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Wonderful information. Highly recommend learning about Nietzsche's life before reading.
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The Gay Science
Quotes and paragraphs
*****
A tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury.
I do not want life again . How did I endure it? Creating. What makes me stand the sight of it? The vision of the overman who affirms life. I have tried to affirm it myself —alas!”
Every philosophy that ranks peace above war, every ethic with a negative definition of happiness, every metaphysics and physics that knows some finale , some final state of some sort, every predominantly aesthetic or religious craving for some Apart, Beyond, Outside, Above, permits the question whether it was not sickness that inspired the philosopher. The unconscious disguise of physiological needs under the cloaks of the objective, ideal, purely spiritual goes to frightening lengths—and often I have asked myself whether, taking a large view, philosophy has not been merely an interpretation of the body and a misunderstanding of the body.
symptoms of certain bodies.
its premonitions of the end, its will to the end
Whether we learn to pit our pride, our scorn, our will power against it, equaling the American Indian who, however tortured, repays his torturer with the malice of his tongue; or whether we withdraw from pain into that Oriental Nothing—called Nirvana—into mute, rigid, deaf resignation, self-forgetting, self-extinction: out of such long and dangerous exercises of self-mastery one emerges as a different person, with a few more question marks —above all with the will henceforth to question further, more deeply, severely, harshly, evilly and quietly than one had questioned heretofore
**** Poems ***
Yes, my joy wants to amuse, Every joy wants to amuse. Would you like to pick my roses? You must stoop and stick your noses Between thorns and rocky views, And not be afraid of bruises. For my joy—enjoys good teases. For my joy—enjoys good ruses. Would you like to pick my roses?
If you don’t want your eyes and mind to fade Pursue the sun while walking in the shade.
Better a whole-hearted feud Than a friendship that is glued.
Never ask! Why cry and shake? Please, I ask you, simply take
Narrow souls I cannot abide; There’s almost no good or evil inside.
He shot an empty word, just for a ball, Into the blue—it made a woman fall.
Double pain is easier to bear Than single pain: Do you accept my dare?
“No path, abysses, death is not so still!”— You wished it, left the path by your own will. Now remain cool and clear, O stranger; For you are lost if you believe in danger.
God loves us, because we are made by him . “But man made God!” say the refined. Should he not love what he designed? Should he, because he made him, now deny him ? That inference limps; it has a cloven mind.
His look is free of envy; hence you laud him; He does not notice whether you applaud him; He has the eagle’s eye for what is far, He does not see you, he sees only stars.
A seeker, I? Oh, please be still! I’m merely heavy —weigh many a pound. I fall, and I keep falling till At last I reach the ground
He sinks, he falls, he’s done”—says who? The truth is: he climbs down to you. His over-bliss became too stark, His over-light pursues your dark.
* Why is she clever now and so refined? On her account a man’s out of his mind, His head was good before he took this whirl: He lost his wits—to the aforesaid girl
If it depended on my choice, I think it might be great To have a place in Paradise; Better yet—outside the gate.
***End of Poems****
Pursue your best or your worst desires, and above all perish!
I keep having the same experience and keep resisting it every time. I do not want to believe it although it is palpable: the great majority of people lacks an intellectual conscience.....
I mean: the great majority of people does not consider it contemptible to believe this or that and to live accordingly, without first having given themselves an account of the final and most certain reasons pro and con, and without even troubling themselves about such reasons afterward:
The strongest and most evil spirits have so far done the most to advance humanity: again and again they relumed the passions that were going to sleep—all ordered society puts the passions to sleep—and they reawakened again and again the sense of comparison, of contradiction, of the pleasure in what is new, daring, untried; they compelled men to pit opinion against opinion, model against model. Usually by force of arms, by toppling boundary markers, by violating pieties—but also by means of new religions and moralities...
In truth, however, the evil instincts are expedient, species-preserving, and indispensable to as high a degree as the good ones; their function is merely different.
All of us harbor concealed gardens and plantings; and, to use another metaphor, 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
The aim of science should be to give men as much pleasure and as little displeasure as possible? But what if pleasure and displeasure were so tied together that whoever wanted to have as much as possible of one must also have as much as possible of the other—that whoever wanted to learn to “jubilate up to the heavens” would also have to be prepared for “depression unto death”?....as much displeasure as possible
What is decisive is how one is accustomed to spice one’s life: it is a matter of taste whether one prefers the slow or the sudden, the assured or the dangerous and audacious increase of power; one seeks this or that spice depending on one’s temperament
Pity is the most agreeable feeling among those who have little pride and no prospects of great conquests; for them easy prey—and that is what all who suffer are—is enchanting. Pity is praised as the virtue of prostitutes.
Our pleasure in ourselves tries to maintain itself by again and again changing something new into ourselves ; that is what possession means. To become tired of some possession means tiring of ourselves
Here and there on earth we may encounter a kind of continuation of love in which this possessive craving of two people for each other gives way to a new desire and lust for possession —a shared higher thirst for an ideal above them. But who knows such love? Who has experienced it? Its right name is friendship .
The times of corruption are those when the apples fall from the tree: I mean the individuals, for they carry the seeds of the future and are the authors of the spiritual colonization and origin of new states and communities. Corruption is merely a nasty word for the autumn of a people.
There is a stupid humility that is not at all rare, and those afflicted with it are altogether unfit to become devotees of knowledge. As soon as a person of this type perceives something striking, he turns on his heel, as it were, and says to himself: “You have made a mistake. What is the matter with your senses? This cannot, may not, be the truth.” And then, instead of looking and listening again, more carefully, he runs away from the striking thing, as if he had been intimidated, and tries to remove it from his mind as fast as he can. For his inner canon says: “I do not want to see anything that contradicts the prevalent opinion. Am I called to discover new truths? There are too many old ones, as it is.”
What is life? — Life—that is: continually shedding something that wants to die. Life—that is: being cruel and inexorable against everything about us that is growing old and weak—and not only about us . Life—that is, then: being without reverence for those who are dying, who are wretched, who are ancient? Constantly being a murderer? —And yet old Moses said: “Thou shalt not kill.”
At this point the conservatives of all ages are thoroughly dishonest: they add lies.
Only now has he become, very late and after an immense self-conquest, a mistrustful animal. Yes, man is now more evil than ever before.” I do not understand this: why should man be more mistrustful and evil now? “Because he now has—and needs—a science
Thinking in a way that is not customary is much less the result of a superior intellect than it is the result of strong, evil inclinations that detach and isolate one, and that are defiant, nasty, and malicious.
Life—is a long death
For thinkers and all sensitive spirits, boredom is that disagreeable “windless calm” of the soul that precedes a happy voyage and cheerful winds.
I see the delight in all the coarser eruptions and gestures of passion
The general lack of experience of pain of both kinds and the relative rarity of the sight of anyone who is suffering have an important consequence: pain is now hated much more than was the case formerly; one speaks much worse of it; indeed, one considers the existence of the mere thought of pain scarcely endurable and turns it into a reproach against the whole of existence.
There is a recipe against pessimistic philosophers and the excessive sensitivity that seems to me the real “misery of the present age”—but this recipe may sound too cruel and might itself be counted among the signs that lead people to judge that “existence is something evil.” Well, the recipe against this “misery” is: misery.
