| The Magic of the Dionysiac Rite |
[Nov. 9th, 2004|03:11 am] |
Not only is the bond between humans beings renewed by the magic of the Dionysiac, but nature, alienated, inimical, or subjugated, celebrates once more her festival of reconciliation with her lost son, humankind. Freely the earth offers up her gifts, and the beasts of prey from mountain and desert approach in peace. The chariot of Dionysos is laden with flowers and wreaths; beneath its yoke stride panther and tiger. If one were to transform Beethoven's jubilant 'Hymn to Joy' into a painting and place no constraints on one's imagination as the millions sink into the dust, shivering in awe, then one could begin to approach the Dionysiac. Now the slave is a freeman, now all the rigid, hostile barriers, which necessity, caprice, or 'impudent fashion' have established between human beings, break asunder. Now, hearing this gospel of universal harmony, each person feels himself to be not simply united, reconciled or merged with his neighbour, but quite literally one with him, as if the veil of Maya had been torn apart, so that the mere shreds of it flutter before the mysterious primordial unity (das Ur-Eine). Singing and dancing, man expresses his sense of belonging to a higher community; he has forgotten how to walk and talk and is on the brink of flying and dancing, up and away into the air above. His gestures speak of his enchantment. Just as the animals now talk and the earth milk and honey, there now sounds out from within man something supernatural: he feels himself to be a god, he himself now moves in such ecstasy and sublimity as once he saw the gods move in his dreams. Man is no longer an artist, he has become a work of art: all nature's artistic power reveals itself here, amidst shivers of intoxication, to the highest, most blissful satisfaction of the primordial unity. Here man, the noblest clay, the most precious marble, is kneaded and carved and, to the accompaniment of the chisel-blows of the Dionysiac world-artist, the call of the Eleusinian Mysteries rings out: 'Fall ye to the ground, ye millions? Feelst thou thy Creator, world?'
The Birth of Tragedy out of the Spirit of Music, 1 |
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[Oct. 15th, 2004|05:09 am] |
Those who can breath the air of my writings know that it is an air of the heights, a strong air. One must be made for it, otherwise there is no small danger that one may catch cold in it. The ice is near, the solitude tremendous—but how calmly all things lie in the light! how freely one breathes! how much one feels beneath oneself!— Philosophy, as I have so far understood and lived it, means living voluntarily among ice and high mountains—seeking out everything strange and questionable in existence, everything so far placed under a ban by morality. Long experience, acquired in the course of such wanderings in what is forbidden, taught me to regard the causes that so far have prompted moralizing and idealizing in a very different light from what may seem desirable: the hidden history of the philosophers, the psychology of the great names, came to light for me.— How much truth does a spirit endure, how much truth does it dare? more and more that became for me the real measure of value. Error (—faith in the ideal—) is not blindness, error is cowardice ... Every attainment, every step forward in knowledge, follows from courage, from hardness against oneself, from cleanliness in relation to oneself ... I do not refute ideals, I merely put on gloves before them ... Nitimur in vetitum*: in this sign my philosophy will triumph one day, for what one has forbidden so far as a matter of principle has always been truth alone. —
*"We strive for the forbidden": Ovid, Amores, III, 4, 17
Preface to Ecce Homo ("How One Becomes What One Is"), 3 |
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| Today is my birthday. I am 160-years-old. |
[Oct. 15th, 2004|04:48 am] |
On this perfect day, when everything is ripening and not only the grape turns brown, the eye of the sun just fell upon my life: I looked back, I looked forward, and never saw so many and such good things at once. It was not for nothing that I buried my forty-fourth year today, I had the right to bury it,—whatever was life in it has been saved, is immortal. The Revaluation of All Values, the Dionysus Dithyrambs and, for recreation, the Twilight of the Idols,—all presents of this year, indeed of its last quarter! How could I fail to be grateful to my whole life?—and so I tell my life to myself.
Preface to Ecce Homo ("How One Becomes What One Is") |
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[Oct. 13th, 2004|12:49 am] |
In the horizon of the infinite.— We have left the land and have embarked! We have burned our bridges behind us—indeed, we have gone further and destroyed the land behind us! Now, little ship, look out! Beside you is the ocean: to be sure, it does not always roar, and at times it lies spread out like silk and gold and reveries of graciousness. But hours will come when you will realize that it is infinite and that there is nothing more awesome than infinity. Oh, the poor bird that felt free and now strikes the walls of this cage! Woe, when you feel homesick for the land as if it had offered more freedom—and there is no longer any "land"!
