedom of knowing you could quit, and deciding not to, tonight. If you can choose to end it, you can also choose to continue, and that choice is the start of strength.