"We should consider every day lost on which we have not danced at least once. And we should call every truth false which was not accompanied by at least one laugh."

Humor

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Thematic Reflection

This quotation examines the core nature of Humor as articulated by Friedrich Nietzsche. Within historical and literary traditions, reflections on Humor provide actionable mental models, challenging individuals to evaluate personal ethics, self-discipline, and daily actions.

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About Friedrich Nietzsche

Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche was a German philosopher and writer who started his career as a classical philologist and turned to philosophy early in his academic career. In 1869, at age 24, he was appointed Professor of Classical Philology at the University of Basel. Plagued by health problems for most of his life, he resigned from the university in 1879. He afterward lived as an independent writer, spending much of his life in relative solitude and financial insecurity while moving between Switzerland, Italy, and southern France in search of climates that might alleviate his condition, and in the following decade, he completed much of his core writing. In 1889, aged 44, he suffered a neurological collapse, and thereafter a complete loss of his mental faculties, with paralysis and vascular dementia; he lived out his remaining 11 years, first under the care of his mother, and later his sister, until his death. His works and his philosophy have fostered not only extensive scholarship but also much popular interest.

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More by Friedrich Nietzsche

"One does not hate as long as one has a low esteem of someone, but only when one esteems him as an equal or a superior."

— Friedrich Nietzsche
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"God is a thought who makes crooked all that is straight."

— Friedrich Nietzsche
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"Judgments, value judgments concerning life, for or against, can in the last resort never be true: they possess value only as symptoms, they come into consideration only as symptoms - in themselves such judgments are stupidities."

— Friedrich Nietzsche
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"Without music, life would be a mistake."

— Friedrich Nietzsche
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More about Humor

"I enjoy jokes, smiling, and making people smile. I may be a little different, but that's OK, who wants to be normal anyway?"

— Tim Duncan
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"Humor can alter any situation and help us cope at the very instant we are laughing."

— Allen Klein
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"Humor results when society says you can't scratch certain things in public, but they itch in public."

— Tom Walsh
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"One of the things I like about acting is that, in a funny way, I come back to myself."

— Bill Murray
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