The Gay Science
Book III, 124 |
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[Sep. 27th, 2004|01:08 am] |
Morality as a problem.— The lack of personality always takes its revenge: a weakened, thin, extinguished personality that denies itself is no longer fit for anything good—least of all for philosophy. "Selflessness" has no value either in heaven or on earth; all great problems demand great love, and of that only strong, round, secure spirits who have a firm grip on themselves are capable. It makes the most telling difference whether a thinker has a personal relationship to his problems, so that he finds in them his destiny, his distress and also his greatest happiness, or an "impersonal" one: namely that he can do no better than to touch them and grasp them with the antennae of cold, curious thought.
The Gay Science
"We Fearless Ones"
Book V, 345
[bold added] |
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[Sep. 19th, 2004|02:11 am] |
The thought of death.— Living in the midst of this jumble of little lanes, needs, and voices gives me a melancholy happiness: how much enjoyment, impatience, and desire, how much thirsty life and drunkenness of life comes to light every moment! And yet silence will soon descend on all these noisy, living, life-thirsty people! How his shadow stands even now behind everyone, as his dark fellow traveler! It is always like the last moment before the departure of an emigrants' ship: people have more to say to each other than ever, the hour is late, and the ocean and its desolate silence are waiting impatiently behind all of this noise—so covetous and certain of their prey. And all and everyone of them suppose that the heretofore was little or nothing while the near future is everything: and that is the reason for all of this haste, this clamor, this outshouting and overreaching each other! Everyone wants to be the first in this future—and yet death and deathly silence alone are certain and common to all in this future! How strange it is that this sole certainty and common element makes almost no impression on people, and that nothing is further from their minds than the feeling that they form a brotherhood of death! It makes me happy to see that men do not want at all to think the thought of death! I should like very much to do something that would make the thought of life even a hundred times more appealing [denkenswerther: i.e., more worth thinking] to them.
The Gay Science
Book IV, 278 |
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[Sep. 9th, 2004|07:55 pm] |
Observe the herd which is grazing beside you. It does not know what yesterday or today is. It springs around, eats, rests, digests, jumps up again, and so from morning to night and from day to day, with its likes and dislikes closely tied to the peg of the moment, and thus neither melancholy nor weary. To witness this is hard for man, because he boasts to himself that his human race is better than the beast and yet looks with jealousy at its happiness. For he wishes only to live like the beast, neither weary nor amid pains, and he wants it in vain, because he does not will it as the animal does. One day the man demands of the beast: "Why do you not talk to me about your happiness and only gaze at me?" The beast wants to answer, too, and say: "That comes about because I always immediately forget what I wanted to say." But by then the beast has already forgotten this reply and remains silent, so that the man wonders on once more.
Untimely Meditations
"On the Use and Abuse of History for Life," 1 |
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[Sep. 9th, 2004|07:47 pm] |
Culture is, above all, unity of style in all the expressions of the life of a people. Much knowledge and learning is neither an essential means to culture nor a sign of it, and if needs be can get along very well with the opposite of culture, barbarism, which is lack of style or a chaotic jumble of all styles.
Untimely Meditations
"David Strauss: the Confessor and the Writer," 1 |
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[Aug. 28th, 2004|05:23 am] |
For a purpose. — Of all actions, those performed for a purpose have been least understood, no doubt because they have always been counted the most understandable and are to our consciousness the most commonplace. The great problems are to be encountered in the street.
The Dawn
"Thoughts on the prejudices of morality"
Book II, 127 |
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[Aug. 15th, 2004|07:02 pm] |
Overcoming of the passions.— The man who has overcome his passions has entered into possession of the most fertile ground; like the colonist who has mastered the forests and swamps. To sow the seeds of good spiritual works in the soil of the subdued passions is then the immediate urgent task. The overcoming itself is only a means, not a goal; if it is not so viewed, all kinds of weeds and devilish nonsense will quickly spring up in this rich soil now unoccupied, and soon there will be more rank confusion than there ever was before.