The argument of growing solitude .— The reproaches of conscience are weak even in the most conscientious people compared to the feeling: “This or that is against the morals of your society.” A cold look or a sneer on the face of those among whom and for whom one has been educated is feared even by the strongest. What is it that they are really afraid of? Growing solitude! This is the argument that rebuts even the best arguments for a person or cause. —Thus the herd instinct speaks up in us.
Where the good begins .—Where the poor power of the eye can no longer see the evil impulse as such because it has become too subtle, man posits the realm of goodness; and the feeling that we have now entered the realm of goodness excites all those impulses which had been threatened and limited by the evil impulses, like the feeling of security, of comfort, of benevolence. Hence, the duller the eye, the more extensive the good. Hence the eternal cheerfulness of the common people and of children. Hence the gloominess and grief—akin to a bad conscience—of the great thinkers. 43
It involves the use of a rare and singular standard and almost a madness: the feeling of heat in things that feel cold to everybody else; the discovery of values for which no scales have been invented yet; offering sacrifices on altars that are dedicated to an unknown god; 45 a courage without any desire for honors; a self-sufficiency that overflows and gives to men and things.
These young people demand that—not happiness but unhappiness should approach from the outside and become visible; and their imagination is busy in advance to turn it into a monster so that afterward they can fight a monster.
****Book 2****
There is no “reality” for us—not for you either, my sober friends. We are not nearly as different as you think, and perhaps our good will to transcend intoxication is as respectable as your faith that you are altogether incapable of intoxication.
We can destroy only as creators.
All the world is agreed that they are to be brought up as ignorant as possible of erotic matters, and that one has to imbue their souls with a profound sense of shame in such matters until the merest suggestion of such things triggers the most extreme impatience and flight
The greatest danger that always hovered over humanity and still hovers over it is the eruption of madness—which means the eruption of arbitrariness in feeling, seeing, and hearing, the enjoyment of the mind’s lack of discipline, the joy in human unreason.
It is in these impatient spirits that a veritable delight in madness erupts because madness has such a cheerful tempo.
is more attractive by virtue of his imperfections
In good society one must never wish to be solely and entirely right, which is what all pure logic aims at; hence the small dose of unreason in all French espritt
Many lies tell the poets
But why do you write? — A: I am not one of those who think with an inky pen in their hand, much less one of those who in front of an open inkwell abandon themselves to their passions while they sit in a chair and stare at the paper. I am annoyed by and ashamed of my writing; writing is for me a pressing and embarrassing need, and to speak of it even in a parable disgusts me. B: But why, then, do you write? —A: Well, my friend, to be quite frank: so far, I have not discovered any other way of getting rid of my thoughts. —B: And why do you want to get rid of them? —A: Why I want to? Do I want to? I must. —B: Enough! Enough!
If we had not welcomed the arts and invented this kind of cult of the untrue, then the realization of general untruth and mendaciousness that now comes to us through science—the realization that delusion and error are conditions of human knowledge and sensation—would be utterly unbearable
We must discover the hero no less than the fool in our passion for knowledge; we must occasionally find pleasure in our folly, or we cannot continue to find pleasure in our wisdom
***Book three***
The total character of the world, however, is in all eternity chaos—in the sense not of a lack of necessity but of a lack of order, arrangement, form, beauty, wisdom, and whatever other names there are for our aesthetic anthropomorphisms.
Once you know that there are no purposes, you also know that there is no accident; for it is only beside a world of purposes that the word “accident” has meaning. Let us beware of saying that death is opposed to life. The living is merely a type of what is dead, and a very rare type.
To what extent can truth endure incorporation? That is the question; that is the experiment.
The course of logical ideas and inferences in our brain today corresponds to a process and a struggle among impulses that are, taken singly, very illogical and unjust. We generally experience only the result of this struggle because this primeval mechanism now runs its course so quickly and is so well concealed.
ask whether it is the stronger or the weaker that feels benevolent.
But it should be kept in mind that “strong” and “weak” are relative concepts.
In many people I find an overwhelmingly forceful and pleasurable desire to be a function
Finally, the great question would still remain whether we can really dispense with illness—even for the sake of our virtue—and whether our thirst for knowledge and self-knowledge in particular does not require the sick soul as much as the healthy, and whether, in brief, the will to health alone, is not a prejudice, cowardice, and perhaps a bit of very subtle barbarism and backwardness.
We have arranged for ourselves a world in which we can live—by positing bodies, lines, planes, causes and effects, motion and rest, form and content; without these articles of faith nobody now could endure life. But that does not prove them. Life is no argument. The conditions of life might include error.
Mystical explanations are considered deep. The truth is that they are not even superficial.
Prayer has been invented for those people who really never have thoughts of their own and who do not know any elevation of the soul or at least do not notice it when it occurs
What religion wants from the masses is no more than that they should keep still with their eyes, hands, legs, and other organs; that way they become more beautiful for a while and—look more like human beings.
The Christian presupposes a powerful, overpowering being who enjoys revenge. His power is so great that nobody could possibly harm him, except for his honor. Every sin is a slight to his honor,
Sin is an offense against him, not against humanity
when religious ideas are destroyed one is troubled by an uncomfortable emptiness and deprivation..From this feeling grows once again “another world,” but now merely a metaphysical one that is no longer religious. But what first led to the positing of “another world” in primeval times was not some impulse or need but an error in the interpretation of certain natural events, a failure of the intellect.
** To find everything profound—that is an inconvenient trait. It makes one strain one’s eyes all the time, and in the end one finds more than one might have wished.
The spirits who seek rest I recognize by the many dark objects with which they surround themselves: those who want to sleep make their room dark or crawl into a cave. —A hint for those who do not know what it is that they seek most, but who would like to know.
If one renounces something thoroughly and for a long time and then accidentally encounters it again, one may almost think that one has discovered it—and how much happiness is there in discovery! Let us be wiser than the serpents who lie too long in the same sunlight.
who know that they are profound strive for clarity. Those who would like to seem profound to the crowd strive for obscurity. For the crowd believes that if it cannot see to the bottom of something it must be profound. It is so timid and dislikes going into the water.
Thoughts are the shadows of our feelings— always darker, emptier, and simpler
Those who live alone do not speak too loud nor write too loud, for they fear the hollow echo—the critique of the nymph Echo. And all voices sound different in solitude
I should account as the foremost musician one who knew only the sadness of the most profound happiness, and no other sadness at all; but such a musician has never existed yet
A: “One is praised only by one’s peers.” B: “Yes, and whoever praises you says: I am your peer.”
There is nothing we like so much to communicate to others as the seal of secrecy—along with what lies under it.
A sage asked a fool about the way to happiness. The fool answered instantly as if he had merely been asked about the way to the nearest town: “Admire yourself and live in the street.” “No,” replied the sage, “you are asking too much; it is quite sufficient to admire oneself.” The fool shot back: “But how can one constantly admire without constantly feeling contempt?”
Anyone with a very loud voice is almost incapable of thinking subtleties
The purpose of punishment is to improve those who punish; that is the last resort of the apologists for punishment
The sacrificial animal does not share the spectators’ ideas about sacrifice, but one has never let it have its say
I fear that the animals consider man as a being like themselves that has lost in a most dangerous way its sound animal common sense; they consider him the insane animal, the laughing animal, the weeping animal, the miserable animal.
