Päivän miete

The sum of feelings, knowledge, experiences, that is, the whole burden of culture, has grown so great that the general danger is an overstimulation of nervous and mental powers; the cultivated classes of European countries are altogether neurotic, and almost every one of their great families has, in one of its branches, moved close to madness. It is true that now we can approach health in all kinds of ways, but in the main we still need a decrease of emotional tension, of the oppressive cultural burden, a decrease that, even if it must be bought with serious losses, does give us room for the great hope for a new Reneissance. We owe to Christianity, to the philosophers, poets, and musicians, a superabundance of deeply agitated feelings; to keep these from engulfing us, we must conjure up the spirit of science, which makes us somewhat colder and more sceptical, on the whole, and cools down particularly the hot flow of belief in ultimate truths, which Christianity, especially, has made so wild.
- Friedrich Nietzsche, 1878