Human, All Too Human
"The Wanderer and His Shadow," 53 |
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[Aug. 13th, 2004|03:45 pm] |
Hope.— Pandora brought the box with the evils and opened it. It was the gods' gift to man, on the outside a beautiful, enticing gift, called the "box of good fortune." Then all the evils, those lively, winged beings, flew out of it. Since that time, they roam around and do harm to men by day and night. One single evil had not yet slipped out of the box. As Zeus had wished, Pandora slammed the top down and it remained inside. So now man has the box of good fortune in his house forever and thinks the world of the treasure. It is at his service; he reaches for it when he fancies it. For he does not know that the box which Pandora brought was the box of evils, and he takes the remaining evil for the greatest worldly good—it is hope, for Zeus did not want man to throw his life away, no matter how much the other evils might torment him, but rather to go on letting himself be tormented anew. To that end, he gives man hope. In truth, it is the most evil of evils because it prolongs man's torment.
Human, All Too Human
II. "On the History of the Moral Sensations," 71 |
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[Aug. 3rd, 2004|05:40 am] |
A Parable.-- Those thinkers in whom all the stars move in cyclic orbits are not the most profound ones: he who looks deep into himself as into an immense cosmic space, and carries Milky ways within him, knows also that all Milky ways are irregular: they lead us into the chaos and the labyrinth of existence.
The Gay Science
Book IV, 322
[Bold added] |
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[Jul. 22nd, 2004|08:21 pm] |
Perhaps our great virtue of the historical sense necessarily stands opposed to good taste, or to the very best taste at any rate, and it is precisely the brief little pieces of good luck and transfiguration of human life that here and there come flashing up which we find most difficult and laborsome to evoke in ourselves: those miraculous moments when a great power voluntarily halted before the boundless and immeasurable—when a superfluity of subtle delight in sudden restraint and petrifaction, in standing firm and fixing oneself, was enjoyed on a ground still trembling. Measure is alien to us, let us admit it to ourselves; what we itch for is the infinite, the unmeasured. Like a rider on a charging steed we let fall the reins before the infinite, we modern men, like semi-barbarians—and attain our state of bliss only when we are also most—in danger.
Beyond Good and Evil
"Prelude to a Philosophy of the Future"
Part 7: Our Virtues, 224 |
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[Jul. 16th, 2004|03:20 pm] |
We have become cold, hard, and tough in the realization that the way of this world is anything but divine, even by human standards it is not rational, merciful, or just: we know it well, the world in which we live is ungodly, immoral, "inhuman",—we have interpreted it far too long in a false and mendacious way, in accordance with the wishes of our reverence, which is to say, according to our needs. For man is a reverent animal! But he is also mistrustful: and that the world is not worth what we thought it was, that is about as certain as anything of which our mistrust has finally got hold. The more mistrust, the more philosophy. We are far from claiming that the world is worth less: indeed it would seem laughable to us today if man were to insist on inventing values that were supposed to excel the value of the actual world,—this is precisely what we have turned our backs on as an extravagant aberration of human vanity and unreason that for a long time was not recognized as such. It found its final expression in modern pessimism, and a more ancient and stronger expression in the teaching of Buddha; but it is part of Christianity also, if more doubtfully and ambiguously so but not for that reason any less seductive. The whole pose of "man against the world," of man as a "world-negating" principle, of man as the measure of the value of things, as judge of the world who in the end places existence itself upon his scales and finds it wanting—the monstrous insipidity of this pose has finally come home to us and we are sick of it,—we laugh as soon as we encounter the juxtaposition of "man and world," separated by the sublime presumption of the little word "and"! But look, when we laugh like that, have we simply not carried the contempt for man one step further? And thus also pessimism, the contempt for that existence which is knowable by us? Have we not exposed ourselves to the suspicion of an opposition, an opposition between the world in which we were at home up to now with our reverences—that perhaps made it possible for us to endure life—, and another world that consists of us: an inexorable, fundamental, and deepest suspicion about ourselves that is more and more gaining worse and worse control of us Europeans and that could easily confront coming generations with the terrifying Either/Or: "Either abolish your reverences or—yourselves!" The latter would be nihilism; but would not the former also be—nihilism?— This is our question mark.
The Gay Science
Book V
"We Fearless Ones," 346 (-Our question mark-) |
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[Jul. 9th, 2004|11:46 am] |
It is precisely among criminals and convicts that the sting of conscience is extremely rare; prisons and penitentiaries are not the kind of hotbed in which this species of gnawing worm is likely to flourish: all conscientious observers are agreed on that, in many cases unwillingly enough and contrary to their own inclinations. Generally speaking, punishment makes men hard and cold; it concentrates; it sharpens the feeling of alienation; it strengthens the power of resistance. If it happens that punishment destroys the vital energy and brings about a miserable prostration and self-abasement, such a result is certainly even less pleasant than the usual effects of punishment—characterized by dry and gloomy seriousness.