Evil has always had great effects in its favor. And nature is evil. Let us therefore be natural.” That is the secret reasoning of those who have mastered the most spectacular effects, and they have all too often been considered great human beings.
He cannot control himself, and from that a poor woman infers that it will be easy to control him and casts her net for him. Soon she will be his slave
Obstinately, he clings to something that he has come to see through; but he calls it “faithfulness.
Either we have no dreams or our dreams are interesting. We should learn to arrange our waking life the same way: nothing or interesting.
A single joyless person is enough to create constant discouragement and cloudy skies for a whole household, and it is a miracle if there is not one person like that. Happiness is not nearly so contagious a disease. Why?
Every habit lends our hand more wit but makes our wit less handy.
What good is a book that does not even carry us beyond all books?
If you are always profoundly occupied, you are beyond all embarrassment.
One is always wrong, but with two, truth begins— One cannot prove his case, but two are irrefutable
When we are in love we wish that our defects might remain concealed—not from vanity but to keep the beloved from suffering. Indeed, the lover would like to seem divine—and this, too, not from vanity.
*****SANCTUS JANUARIUS****
I want to learn more and more to see as beautiful what is necessary in things; then I shall be one of those who make things beautiful.
We were friends and have become estranged. But this was right, and we do not want to conceal and obscure it from ourselves as if we had reason to feel ashamed. We are two ships each of which has its goal and course; our paths may cross and we may celebrate a feast together, as we did—and then the good ships rested so quietly in one harbor and one sunshine that it may have looked as if they had reached their goal and as if they had one goal. But then the almighty force of our tasks drove us apart again into different seas and sunny zones, and perhaps we shall never see each other again; perhaps we shall meet again but fail to recognize each other: our exposure to different seas and suns has changed us. That we have to become estranged is the law above us; by the same token we should also become more venerable for each other—and the memory of our former friendship more sacred. There is probably a tremendous but invisible stellar orbit in which our very different ways and goals may be included as small parts of this path; let us rise up to this thought. But our life is too short and our power of vision too small for us to be more than friends in the sense of this sublime possibility. —Let us then believe in our star friendship even if we should be compelled to be earth enemies.
For believe me: the secret for harvesting from existence the greatest fruitfulness and the greatest enjoyment is—to live dangerously !
“My thoughts,” said the wanderer to his shadow, 14 “should show me where I stand; but they should not betray to me where I am going. I love my ignorance of the future and do not wish to perish of impatience and of tasting promised things ahead of time.”
For one thing is needful: that a human being should attain satisfaction with himself, whether it be by means of this or that poetry and art; only then is a human being at all tolerable to behold. Whoever is dissatisfied with himself is continually ready for revenge, and we others will be his victims, if only by having to endure his ugly sight. For the sight of what is ugly makes one bad and gloomy
Wherever we may come there will always be freedom and sunlight around us.
Most intolerable, to be sure, and the terrible par excellence would be for me a life entirely devoid of habits, a life that would demand perpetual improvisation.
I know more about life because I have so often been on the verge of losing it; and precisely for that reason I get more out of life than any of you.”
Those moralists who command man first of all and above all to gain control of himself thus afflict him with a peculiar disease; namely, a constant irritability in the face of all natural stirrings and inclinations—as it were, a kind of itching.
One is not always bold, and when one grows tired then one of us, too, is apt to moan like this: “It is so hard to hurt people—oh, why is it necessary! What does it profit us to live in seclusion when we refuse to keep to ourselves what gives-offense? Would it not be more advisable to live in the swarm and to make up to individuals the sins that should and must be committed against all? To be foolish with fools, vain with the vain, and enthusiastic with enthusiasts? Wouldn’t that be fair, given such overweening deviation on the whole? When I hear of the malice of others against me—isn’t my first reaction one of satisfaction? Quite right! I seem to be saying to them—I am so ill-attuned to you and have so much truth on my side that you might as well have a good day at my expense whenever you can! Here are my faults and blunders, here my delusion, my bad taste, my confusion, my tears, my vanity, my owlish seclusion, my contradictions. Here you can laugh. Laugh, then, and be merry! I do not resent the law and nature of things according to which faults and blunders cause merriment
***There is as much wisdom in pain as there is in pleasure: both belong among the factors that contribute the most to the preservation of the species
For one must be able to lose oneself occasionally if one wants to learn something from things different from oneself.
But we, we others who thirst after reason, are determined to scrutinize our experiences as severely as a scientific experiment—hour after hour, day after day. We ourselves wish to be our experiments and guinea pigs.
Those thinkers in whom all stars move in cyclic orbits are not the most profound. Whoever looks into himself as into vast space and carries galaxies in himself, also knows how irregular all galaxies are; they lead into the chaos and labyrinth of existence
No, life has not disappointed me. On the contrary, I find it truer
Life as a means to knowledge” —with this principle in one’s heart one can live not only boldly but even gaily, and laugh gaily, too. And who knows how to laugh anyway and live well if he does not first know a good deal about war and victory?
Who will attain anything great if he does not find in himself the strength and the will to inflict great suffering?
In the great majority, the intellect is a clumsy, gloomy, creaking machine that is difficult to start. They call it “taking the matter seriously” when they want to work with this machine and think well. How burdensome they must find good thinking! The lovely human beast always seems to lose its good spirits when it thinks well; it becomes “serious.” And “where laughter and gaiety are found, thinking does not amount to anything”: that is the prejudice of this serious beast against all “gay science.” — Well then, let us prove that this is a prejudice
Your selfishness is the misfortune of your life”—that was preached for thousands of years and harmed, as I have said, selfishness and deprived it of much spirit, much cheerfulness, much sensitivity, much beauty; it made selfishness stupid and ugly and poisoned it.
“Your thoughtlessness and stupidity, the way you live according to the rule, your submission to your neighbor’s opinion is the reason why you so rarely achieve happiness; we thinkers, as thinkers, are the happiest of all.”
Every philosopher has probably had an evil hour when he thought: What do I matter if one does not accept my bad arguments, too? —And then some mischievous 61 little bird flew past him and twittered: “What do you matter? What do you matter?”
For the longest time, conscious thought was considered thought itself. Only now does the truth dawn on us that by far the greatest part of our spirit’s activity remains unconscious and unfelt.
Conscious thinking, especially that of the philosopher, is the least vigorous and therefore also the relatively mildest and calmest form of thinking; and thus precisely philosophers are most apt to be led astray about the nature of knowledge.
This is what happens to us in music: First one has to learn to hear a figure and melody at all, to detect and distinguish it, to isolate it and delimit it as a separate life. Then it requires some exertion and good will to tolerate it in spite of its strangeness, to be patient with its appearance and expression, and kindhearted about its oddity. Finally there comes a moment when we are used to it, when we wait for it, when we sense that we should miss it if it were missing; and now it continues to compel and enchant us relentlessly until we have become its humble and enraptured lovers who desire nothing better from the world than it and only it.
