faire bouger le monde

12:24 Jan 24, 2019 

yet it's in all webpages of his "quotes", thank you for your help :)
As you said no one will really dwell on it. I know I wouldn't :p

19:48 Jan 23, 2019 

Fascinating though all this may be, to those of us who care about this sort of thing, and much as it goes against the grain, for me at least, to perpetuate phony quotations, I think you should just translate it as it stands. I very much doubt any potential reader will know or care whether Nietzsche actually wrote it.

19:25 Jan 23, 2019 

And going back to Phil's research, "Ohne Musik ist das Leben ein Irrtum", which is genuine Nietzsche (or nearly: it's actually "Ohne Musik wäre das Leben ein Irrthum"), from Götzen-Dämmerung, is very probably in the mix too, I think.

19:19 Jan 23, 2019 

It turns out that dancing was originally involved ("to give birth to a dancing star"); hence, presumably, "faire danser le monde" in the variant version Eliza found, which is in this respect a little closer to Nietzsche's original. And chaos has turned into music possibly through recollection of the proverbial pseudo-Nietzsche quotation on seeing dancing but not hearing the music, which was apparently coined by Madame de Staël. With a bit of Archimedes thrown in. A veritable salad.

19:06 Jan 23, 2019 

Whether it would be prudent to replace the pseudo-quotation in your text with the genuine Nietzsche version is something you will have to judge for yourself. It changes the message somewhat.

19:05 Jan 23, 2019 

Why are we talking about dancing?

19:00 Jan 23, 2019 

This very well known quotation, falsely attributed to Nietszche, actually goes back to Madame de Staël in De l'Allemagne (1813). The English translation is from 1814:

"sometimes even in the habitual course of life, the reality of this world disappears all at once, and we feel ourselves in the middle of its interests as we should at a ball, where we did not hear the music; the dancing that we saw there would appear insane."

It has been borrowed many times since. I owe this information to the following page, which quotes its sources:
https://quoteinvestigator.com/2012/06/05/dance-insane/#retur...

It also put me on the track of what must be the actual Nietzsche quotation which they're garbled here:

"One must still have chaos in oneself to be able to give birth to a dancing star."

This is from Also sprach Zarathustra. In the original German it's as follows:

"Ich sage euch: man muss noch Chaos in sich haben, um einen tanzenden Stern gebären zu können. Ich sage euch: ihr habt noch Chaos in euch."
http://www.gutenberg.org/cache/epub/7205/pg7205-images.html

18:53 Jan 23, 2019 

I may be way off track here, but "faire bouger le monde" immediately reminds me of a famous quotation: "Give me a lever and a place to stand and I will move the earth" (there are variants).
https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Archimedes

Could it be possibly that Nietzsche has morphed into Archimedes in mid-sentence?

18:44 Jan 23, 2019 

I agree that this quote is probably fake, because I couldn't find it despite several searches in English and French. I did find several French sites with an almost identical quote ("faire DANSER le monde" was the difference), but none of them said where in his work it allegedly came from.

But the "without music..." quote you posted is far from the only authentic Nietzsche quote about music. He talked about music a lot, apparently, so it's hard to figure out what real quote this is a distortion of.

18:31 Jan 23, 2019 

"And those who were seen dancing were thought to be insane by those who could not hear the music" is the only quote of Nietzsche that contains the music and the dance. That pushes me to think that the above-mentioned quote doesn't exist. I can't find it anywhere.

18:12 Jan 23, 2019 

I actually looked at the book, and the correct version is "without music, life is a mistake". So the first half of your quote is real, and the second is made up.

17:59 Jan 23, 2019 

I think this may be one of those made-up quotes without which no glossy corporate brochure is complete these days. I found a lot of hits for variations on "Ohne Musik ist das Leben ein Irrtum", without music life is a mistake, but no evidence that he actually said this.

I would just translate what the French says and be done with it, unless (for example) it's a big company's annual report where people might notice fake or incorrect quotes.

17:46 Jan 23, 2019 

I strongly suspect that 'le monde' here means 'people' rather than 'the world'; and unless it's actually what Nietzsche himself said, I'd definitely avoid using 'one', which is over-used in FR compared to EN.