If we consider those millennia before the history of man, we may unhesitatingly assert that it was precisely through punishment that the development of the feeling of guilt was most powerfully hindered—at least in the victims upon whom the punitive force was vented. For we must not underrate the extent to which the sight of the judicial and executive procedures prevents the criminal from considering his deed, the type of his action as such, reprehensible: for he sees exactly the same kind of actions practiced in the service of justice and approved of and practiced with a good conscience: spying, deception, bribery, setting traps, the whole cunning and underhand art of police and prosecution, plus robbery, violence, defamation, imprisonment, torture, murder, practiced as a matter of principle and without even emotion to excuse them, which are pronounced characteristics of the various forms of punishment—all of them therefore actions which his judges in no way condemn and repudiate as such, but only when they are applied and directed to certain particular ends.
On the Genealogy of Morals
Second Essay
"Guilt," "Bad Conscience," And The Like, 14 |
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[Jun. 27th, 2004|08:14 pm] |
A man whose shame is profound encounters even his destinies and delicate decisions on paths which few ever reach and whose mere existence his neighbors and closest intimates must not know: his mortal danger is concealed from their eyes, and so is his regained sureness of life. Such a concealed man who instinctively needs speech for silence and to be silent and who is inexhaustible in his evasion of communication, wants and sees to it that a mask of him roams in his place through the hearts and heads of his friends; and supposing he did not want it, he would still realize some day that in spite of that a mask of him is there—and that this is good. Every profound spirit needs a mask: even more, around every profound spirit a mask is continually growing, owing to the constantly false, namely shallow, interpretation of every word, every step, every sign of life that he gives. —
Beyond Good and Evil
"Prelude to a Philosophy of the Future"
Part II: The Free Spirit, 40 |
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[Jun. 25th, 2004|04:06 pm] |
... Let's condense this whole fact into a short formula: the philosophical spirit always had to begin by disguising himself, wrapping himself in a cocoon of the previously established forms of the contemplative man, as priest, magician, prophet, generally as a religious man, in order to make any kind of life at all possible. The ascetic ideal for a long time served the philosopher as a form in which he could appear, as a condition for his existence. He had to play the role, in order to be able to be a philosopher. And he had to believe in what he was doing, in order to play that role.
The characteristically detached stance of philosophers, something which denied the world, was hostile to life, had no faith in the senses, and was free of sensuality, which was maintained right up to the most recent times and thus became valued as the essence of the philosophical attitude—that is above all a necessary consequence of the conditions under which, in general, philosophy arose and survived. In fact, for the longest time on earth philosophy would not have been at all possible without an ascetic cover and costume, without an ascetic misunderstanding of the self. To put the matter explicitly: up to the most recent times the ascetic priest has provided the repellent and dark caterpillar form which was the only one in which philosophy could live and creep around ...
Has that really changed? Is that colorful and dangerous winged creature, that "spirit" which this caterpillar hid within itself, at last really been released and allowed out into the light, thanks to a sunnier, warmer, brighter world? Nowadays do we have sufficient pride, daring, bravery, self-certainty, spiritual will, desire to assume responsibility, and freedom of the will so that from now on "the philosopher" is possible on earth? ...
On the Genealogy of Morals
Third Essay: "What is the Meaning of Ascetic Ideals?"
Section 10 |
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[Jun. 15th, 2004|02:26 pm] |
But the thought is one thing, the deed is another, and another yet is the image of the deed. The wheel of causality does not roll between them.
An image made this pale man pale. He was equal to his deed when he did it: but he could not endure its image after it was done.
Thus Spoke Zarathustra
"Of the Pale Criminal" |
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[Jun. 14th, 2004|12:47 pm] |
A person with artistic sensibility relates to the reality of dream in the same way as a philosopher relates to the reality of existence: he attends to it closely and with pleasure, using these images to interpret life, and practising for life with the help of these events.
The Birth of Tragedy out of the Spirit of Music, 1 |
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[Jun. 14th, 2004|12:41 pm] |
Every human being is fully an artist when creating the worlds of dream, and the lovely semblance of dream is the precondition of all the arts of image-making, including, as we shall see, an important half of poetry. We take pleasure in dreaming, understanding its figures without mediation; all forms speak to us; nothing is indifferent or unnecessary.
