Friedrich Nietzsche

1844–1900 · German philosopher & classical philologist

Friedrich Nietzsche (15 October 1844 – 25 August 1900) began as a classical philologist and turned to philosophy. He drafted Twilight of the Idols in a little over a week — 26 August to 3 September 1888 — and it was printed and bound by January 1889, the month he suffered the breakdown in Turin that ended his working life. Its opening section, ‘Maxims and Arrows,’ is a run of forty-four one-line provocations; this is the twelfth. Its modern fame is largely secondhand, arriving through Man’s Search for Meaning rather than through Nietzsche’s own translators.

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