quote · Source-linked selection
The Believed Motive.—However important it may be to know the motives according to which mankind has really acted hitherto, perhaps the belief in this or that motive, and therefore that which mankind has assumed and imagined to be the actual mainspring of its activity hitherto, is something still more essential for the thinker to know. For the internal happiness and misery of men have always come to them through their belief in this or that motive,—not however, through that which was actually the motive! All about the latter has an interest of secondary rank.
The Believed Motive.—However important it may be to know the motives according to which mankind has really acted hitherto, perhaps the belief in this or that motive, and therefore that which mankind has assumed and imagined to be the actual mainspring of its activity hitherto, is something still more essential for the thinker to know. For the internal happiness and misery of men have always come to them through their belief in this or that motive,—not however, through that which was actually the motive! All about the latter has an interest of secondary rank.
Approximate author period: c. 1872 AD · industrial
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- Author or tradition
- Friedrich Nietzsche
Attribution: attributed - Country attributed
- Not established
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- Approximate author period: c. 1872 AD · industrial
author lifetime midpoint (1844–1900); not quotation composition date
An author lifetime, approximate period or collection date is not necessarily the date when these words were first written or spoken. - Recorded source
- The Joyful Wisdom (1910 English edition) (1910 AD)
The Joyful Wisdom, complete printed unit 44; Thomas Common (prose); Paul V. Cohn and Maude D. Petre (poetry) translation; Edinburgh and London: T.N. Foulis,1910
A collection's publication date can be later than the words it records.
The voice behind the words.
Author of Human, All-Too-Human, here represented by complete numbered passages in Helen Zimmern’s 1909 and Paul V. Cohn’s 1913 English editions. Catalogue lifetime 1844–1900; historical philosophical arguments and dated viewpoints require context, rather than treating every sentence as general advice.
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