The Birth of Tragedy out of the Spirit of Music, 1 |
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[May. 10th, 2004|05:28 pm] |
Thus speaks all great love: it overcomes even forgiveness and pity.
One should hold fast to one's heart; for if one lets it go, how soon one loses one's head, too!
Alas, where in the world have there been greater follies than with the compassionate? And what in the world has caused more suffering than the follies of the compassionate?
Woe to all lovers who cannot surmount pity!
Thus spoke the devil to me once: "Even God has his Hell: it is his love for man."
Thus Spoke Zarathustra
Part II
Of the Compassionate, 25 |
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[May. 9th, 2004|03:10 pm] |
The extent to which the man of action is lazy— I believe that each person must have his own opinion concerning everything about which it is possible to have an opinion, because he himself is an individual, unique thing that adopts a new posture towards all other things such has never been adopted before. But laziness, which is at the bottom of the active man's soul, hinders man from drawing water out of his own well.— It is the same with freedom of opinions as with health: both are individual; from neither can a universally valid concept be set up. What one individual needs for his health will make another ill, and for more highly developed natures, many means and ways to freedom of spirit may be ways and means to unfreedom.
Human, All Too Human
Part V
Tokens of Higher and Lower Culture, 286 |
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[Apr. 30th, 2004|08:11 pm] |
Feeling of power. -- Be sure you mark the difference: he who wants to acquire the feeling of power resorts to any means and disdains nothing that will nourish it. He who has it, however, has become very fastidious and noble in his tastes; he now find few things to satisfy him.
Daybreak
"Thoughts on the prejudices of morality"
Book IV, 348
* Bold added. |
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[Apr. 18th, 2004|02:42 am] |
Those who carry away feelings as the effects of music possess in them, as it were, a symbolic intermediate realm that can give them a foretaste of music while at the same time it excludes them from its inmost sanctuaries.
The lyric poet interprets music for himself by means of the symbolic world of the emotions while he himself is at rest in Apollonian contemplation and above these emotions.
On Music and Words |
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[Apr. 10th, 2004|06:13 pm] |
We philosophers are not free to divide body from soul as the people do; we are even less free to divide soul from spirit. We are not thinking frogs, nor objectifying and registering mechanisms with their innards removed: constantly, we have to give birth to our thoughts out of our pain and, like mothers, endow them with all we have of blood, heart, fire, pleasure, passion, agony, conscience, fate, and catastrophe.
The Gay Science
Preface, 3 |
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[Apr. 8th, 2004|05:59 pm] |
Thoughts.— Thoughts are the shadows of our feelings—always darker, emptier, simpler.
The Gay Science
Book III, 179 |
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[Apr. 2nd, 2004|02:49 pm] |
What a philosopher is, is hard to learn, because it cannot be taught: one has to “know” it from experience—or one ought to be sufficiently proud not to know it. But that nowadays all the world talks of things of which it cannot have experience is most and worst evident in respect of philosophers and the philosophical states of mind—very few know them or are permitted to know them, and all popular conceptions of them are false.
Beyond Good and Evil
"Prelude to a Philosophy of the Future"
Part VI: We Scholars, 213 |
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[Mar. 30th, 2004|05:31 pm] |
Buddhism presupposes a very mild climate, customs of great gentleness and liberality, and the absence of militarism; moreover, the movement had to originate among the higher, and even the scholarly, classes. Cheerfulness, calm, and freedom from desire are the highest goal, and the goal is attained. Buddhism is not a religion in which one merely aspires to perfection: perfection is the normal case. —
The Antichrist
"Revaluation of All Values," 21 |
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[Mar. 30th, 2004|05:30 pm] |
Life itself is to my mind the instinct for growth, for durability, for an accumulation of forces, for power: where the will to power is lacking, there is decline. It is my contention that all the supreme values of mankind lack this will,—that the values which are symptomatic of decline, nihilistic values, are lording it under the holiest names.
The Antichrist
"Revaluation of All Values," 6 |
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[Mar. 21st, 2004|07:11 pm] |
The madman.— Have you not heard of that madman who lit a lantern in the bright morning hours, ran to the market place and cried incessantly: "I seek God! I seek God!"— As many of those who did not believe in God were standing around just then, he provoked much laughter. Has he got lost? asked one. Did he lose his way like a child? asked another. Or is he hiding? Is he afraid of us? Has he gone on a voyage? emigrated?— Thus they yelled and laughed. The madman jumped into their midst and pierced them with his eyes. "Whither is God?" he cried. "I will tell you. We have killed him—you and I! All of us are his murderers!