But that is what happens to us not only in music. That is how we have learned to love all things that we now love. In the end we are always rewarded for our good will, our patience, fairmindedness, and gentleness with what is strange; gradually, it sheds its veil and turns out to be a new and indescribable beauty. That is its thanks for our hospitality. Even those who love themselves will have learned it in this way; for there is no other way Love, too, has to be learned.
Your judgment “this is right” has a pre-history in your instincts, likes, dislikes, experiences, and lack of experiences. “How did it originate there?” you must ask, and then also: “What is it that impels me to listen to it?” You can listen to its commands like a good soldier who hears his officer’s command. Or like a woman who loves the man who commands. Or like a flatterer and coward who is afraid of the commander. Or like a dunderhead who obeys because no objection occurs to him. In short, there are a hundred ways in which you can listen to your conscience. But that you take this or that judgment for the voice of conscience—in other words, that you feel something to be right—may be due to the fact that you have never thought much about yourself and simply have accepted blindly that what you had been told ever since your childhood was right; or it may be due to the fact that what you call your duty has up to this point brought you sustenance and honors—and you consider it “right” because it appears to you as your own “condition of existence” (and that you have a right to existence seems irrefutable to you).
nyone who manages to experience the history of humanity as a whole as his own history will feel in an enormously generalized way all the grief of an invalid who thinks of health, of an old man who thinks of the dreams of his youth, of a lover deprived of his beloved, of the martyr whose ideal is perishing, of the hero on the evening after a battle that has decided
It never occurs to them that, to put it mystically, the path to one’s own heaven always leads through the voluptuousness of one’s own hell.
How little you know of human happiness, you comfortable and benevolent people, for happiness and unhappiness are sisters and even twins that either grow up together or, as in your case, remain small together. But now back to the first question!
I mean to say that the world is overfull of beautiful things but nevertheless poor, very poor when it comes to beautiful moments and unveilings of these things. But perhaps this is the most powerful magic of life: it is covered by a veil interwoven with gold, a veil of beautiful possibilities, sparkling with promise, resistance, bashfulness, mockery, pity, and seduction.
What, if some day or night a demon were to steal after you into your loneliest loneliness and say to you: “This life as you now live it and have lived it, you will have to live once more and innumerable times more; and there will be nothing new in it, but every pain and every joy and every thought and sigh and everything unutterably small or great in your life will have to return to you, all in the same succession and sequence—even this spider and this moonlight between the trees, and even this moment and I myself. The eternal hourglass of existence is turned upside down again and again, and you with it, speck of dust!
Would you not throw yourself down and gnash your teeth and curse the demon who spoke thus? Or have you once experienced a tremendous moment when you would have answered him: “You are a god and never have I heard anything more divine.” If this thought gained possession of you, it would change you as you are or perhaps crush you. The question in each and every thing, “Do you desire this once more and innumerable times more?” would lie upon your actions as the greatest weight. Or how well disposed would you have to become to yourself and to life to crave nothing more fervently than this ultimate eternal confirmation and seal?
Would you not throw yourself down and gnash your teeth and curse the demon who spoke thus? Or have you once experienced a tremendous moment when you would have answered him: “You are a god and never have I heard anything more divine.” If this thought gained possession of you, it would change you as you are or perhaps crush you. The question in each and every thing, “Do you desire this once more and innumerable times more?” would lie upon your actions as the greatest weight. Or how well disposed would you have to become to yourself and to life to crave nothing more fervently than this ultimate eternal confirmation and seal?
***we fearless one***
Why have morality at all when life, nature, and history are “not moral”?
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 and finds in them his destiny, his distress, and his greatest happiness, or an “impersonal” one, meaning that he can do no better than to touch them and grasp them with the antennae of cold, curious thought.
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 .
How much one needs a faith 19 in order to flourish, how much that is “firm” and that one does not wish to be shaken because one clings to it, that is a measure of the degree of one’s strength (or, to put the point more clearly, of one’s weakness)
Faith is always coveted most and needed most urgently where will is lacking; for will, as the affect of command, is the decisive sign of sovereignty and strength.
Quotes and paragraphs
*****
A tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury.
I do not want life again . How did I endure it? Creating. What makes me stand the sight of it? The vision of the overman who affirms life. I have tried to affirm it myself —alas!”
Every philosophy that ranks peace above war, every ethic with a negative definition of happiness, every metaphysics and physics that knows some finale , some final state of some sort, every predominantly aesthetic or religious craving for some Apart, Beyond, Outside, Above, permits the question whether it was not sickness that inspired the philosopher. The unconscious disguise of physiological needs under the cloaks of the objective, ideal, purely spiritual goes to frightening lengths—and often I have asked myself whether, taking a large view, philosophy has not been merely an interpretation of the body and a misunderstanding of the body.
symptoms of certain bodies.
its premonitions of the end, its will to the end
Whether we learn to pit our pride, our scorn, our will power against it, equaling the American Indian who, however tortured, repays his torturer with the malice of his tongue; or whether we withdraw from pain into that Oriental Nothing—called Nirvana—into mute, rigid, deaf resignation, self-forgetting, self-extinction: out of such long and dangerous exercises of self-mastery one emerges as a different person, with a few more question marks —above all with the will henceforth to question further, more deeply, severely, harshly, evilly and quietly than one had questioned heretofore
**** Poems ***
Yes, my joy wants to amuse, Every joy wants to amuse. Would you like to pick my roses? You must stoop and stick your noses Between thorns and rocky views, And not be afraid of bruises. For my joy—enjoys good teases. For my joy—enjoys good ruses. Would you like to pick my roses?
If you don’t want your eyes and mind to fade Pursue the sun while walking in the shade.
Better a whole-hearted feud Than a friendship that is glued.
Never ask! Why cry and shake? Please, I ask you, simply take
Narrow souls I cannot abide; There’s almost no good or evil inside.
He shot an empty word, just for a ball, Into the blue—it made a woman fall.
Double pain is easier to bear Than single pain: Do you accept my dare?
“No path, abysses, death is not so still!”— You wished it, left the path by your own will. Now remain cool and clear, O stranger; For you are lost if you believe in danger.
God loves us, because we are made by him . “But man made God!” say the refined. Should he not love what he designed? Should he, because he made him, now deny him ? That inference limps; it has a cloven mind.
His look is free of envy; hence you laud him; He does not notice whether you applaud him; He has the eagle’s eye for what is far, He does not see you, he sees only stars.
A seeker, I? Oh, please be still! I’m merely heavy —weigh many a pound. I fall, and I keep falling till At last I reach the ground
He sinks, he falls, he’s done”—says who? The truth is: he climbs down to you. His over-bliss became too stark, His over-light pursues your dark.
* Why is she clever now and so refined? On her account a man’s out of his mind, His head was good before he took this whirl: He lost his wits—to the aforesaid girl
If it depended on my choice, I think it might be great To have a place in Paradise; Better yet—outside the gate.
***End of Poems****
Pursue your best or your worst desires, and above all perish!
I keep having the same experience and keep resisting it every time. I do not want to believe it although it is palpable: the great majority of people lacks an intellectual conscience.....
