Oh, those Greeks! They knew how to live. What is required for that is to stop courageously at the surface, the fold, the skin, to adore appearance, to believe in forms, tones, words, in the whole Olympus of appearance. Those Greeks were superficial—out of profundity.

This remark comes from Nietzsche’s early work on Greek culture and art, written in the early 1870s when he was a young professor of classical philology at Basel. In this period he was developing his critique of modern “Socratic” seriousness and moralism and contrasting it with what he took to be the Greeks’ artistic, life-affirming way of coping with suffering. The passage belongs to his argument that Greek civilization did not achieve greatness by naïve innocence, but by consciously creating beautiful surfaces—myth, form, and style—as a protective and celebratory response to the terrors of existence.

Nietzsche praises the Greeks for valuing appearance—form, tone, style—not as shallow deception but as a profound strategy for living. “Stopping at the surface” means refusing the ascetic impulse to hunt for a “true world” behind phenomena and instead affirming the world as it is experienced. Calling the Greeks “superficial—out of profundity” reverses a common moral judgment: their “superficiality” is not lack of depth but the hard-won insight that life needs artifice, illusion, and beauty to be bearable and joyful. The line also anticipates Nietzsche’s later critique of metaphysics and his defense of art as a higher form of truthfulness about life.