Art & Creativity Quote by Friedrich Nietzsche

Nietzsche turns a bodily necessity into a discipline, then slips in the barb: even rest has to be earned. The joke lands because it reverses the sentimental framing of sleep as pure escape. For him, “no mean art” isn’t self-help rhetoric; it’s an insistence that the supposedly passive parts of life are shaped by will, habit, and force. Sleep becomes a craft, not a collapse.

The line’s subtext is performance. To sleep well “for its sake” you must “stay awake all day” not in the literal sense of just not napping, but in the existential sense: remain alert, engaged, metabolizing the world rather than drifting through it. Nietzsche is poking at the bourgeois fantasy of effortless comfort. You don’t get oblivion on credit; you pay for it with intensity, attention, maybe even struggle. It’s also a quiet rebuke to the romantic cult of exhaustion - the idea that you can live half-asleep and then expect restorative peace at night. He suggests the opposite: a life lived lazily breeds restless sleep, because the mind hasn’t spent itself honestly.

Context matters: Nietzsche wrote as a critic of modern “decadence,” of softening instincts and replacing vitality with sedation (moral, social, religious). Read that way, the aphorism is less about bedtime hygiene than about ethics of energy. Real rest is the afterglow of a day that demanded something from you; anything else is anesthesia dressed up as serenity.