I mean: the great majority of people does not consider it contemptible to believe this or that and to live accordingly, without first having given themselves an account of the final and most certain reasons pro and con, and without even troubling themselves about such reasons afterward:
The strongest and most evil spirits have so far done the most to advance humanity: again and again they relumed the passions that were going to sleep—all ordered society puts the passions to sleep—and they reawakened again and again the sense of comparison, of contradiction, of the pleasure in what is new, daring, untried; they compelled men to pit opinion against opinion, model against model. Usually by force of arms, by toppling boundary markers, by violating pieties—but also by means of new religions and moralities...
In truth, however, the evil instincts are expedient, species-preserving, and indispensable to as high a degree as the good ones; their function is merely different.
All of us harbor concealed gardens and plantings; and, to use another metaphor, 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
The aim of science should be to give men as much pleasure and as little displeasure as possible? But what if pleasure and displeasure were so tied together that whoever wanted to have as much as possible of one must also have as much as possible of the other—that whoever wanted to learn to “jubilate up to the heavens” would also have to be prepared for “depression unto death”?....as much displeasure as possible
What is decisive is how one is accustomed to spice one’s life: it is a matter of taste whether one prefers the slow or the sudden, the assured or the dangerous and audacious increase of power; one seeks this or that spice depending on one’s temperament
Pity is the most agreeable feeling among those who have little pride and no prospects of great conquests; for them easy prey—and that is what all who suffer are—is enchanting. Pity is praised as the virtue of prostitutes.
Our pleasure in ourselves tries to maintain itself by again and again changing something new into ourselves ; that is what possession means. To become tired of some possession means tiring of ourselves
Here and there on earth we may encounter a kind of continuation of love in which this possessive craving of two people for each other gives way to a new desire and lust for possession —a shared higher thirst for an ideal above them. But who knows such love? Who has experienced it? Its right name is friendship .
The times of corruption are those when the apples fall from the tree: I mean the individuals, for they carry the seeds of the future and are the authors of the spiritual colonization and origin of new states and communities. Corruption is merely a nasty word for the autumn of a people.
There is a stupid humility that is not at all rare, and those afflicted with it are altogether unfit to become devotees of knowledge. As soon as a person of this type perceives something striking, he turns on his heel, as it were, and says to himself: “You have made a mistake. What is the matter with your senses? This cannot, may not, be the truth.” And then, instead of looking and listening again, more carefully, he runs away from the striking thing, as if he had been intimidated, and tries to remove it from his mind as fast as he can. For his inner canon says: “I do not want to see anything that contradicts the prevalent opinion. Am I called to discover new truths? There are too many old ones, as it is.”
What is life? — Life—that is: continually shedding something that wants to die. Life—that is: being cruel and inexorable against everything about us that is growing old and weak—and not only about us . Life—that is, then: being without reverence for those who are dying, who are wretched, who are ancient? Constantly being a murderer? —And yet old Moses said: “Thou shalt not kill.”
At this point the conservatives of all ages are thoroughly dishonest: they add lies.
Only now has he become, very late and after an immense self-conquest, a mistrustful animal. Yes, man is now more evil than ever before.” I do not understand this: why should man be more mistrustful and evil now? “Because he now has—and needs—a science
Thinking in a way that is not customary is much less the result of a superior intellect than it is the result of strong, evil inclinations that detach and isolate one, and that are defiant, nasty, and malicious.
Life—is a long death
For thinkers and all sensitive spirits, boredom is that disagreeable “windless calm” of the soul that precedes a happy voyage and cheerful winds.
I see the delight in all the coarser eruptions and gestures of passion
The general lack of experience of pain of both kinds and the relative rarity of the sight of anyone who is suffering have an important consequence: pain is now hated much more than was the case formerly; one speaks much worse of it; indeed, one considers the existence of the mere thought of pain scarcely endurable and turns it into a reproach against the whole of existence.
There is a recipe against pessimistic philosophers and the excessive sensitivity that seems to me the real “misery of the present age”—but this recipe may sound too cruel and might itself be counted among the signs that lead people to judge that “existence is something evil.” Well, the recipe against this “misery” is: misery.
The argument of growing solitude .— The reproaches of conscience are weak even in the most conscientious people compared to the feeling: “This or that is against the morals of your society.” A cold look or a sneer on the face of those among whom and for whom one has been educated is feared even by the strongest. What is it that they are really afraid of? Growing solitude! This is the argument that rebuts even the best arguments for a person or cause. —Thus the herd instinct speaks up in us.
Where the good begins .—Where the poor power of the eye can no longer see the evil impulse as such because it has become too subtle, man posits the realm of goodness; and the feeling that we have now entered the realm of goodness excites all those impulses which had been threatened and limited by the evil impulses, like the feeling of security, of comfort, of benevolence. Hence, the duller the eye, the more extensive the good. Hence the eternal cheerfulness of the common people and of children. Hence the gloominess and grief—akin to a bad conscience—of the great thinkers. 43
It involves the use of a rare and singular standard and almost a madness: the feeling of heat in things that feel cold to everybody else; the discovery of values for which no scales have been invented yet; offering sacrifices on altars that are dedicated to an unknown god; 45 a courage without any desire for honors; a self-sufficiency that overflows and gives to men and things.
These young people demand that—not happiness but unhappiness should approach from the outside and become visible; and their imagination is busy in advance to turn it into a monster so that afterward they can fight a monster.
****Book 2****
There is no “reality” for us—not for you either, my sober friends. We are not nearly as different as you think, and perhaps our good will to transcend intoxication is as respectable as your faith that you are altogether incapable of intoxication.
We can destroy only as creators.
All the world is agreed that they are to be brought up as ignorant as possible of erotic matters, and that one has to imbue their souls with a profound sense of shame in such matters until the merest suggestion of such things triggers the most extreme impatience and flight
The greatest danger that always hovered over humanity and still hovers over it is the eruption of madness—which means the eruption of arbitrariness in feeling, seeing, and hearing, the enjoyment of the mind’s lack of discipline, the joy in human unreason.
It is in these impatient spirits that a veritable delight in madness erupts because madness has such a cheerful tempo.
is more attractive by virtue of his imperfections
In good society one must never wish to be solely and entirely right, which is what all pure logic aims at; hence the small dose of unreason in all French espritt
Many lies tell the poets
But why do you write? — A: I am not one of those who think with an inky pen in their hand, much less one of those who in front of an open inkwell abandon themselves to their passions while they sit in a chair and stare at the paper. I am annoyed by and ashamed of my writing; writing is for me a pressing and embarrassing need, and to speak of it even in a parable disgusts me. B: But why, then, do you write? —A: Well, my friend, to be quite frank: so far, I have not discovered any other way of getting rid of my thoughts. —B: And why do you want to get rid of them? —A: Why I want to? Do I want to? I must. —B: Enough! Enough!
If we had not welcomed the arts and invented this kind of cult of the untrue, then the realization of general untruth and mendaciousness that now comes to us through science—the realization that delusion and error are conditions of human knowledge and sensation—would be utterly unbearable
We must discover the hero no less than the fool in our passion for knowledge; we must occasionally find pleasure in our folly, or we cannot continue to find pleasure in our wisdom
***Book three***
The total character of the world, however, is in all eternity chaos—in the sense not of a lack of necessity but of a lack of order, arrangement, form, beauty, wisdom, and whatever other names there are for our aesthetic anthropomorphisms.
