Friedrich Nietzsche (1844 – 1900)
German philosopher, whose critiques of contemporary culture, religion, and philosophy centered on a basic question regarding the foundation of values and morality.
Freedom is the will to be responsible for ourselves. It is to preserve the distance which separates us from other men. To grow more indifferent to hardship, to severity, to privation, and even to life itself.
Ach, es gibt so viel Dinge zwischen Himmel und Erde, von denen sich nur die Dichter etwas haben träumen lassen. Und zumal ü b e r dem Himmel: denn alle Götter sind Dichter-Gleichnis, Dichter-Erschleichnis! Wahrlich, immer zieht es uns hinan - nämlich zum Reich der Wolken: auf diese setzen wir unsre bunten Bälge und heißen sie dann Götter und Übermenschen: - Sind sie doch gerade leicht genug für diese Stühle! - alle diese Götter und Übermenschen. Ach, wie bin ich all des Unzulänglichen müde, das durchaus Ereignis sein soll! Ach, wie bin ich der Dichter müde!
When virtue has slept, she will get up more refreshed.
Where there is happiness, there is found pleasure in nonsense. The transformation of experience into its opposite, of the suitable into the unsuitable, the obligatory into the optional (but in such a manner that this process produces no injury and is only imagined in jest), is a pleasure; ...
Good prose is written only face to face with poetry.
This is the antinomy: Insofar as we believe in morality we pass sentence on existence.
O meine Brüder, nicht zurück soll euer Adel schauen, sondern h i n a u s ! Vertriebene sollt ihr sein aus allen Vater- und Urväterländern! Eurer Kinder Land sollt ihr lieben: diese Liebe sei euer neuer Adel, — das unentdeckte, im fernsten Meere! Nach ihm heiße ich eure Segel suchen und suchen! An euren Kindern sollt ihr gut machen, daß ihr eurer Väter Kinder seid: alles Vergangene sollt ihr so erlösen! Diese neue Tafel stelle ich über euch!
The spirit of scientific investigation never ceased to impress [Nietzsche] as uniquely favorable not only for achieving knowledge but also for furnishing an atmosphere of dryness and clarity within which a man of genuinely intellectual conscience might function.
The whole world knows that virtue consists in the subjugation of one's passions, or in self-renunciation. It is not just the Christian world, against whom Nietzsche howls, that knows this, but it is an eternal supreme law towards which all humanity has developed, including Brahmanism, Buddhism, Confucianism, and the ancient Persian religion. And suddenly a man appears who declares that he is convinced that self-renunciation, meekness, submissiveness and love are all vices that destroy humanity (he has in mind Christianity, ignoring all the others religions). One can understand why such a declaration baffled people at first. But after giving it a little thought and failing to find any proof of the strange propositions, any rational person ought to throw the books aside and wonder if there is any kind of rubbish that would not find a publisher today. But this has not happened with Nietzsche´s books. The majority of pseudo-enlightened people seriously look into the theory of the übermensch, and acknowledge its author to be a great philosopher, a descendant of Descartes, Leibniz and Kant. And all this has come about because the majority of pseudo-enlightened men of today object to any reminder of virtue, or to its chief premise: self-renunciation and love -virtues that restrain and condemn the animal side of their life. They gladly welcome a doctrine, however incoherently and disjointedly expressed, of egotism and cruelty, sanctioning the idea of personal happiness and superiority over the lives of others, by which they live.
To say it once again: today I find it an impossible book — badly written, clumsy and embarrassing, its images frenzied and confused, sentimental, in some places saccharine-sweet to the point of effeminacy, uneven in pace, lacking in any desire for logical purity, so sure of its convictions that it is above any need for proof, and even suspicious of the propriety of proof, a book for initiates, 'music' for those who have been baptized in the name of music and who are related from the first by their common and rare experiences of art, a shibboleth for first cousins in artibus [in the arts] an arrogant and fanatical book that wished from the start to exclude the profanum vulgus [the profane mass] of the 'educated' even more than the 'people'; but a book which, as its impact has shown and continues to show, has a strange knack of seeking out its fellow-revellers and enticing them on to new secret paths and dancing-places.
That faith makes blessed under certain circumstances, that blessedness does not make of a fixed idea a true idea, that faith moves no mountains but puts mountains where there are none: a quick walk through a madhouse enlightens one sufficiently about this.
If you have hitherto believed that life was one of the highest value and now see yourselves disappointed, do you at once have to reduce it to the lowest possible price?
Wahrlich, ein schmutziger Strom ist der Mensch. Man muß schon ein Meer sein, um einen schmutzigen Strom aufnehmen zu können, ohne unrein zu werden.
One has attained to mastery when one neither goes wrong nor hesitates in the performance.
When someone hides something behind a bush and looks for it again in the same place and finds it there as well, there is not much to praise in such seeking and finding. Yet this is how matters stand regarding seeking and finding "truth" within the realm of reason. If I make up the definition of a mammal, and then, after inspecting a camel, declare "look, a mammal' I have indeed brought a truth to light in this way, but it is a truth of limited value. That is to say, it is a thoroughly anthropomorphic truth which contains not a single point which would be "true in itself" or really and universally valid apart from man. At bottom, what the investigator of such truths is seeking is only the metamorphosis of the world into man.
Nihilist und Christ: das reimt sich, das reimt sich nicht bloss.
Ohne Musik wäre das Leben ein Irrtum.
Vorrecht der Grösse. - Es ist das Vorrecht der Grösse, mit geringen Gaben hoch zu beglücken.
We are, all of us, growing volcanoes that approach the hour of their eruption; but how near or distant that is, nobody knows — not even God.
In the best of cases, the philosopher is not simply one who ascends from the cave and perceives the sun. Rather, he is one who out of the depths of his own creativity becomes a new sun for mankind.