The Midnight Consolation: Nietzsche on the Thought of Suicide

A brooding, oil-painted portrait of philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche resting his head on one hand, staring solemnly at a human skull beneath him. Cloaked in shadows and rendered in deep, earthy tones, the image evokes the bleak comfort of existential reflection and the haunting intimacy of mortality.

“The thought of suicide is a great consolation: by means of it one gets through many a dark night.”
— Friedrich Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil, Aphorism 157

There are nights the soul does not sleep.
Nights when silence isn’t peace — it’s pressure. When the air gets heavier with each breath. When grief curls beneath the ribs like a coiled animal.
Nietzsche knew those nights.

He wasn’t romanticizing despair.
He wasn’t preaching death.
He was telling the truth — the kind that glows faintly in the dark, not to beckon you toward an end, but to remind you that you still have a choice. That you're still here, even if only by a thread of thought.

“The thought of suicide is a great consolation…”

A harsh sentence. But not a hollow one.
Nietzsche wasn’t celebrating suicide — he was pointing to its idea as a strange kind of life raft.
The mere possibility of escape is what helped many survive.
It was not action — it was awareness.

Sometimes the mind needs a door, even a forbidden one, to remember it isn’t entirely trapped.
And it’s precisely because we don't walk through it that we realize we still want to remain.

“…by means of it one gets through many a dark night.”

That night might come for your client.
For their son. Their sister. Their mother.
The night where nothing makes sense and every memory hurts. Where the world keeps moving and they don’t know how they’re still breathing in it.

And yet… they are.

What Nietzsche offers here is not a guide, but a grim candle.
Not an answer, but the admission that the weight is real. That for those who stay —
— even when they don’t know why —
— even when they feel the cold breath of that door —
— there is something quietly heroic about endurance.

We do not publish this quote lightly.
We offer it like a flint — for those fumbling in ash.
To say: you are not alone in your struggle.
To say: others have stared into that chasm, and kept walking.
To say: survival does not always feel noble — but sometimes, it is.

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