Once you know that there are no purposes, you also know that there is no accident; for it is only beside a world of purposes that the word “accident” has meaning. Let us beware of saying that death is opposed to life. The living is merely a type of what is dead, and a very rare type.
To what extent can truth endure incorporation? That is the question; that is the experiment.
The course of logical ideas and inferences in our brain today corresponds to a process and a struggle among impulses that are, taken singly, very illogical and unjust. We generally experience only the result of this struggle because this primeval mechanism now runs its course so quickly and is so well concealed.
ask whether it is the stronger or the weaker that feels benevolent.
But it should be kept in mind that “strong” and “weak” are relative concepts.
In many people I find an overwhelmingly forceful and pleasurable desire to be a function
Finally, the great question would still remain whether we can really dispense with illness—even for the sake of our virtue—and whether our thirst for knowledge and self-knowledge in particular does not require the sick soul as much as the healthy, and whether, in brief, the will to health alone, is not a prejudice, cowardice, and perhaps a bit of very subtle barbarism and backwardness.
We have arranged for ourselves a world in which we can live—by positing bodies, lines, planes, causes and effects, motion and rest, form and content; without these articles of faith nobody now could endure life. But that does not prove them. Life is no argument. The conditions of life might include error.
Mystical explanations are considered deep. The truth is that they are not even superficial.
Prayer has been invented for those people who really never have thoughts of their own and who do not know any elevation of the soul or at least do not notice it when it occurs
What religion wants from the masses is no more than that they should keep still with their eyes, hands, legs, and other organs; that way they become more beautiful for a while and—look more like human beings.
The Christian presupposes a powerful, overpowering being who enjoys revenge. His power is so great that nobody could possibly harm him, except for his honor. Every sin is a slight to his honor,
Sin is an offense against him, not against humanity
when religious ideas are destroyed one is troubled by an uncomfortable emptiness and deprivation..From this feeling grows once again “another world,” but now merely a metaphysical one that is no longer religious. But what first led to the positing of “another world” in primeval times was not some impulse or need but an error in the interpretation of certain natural events, a failure of the intellect.
** To find everything profound—that is an inconvenient trait. It makes one strain one’s eyes all the time, and in the end one finds more than one might have wished.
The spirits who seek rest I recognize by the many dark objects with which they surround themselves: those who want to sleep make their room dark or crawl into a cave. —A hint for those who do not know what it is that they seek most, but who would like to know.
If one renounces something thoroughly and for a long time and then accidentally encounters it again, one may almost think that one has discovered it—and how much happiness is there in discovery! Let us be wiser than the serpents who lie too long in the same sunlight.
who know that they are profound strive for clarity. Those who would like to seem profound to the crowd strive for obscurity. For the crowd believes that if it cannot see to the bottom of something it must be profound. It is so timid and dislikes going into the water.
Thoughts are the shadows of our feelings— always darker, emptier, and simpler
Those who live alone do not speak too loud nor write too loud, for they fear the hollow echo—the critique of the nymph Echo. And all voices sound different in solitude
I should account as the foremost musician one who knew only the sadness of the most profound happiness, and no other sadness at all; but such a musician has never existed yet
A: “One is praised only by one’s peers.” B: “Yes, and whoever praises you says: I am your peer.”
There is nothing we like so much to communicate to others as the seal of secrecy—along with what lies under it.
A sage asked a fool about the way to happiness. The fool answered instantly as if he had merely been asked about the way to the nearest town: “Admire yourself and live in the street.” “No,” replied the sage, “you are asking too much; it is quite sufficient to admire oneself.” The fool shot back: “But how can one constantly admire without constantly feeling contempt?”
Anyone with a very loud voice is almost incapable of thinking subtleties
The purpose of punishment is to improve those who punish; that is the last resort of the apologists for punishment
The sacrificial animal does not share the spectators’ ideas about sacrifice, but one has never let it have its say
I fear that the animals consider man as a being like themselves that has lost in a most dangerous way its sound animal common sense; they consider him the insane animal, the laughing animal, the weeping animal, the miserable animal.
Evil has always had great effects in its favor. And nature is evil. Let us therefore be natural.” That is the secret reasoning of those who have mastered the most spectacular effects, and they have all too often been considered great human beings.
He cannot control himself, and from that a poor woman infers that it will be easy to control him and casts her net for him. Soon she will be his slave
Obstinately, he clings to something that he has come to see through; but he calls it “faithfulness.
Either we have no dreams or our dreams are interesting. We should learn to arrange our waking life the same way: nothing or interesting.
A single joyless person is enough to create constant discouragement and cloudy skies for a whole household, and it is a miracle if there is not one person like that. Happiness is not nearly so contagious a disease. Why?
Every habit lends our hand more wit but makes our wit less handy.
What good is a book that does not even carry us beyond all books?
If you are always profoundly occupied, you are beyond all embarrassment.
One is always wrong, but with two, truth begins— One cannot prove his case, but two are irrefutable
When we are in love we wish that our defects might remain concealed—not from vanity but to keep the beloved from suffering. Indeed, the lover would like to seem divine—and this, too, not from vanity.
*****SANCTUS JANUARIUS****
I want to learn more and more to see as beautiful what is necessary in things; then I shall be one of those who make things beautiful.
We were friends and have become estranged. But this was right, and we do not want to conceal and obscure it from ourselves as if we had reason to feel ashamed. We are two ships each of which has its goal and course; our paths may cross and we may celebrate a feast together, as we did—and then the good ships rested so quietly in one harbor and one sunshine that it may have looked as if they had reached their goal and as if they had one goal. But then the almighty force of our tasks drove us apart again into different seas and sunny zones, and perhaps we shall never see each other again; perhaps we shall meet again but fail to recognize each other: our exposure to different seas and suns has changed us. That we have to become estranged is the law above us; by the same token we should also become more venerable for each other—and the memory of our former friendship more sacred. There is probably a tremendous but invisible stellar orbit in which our very different ways and goals may be included as small parts of this path; let us rise up to this thought. But our life is too short and our power of vision too small for us to be more than friends in the sense of this sublime possibility. —Let us then believe in our star friendship even if we should be compelled to be earth enemies.
For believe me: the secret for harvesting from existence the greatest fruitfulness and the greatest enjoyment is—to live dangerously !
“My thoughts,” said the wanderer to his shadow, 14 “should show me where I stand; but they should not betray to me where I am going. I love my ignorance of the future and do not wish to perish of impatience and of tasting promised things ahead of time.”
For one thing is needful: that a human being should attain satisfaction with himself, whether it be by means of this or that poetry and art; only then is a human being at all tolerable to behold. Whoever is dissatisfied with himself is continually ready for revenge, and we others will be his victims, if only by having to endure his ugly sight. For the sight of what is ugly makes one bad and gloomy
Wherever we may come there will always be freedom and sunlight around us.
Most intolerable, to be sure, and the terrible par excellence would be for me a life entirely devoid of habits, a life that would demand perpetual improvisation.
I know more about life because I have so often been on the verge of losing it; and precisely for that reason I get more out of life than any of you.”