The Gay Science
Book III, 125 |
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[Mar. 20th, 2004|02:00 pm] |
I have often asked myself whether I am not more heavily obligated to the hardest years of my life than to any others. As my inmost nature teaches me, whatever is necessary as seen from the heights and in the sense of a great economy—is also the useful par excellence: one should not only bear it, one should love it. Amor fati: that is my inmost nature. And as for my long sickness, do I not owe it indiscernibly more than I owe to my health? I owe it a higher health—one which is made stronger by whatever does not kill it. I also owe my philosophy to it. Only great pain is the ultimate liberator of the spirit, as the teacher of great suspicion which turns every U into an X, a real, genuine X, that is, the letter before the penultimate one. Only great pain, that long, slow pain in which we are burned with green wood, as it were—pain which takes its time only this forces us philosophers to descend into our ultimate depths and to put away all trust, all good-naturedness, all that would veil, all mildness, all that is medium things in which formerly we may have found our humanity. I doubt that such a pain makes us "better," but I know that it makes us more profound.
Nietzsche contra Wagner
"Out of the Files of a Psychologist"
Epilogue, 1 |
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[Mar. 16th, 2004|01:15 pm] |
Every philosopher would speak as once Buddha spoke when someone told him of the birth his son, "Rahula has been born to me. A shackle has been forged for me." (Rahula here means "a little demon"). To every "free spirit" there must come a reflective hour, provided that previously he has had a one without thought, of the sort that came then to Buddha—"Life in a house," he thought to himself, "is narrow and confined, a polluted place. Freedom consists of abandoning houses;" "because he thought this way, he left the house."
Ascetic ideals indicate so many bridges to independence that a philosopher cannot, without an inner rejoicing and applause, listen to the history of all those decisive people who one day said no to all lack of freedom and went off to some desert or other, even given the fact that such people were strong donkeys and entirely different from a powerful spirit.
On the Genealogy of Morals
Third Essay
"What is the Meaning of Ascetic Ideals?" 7 |
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[Mar. 10th, 2004|12:49 am] |
New struggles.— After Buddha was dead, his shadow was still shown for centuries in a cave—a tremendous, gruesome shadow. God is dead; but given the way of men, there may still be caves for thousands of years in which his shadow will be shown.— And we—we still have to vanquish his shadow, too!
The Gay Science
Book III, 108 |
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[Mar. 4th, 2004|05:51 pm] |
Now it is plain to me, first of all, that in this theory the source of the concept "good" has been sought and established in the wrong place: the judgment "good" did not originate with those to whom "goodness" was shown! Rather it was "the good" themselves, that is to say, the noble, powerful, high-stationed and high-minded, who felt and established themselves and their actions as good, that is, of the first rank, in contradistinction to all the low, low-minded, common and plebeian. It was out of this pathos of distance that they first seized the right to create values and to coin names for these values: what had they to do with utility!
On the Genealogy of Morals
First Essay: "Good and Evil," "Good and Bad"
2 |
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[Feb. 29th, 2004|03:48 pm] |
I cannot remember ever having taken any trouble -- no trace of struggle can be discovered in my life, I am the opposite of an heroic nature. To 'want' something, to 'strive' after something, to have a 'goal,' a 'wish' in view -- I know none of this from experience. Even at this moment I look out upon my future -- a distant future! -- as upon a smooth sea: it is ruffled by no desire. I do not want in the slightest that anything should become other than it is; I do not want myself to become other than I am ... But that is how I have always lived. I have harbored no desire. Someone who after his forty-fourth year can say he has never striven after honors, after women, after money! -- Not that I could not have had them ...
Ecce Homo
"Why I Am So Clever," 9 |
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[Feb. 26th, 2004|02:05 pm] |
'Know yourself' is the whole of science. - Only when he has attained a final knowledge of all things will man have to come to know himself. For things are only the boundaries of man.
Daybreak
"Thoughts on the prejudices of morality"
Book I, 48 |
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[Feb. 23rd, 2004|06:50 pm] |
Remedium amoris. - The cure for love is still in most cases that ancient radical medicine: love in return.
