“Hamlet”
December 10, 2014
From Nietzsche’s The Birth of Tragedy (1873):
Knowledge kills action; action requires the veils of illusion: that is the doctrine of Hamlet, not that cheap wisdom of Jack the Dreamer who reflects too much and, as it were, from an excess of possibilities does not get around to action. Not reflection, no—true knowledge, an insight into the horrible truth, outweighs any motive for action, both in Hamlet and in the Dionysian man (qtd. in Bloom, Shakespeare 394).