Those moralists who command man first of all and above all to gain control of himself thus afflict him with a peculiar disease; namely, a constant irritability in the face of all natural stirrings and inclinations—as it were, a kind of itching.
One is not always bold, and when one grows tired then one of us, too, is apt to moan like this: “It is so hard to hurt people—oh, why is it necessary! What does it profit us to live in seclusion when we refuse to keep to ourselves what gives-offense? Would it not be more advisable to live in the swarm and to make up to individuals the sins that should and must be committed against all? To be foolish with fools, vain with the vain, and enthusiastic with enthusiasts? Wouldn’t that be fair, given such overweening deviation on the whole? When I hear of the malice of others against me—isn’t my first reaction one of satisfaction? Quite right! I seem to be saying to them—I am so ill-attuned to you and have so much truth on my side that you might as well have a good day at my expense whenever you can! Here are my faults and blunders, here my delusion, my bad taste, my confusion, my tears, my vanity, my owlish seclusion, my contradictions. Here you can laugh. Laugh, then, and be merry! I do not resent the law and nature of things according to which faults and blunders cause merriment
***There is as much wisdom in pain as there is in pleasure: both belong among the factors that contribute the most to the preservation of the species
For one must be able to lose oneself occasionally if one wants to learn something from things different from oneself.
But we, we others who thirst after reason, are determined to scrutinize our experiences as severely as a scientific experiment—hour after hour, day after day. We ourselves wish to be our experiments and guinea pigs.
Those thinkers in whom all stars move in cyclic orbits are not the most profound. Whoever looks into himself as into vast space and carries galaxies in himself, also knows how irregular all galaxies are; they lead into the chaos and labyrinth of existence
No, life has not disappointed me. On the contrary, I find it truer
Life as a means to knowledge” —with this principle in one’s heart one can live not only boldly but even gaily, and laugh gaily, too. And who knows how to laugh anyway and live well if he does not first know a good deal about war and victory?
Who will attain anything great if he does not find in himself the strength and the will to inflict great suffering?
In the great majority, the intellect is a clumsy, gloomy, creaking machine that is difficult to start. They call it “taking the matter seriously” when they want to work with this machine and think well. How burdensome they must find good thinking! The lovely human beast always seems to lose its good spirits when it thinks well; it becomes “serious.” And “where laughter and gaiety are found, thinking does not amount to anything”: that is the prejudice of this serious beast against all “gay science.” — Well then, let us prove that this is a prejudice
Your selfishness is the misfortune of your life”—that was preached for thousands of years and harmed, as I have said, selfishness and deprived it of much spirit, much cheerfulness, much sensitivity, much beauty; it made selfishness stupid and ugly and poisoned it.
“Your thoughtlessness and stupidity, the way you live according to the rule, your submission to your neighbor’s opinion is the reason why you so rarely achieve happiness; we thinkers, as thinkers, are the happiest of all.”
Every philosopher has probably had an evil hour when he thought: What do I matter if one does not accept my bad arguments, too? —And then some mischievous 61 little bird flew past him and twittered: “What do you matter? What do you matter?”
For the longest time, conscious thought was considered thought itself. Only now does the truth dawn on us that by far the greatest part of our spirit’s activity remains unconscious and unfelt.
Conscious thinking, especially that of the philosopher, is the least vigorous and therefore also the relatively mildest and calmest form of thinking; and thus precisely philosophers are most apt to be led astray about the nature of knowledge.
This is what happens to us in music: First one has to learn to hear a figure and melody at all, to detect and distinguish it, to isolate it and delimit it as a separate life. Then it requires some exertion and good will to tolerate it in spite of its strangeness, to be patient with its appearance and expression, and kindhearted about its oddity. Finally there comes a moment when we are used to it, when we wait for it, when we sense that we should miss it if it were missing; and now it continues to compel and enchant us relentlessly until we have become its humble and enraptured lovers who desire nothing better from the world than it and only it.
But that is what happens to us not only in music. That is how we have learned to love all things that we now love. In the end we are always rewarded for our good will, our patience, fairmindedness, and gentleness with what is strange; gradually, it sheds its veil and turns out to be a new and indescribable beauty. That is its thanks for our hospitality. Even those who love themselves will have learned it in this way; for there is no other way Love, too, has to be learned.
Your judgment “this is right” has a pre-history in your instincts, likes, dislikes, experiences, and lack of experiences. “How did it originate there?” you must ask, and then also: “What is it that impels me to listen to it?” You can listen to its commands like a good soldier who hears his officer’s command. Or like a woman who loves the man who commands. Or like a flatterer and coward who is afraid of the commander. Or like a dunderhead who obeys because no objection occurs to him. In short, there are a hundred ways in which you can listen to your conscience. But that you take this or that judgment for the voice of conscience—in other words, that you feel something to be right—may be due to the fact that you have never thought much about yourself and simply have accepted blindly that what you had been told ever since your childhood was right; or it may be due to the fact that what you call your duty has up to this point brought you sustenance and honors—and you consider it “right” because it appears to you as your own “condition of existence” (and that you have a right to existence seems irrefutable to you).
nyone who manages to experience the history of humanity as a whole as his own history will feel in an enormously generalized way all the grief of an invalid who thinks of health, of an old man who thinks of the dreams of his youth, of a lover deprived of his beloved, of the martyr whose ideal is perishing, of the hero on the evening after a battle that has decided
It never occurs to them that, to put it mystically, the path to one’s own heaven always leads through the voluptuousness of one’s own hell.
How little you know of human happiness, you comfortable and benevolent people, for happiness and unhappiness are sisters and even twins that either grow up together or, as in your case, remain small together. But now back to the first question!
I mean to say that the world is overfull of beautiful things but nevertheless poor, very poor when it comes to beautiful moments and unveilings of these things. But perhaps this is the most powerful magic of life: it is covered by a veil interwoven with gold, a veil of beautiful possibilities, sparkling with promise, resistance, bashfulness, mockery, pity, and seduction.
What, if some day or night a demon were to steal after you into your loneliest loneliness and say to you: “This life as you now live it and have lived it, you will have to live once more and innumerable times more; and there will be nothing new in it, but every pain and every joy and every thought and sigh and everything unutterably small or great in your life will have to return to you, all in the same succession and sequence—even this spider and this moonlight between the trees, and even this moment and I myself. The eternal hourglass of existence is turned upside down again and again, and you with it, speck of dust!
Would you not throw yourself down and gnash your teeth and curse the demon who spoke thus? Or have you once experienced a tremendous moment when you would have answered him: “You are a god and never have I heard anything more divine.” If this thought gained possession of you, it would change you as you are or perhaps crush you. The question in each and every thing, “Do you desire this once more and innumerable times more?” would lie upon your actions as the greatest weight. Or how well disposed would you have to become to yourself and to life to crave nothing more fervently than this ultimate eternal confirmation and seal?
Would you not throw yourself down and gnash your teeth and curse the demon who spoke thus? Or have you once experienced a tremendous moment when you would have answered him: “You are a god and never have I heard anything more divine.” If this thought gained possession of you, it would change you as you are or perhaps crush you. The question in each and every thing, “Do you desire this once more and innumerable times more?” would lie upon your actions as the greatest weight. Or how well disposed would you have to become to yourself and to life to crave nothing more fervently than this ultimate eternal confirmation and seal?