Daybreak
"Thoughts on the prejudices of morality"
Book IV, 415 |
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[Feb. 22nd, 2004|04:29 pm] |
Saints. It is the most sensual of men who have to flee from women and torment their body.
Daybreak
"Thoughts on the prejudices of morality"
Book IV, 294 |
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[Feb. 22nd, 2004|04:10 pm] |
What one knows of oneself. As soon as one animal sees another it measures itself against it in its mind, and men in barbarous ages did likewise. From this it follows that every man comes to know himself almost solely in regard to his powers of defence and attack.
Daybreak
"Thoughts on the prejudices of morality"
Book IV, 212 |
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[Jan. 11th, 2004|02:41 pm] |
Truth has need of power. -- In itself truth is no power at all -- whatever its flatterers of the Enlightenment may be accustomed to say to the contrary! -- It has, rather, to draw power over to its side, or go over to the side of power, or it will perish again and again! This has been proved sufficiently and more than sufficiently!
Daybreak
"Thoughts on the prejudices of morality"
Book V, 535 |
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[Jan. 11th, 2004|02:40 pm] |
Master and pupil. -- It is part of the humanity of a master to warn his pupil about himself.
Daybreak
"Thoughts on the prejudices of morality"
Book V, 447 |
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[Dec. 15th, 2003|12:34 pm] |
Linguistic danger to spiritual freedom. -- Every word is a prejudice.
Human, All Too Human
"The Wanderer and His Shadow," 55
Part II |
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[Dec. 14th, 2003|03:41 pm] |
I would believe only in a God who could dance.
Thus Spoke Zarathustra
"On Reading and Writing"
Part I |
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[Dec. 14th, 2003|03:35 pm] |
It is true: we love life, not because we are used to living but because we are used to loving.
There is always some madness in love. But there is also always some reason in madness....
Thus Spoke Zarathustra
"On Reading and Writing"
Part I |
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| On obedience and commanding |
[Dec. 14th, 2003|03:22 pm] |
I have followed the living creature, I have followed the greatest and the smallest paths, that I might understand its nature....
But wherever I found the living creatures, there too I heard the language of obedience. All living creatures are obeying creatures.
And this is the second thing: he who cannot obey himself will be commanded. That is the nature of living creatures.
But this is the third thing I heard: that commanding is more difficult than obeying. And not only because the commander bears the burden of all who obey, and that this burden can easily crush him.
Thus Spoke Zarathustra
"On Self-Overcoming"
Part II |
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[Dec. 8th, 2003|01:07 pm] |
.... From a psychological point of view, 'sins' are indispensable in any society organized by priests: they are actually levers of power, the priest lives on sins, he needs 'the commission of sins'....Supreme law: God forgives him who repents' -- in plain language: who subjects himself to the priest.--
The Anti-Christ
26 |
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[Dec. 7th, 2003|11:14 pm] |
... One must reach out and try to grasp this astonishing finesse, that the value of life cannot be estimated. Not by a living man, because he is a party to the dispute, indeed its object, and not the judge of it; not by a dead one, for another reason. ...
Twilight of the Idols
"The Problem of Socrates," 2 |
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[Dec. 7th, 2003|11:43 am] |
... Who before me climbed into the caverns from which the poisonous fumes of this type of ideal—slander of the world!—are rising? Who even dared to suspect that they are caverns? Who among philosophers was a psychologist at all before me, and not rather the opposite, a "higher swindler" and "idealist"? There was no psychology at all before me.— To be the first here may be a curse, it is at any rate a destiny: for one is also the first to despise ... Nausea at man is my danger ...
Ecce Homo
"How one becomes what one is"
"Why I Am a Destiny," 6 |
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[Dec. 3rd, 2003|01:01 pm] |
The Noblest Virtue. -- In the first era of higher humanity bravery is accounted the noblest of the virtues, in the second justice, in the third moderation, in the fourth wisdom. In which era do we live? In which do you live?
Human, All Too Human
"The Wanderer and His Shadow," 64 |
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[Dec. 1st, 2003|07:22 pm] |
Age and truth. -- Young people love what is strange and interesting, regardless of whether it is true or false. More mature spirits love in truth that which is strange and interesting in it. Heads fully mature, finally, love truth also where it appears plain and simple and is boring to ordinary people: they have noticed that truth is accustomed to impart its highest spiritual possessions with an air of simplicity.
Human, All Too Human
"Man Alone With Himself," 609 |
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