***we fearless one***
Why have morality at all when life, nature, and history are “not moral”?
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 and finds in them his destiny, his distress, and his greatest happiness, or an “impersonal” one, meaning that he can do no better than to touch them and grasp them with the antennae of cold, curious thought.
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 .
How much one needs a faith 19 in order to flourish, how much that is “firm” and that one does not wish to be shaken because one clings to it, that is a measure of the degree of one’s strength (or, to put the point more clearly, of one’s weakness)
Faith is always coveted most and needed most urgently where will is lacking; for will, as the affect of command, is the decisive sign of sovereignty and strength.
tomstbr's review against another edition
4.0
Not really sure what I read but it definitely challenged the mind....
casparb's review against another edition
4.0
I will confess to being susceptible to surface readings of Nietszche. Hopefully, I've pushed through that.
Better known by its altogether more fun title - The Gay Science. I had a lovely time with this and I wish that this was where I started with Nietzsche.
The bizarre misogyny is still there: one very much has to hold there nose whenever women are brought up, resisting the urge to scream incel. BUT (large but) I'm doing my best to approach Nietzscheanism beyond Nietzsche, if we believe in such a thing. Art/artist I know, but this is something different: it's tempting to read Nietzsche as one of Foucault's initiators of discursivity (or did Foucault name Nietzsche as one?? I can't remember), and I think that may be the only useful way that we can read Nietzche qua Nietzsche today. But I don't know. I'm not a philosophy student.
Better known by its altogether more fun title - The Gay Science. I had a lovely time with this and I wish that this was where I started with Nietzsche.
The bizarre misogyny is still there: one very much has to hold there nose whenever women are brought up, resisting the urge to scream incel. BUT (large but) I'm doing my best to approach Nietzscheanism beyond Nietzsche, if we believe in such a thing. Art/artist I know, but this is something different: it's tempting to read Nietzsche as one of Foucault's initiators of discursivity (or did Foucault name Nietzsche as one?? I can't remember), and I think that may be the only useful way that we can read Nietzche qua Nietzsche today. But I don't know. I'm not a philosophy student.
fiveheads's review against another edition
5.0
Switched from Kaufmann to Common trans. Prefer Common.
sweetcuppincakes's review against another edition
5.0
This could be the only Nietzsche you have to read. But this is coming from someone who has only read the works found in Kaufmann's (the English translator) Basic Writings of Nietzsche - the big obvious omission being Thus Spoke Zarathustra, an assumedly good contender for 'the only Nietzsche you have to read'. I think it's all here, though — Nietzsche's grandiloquence, his tempered megalomania, his contradictions, his disdain for "morality", his iconoclastic individualism... his use of em dashes: ——— Yeah!
We read him — or anyone from a century or more before us — for insight into our lives, here and now, rather than for the historical merit of a document and reflection of the Signs of the [Past] Times. And The Gay Science is a mirror that we can all make good use of today. It's interesting how Alt-Righters take Nietzsche to be speaking to them and their 'cause', and surely, some snippets of Nietzsche (as well as some core tenets, one has to admit) can fuel the reactionary vitriol against political correctness and the One True Morality™ that the Alt-Right accuses the Left of normalizing and forcing upon everyone. The greater context — as difficult as it can be to parse and make sense of at times — shows that Nietzsche would share the same disdain for today's Alt-Right as he did for his Germany.
Section 377 in Book 5, in its entirety, shows the full breadth of the political implications of his thought, and his belief in "good Europeans" and a united Europe in all its imperfect cosmopolitan glory! (And there's some of his misogyny - it's just there, whatcha gonna do?) Here it is in full:
We read him — or anyone from a century or more before us — for insight into our lives, here and now, rather than for the historical merit of a document and reflection of the Signs of the [Past] Times. And The Gay Science is a mirror that we can all make good use of today. It's interesting how Alt-Righters take Nietzsche to be speaking to them and their 'cause', and surely, some snippets of Nietzsche (as well as some core tenets, one has to admit) can fuel the reactionary vitriol against political correctness and the One True Morality™ that the Alt-Right accuses the Left of normalizing and forcing upon everyone. The greater context — as difficult as it can be to parse and make sense of at times — shows that Nietzsche would share the same disdain for today's Alt-Right as he did for his Germany.
Section 377 in Book 5, in its entirety, shows the full breadth of the political implications of his thought, and his belief in "good Europeans" and a united Europe in all its imperfect cosmopolitan glory! (And there's some of his misogyny - it's just there, whatcha gonna do?) Here it is in full:
We who are homeless.— Among Europeans today there is no lack of those who are entitled to call themselves homeless in a distinctive and honorable sense: it is to them that I especially commend my secret wisdom and gaya scienza. For their fate is hard, their hopes are uncertain; it is quite a feat to devise some comfort for them—but what avail? We children of the future, how could we be at home in this today? We feel disfavor for all ideals that might lead one to feel at home even in this fragile, broken time of transition; as for its “realities,” we do not believe that they will last. The ice that still supports people today has become very thin; the wind that brings the thaw is blowing; we ourselves who are homeless constitute a force that breaks open ice and other all too thin “realities.”
We “conserve” nothing; neither do we want to return to any past periods; we are not by any means “liberal”; we do not work for “progress”; we do not need to plug up our ears against the sirens who in the market place sing of the future: their song about “equal rights,” “a free society” “no more masters and no servants” has no allure for us. We simply do not consider it desirable that a realm of justice and concord should be established on earth (because it would certainly be the realm of the deepest leveling and chinoiserie); we are delighted with all who love, as we do, danger, war, and adventures, who refuse to compromise, to be captured, reconciled, and castrated; we count ourselves among conquerors; we think about the necessity for new orders, also for a new slavery—for every strengthening and enhancement of the human type also involves a new kind of enslavement. Is it not clear that with all this we are bound to feel ill at ease in an age that likes to claim the distinction of being the most humane, the mildest, and the most righteous age that the sun has ever seen? It is bad enough that precisely when we hear these beautiful words we have the ugliest suspicions. What we find in them is merely an expression—and a masquerade—of a profound weakening, of weariness, of old age, of declining energies. What can it matter to us what tinsel the sick may use to cover up their weakness? Let them parade it as their virtue; after all, there is no doubt that weakness makes one mild, oh so mild. so righteous, so inoffensive, so “humane”!
The “religion of pity” to which one would like to convert us—oh, we know the hysterical little males and females well enough who today need precisely this religion as a veil and make-up. We are no humanitarians; we should never dare to permit ourselves to speak of our “love of humanity” ; our kind is not actor enough for that. Or not Saint-Simonist enough, not French enough. One really has to be afflicted with a Gallic excess of erotic irritability and enamored impatience to approach in all honesty the whole of humanity with one's lust!
Humanity! Has there ever been a more hideous old woman among all old women—(unless it were “truth”: a question for philosophers)? No, we do not love humanity; but on the other hand we are not nearly “German” enough, in the sense in which the word “German” is constantly being used nowadays, to advocate nationalism and race hatred and to be able to take pleasure in the national scabies of the heart and blood poisoning that now leads the nations of Europe to delimit and barricade themselves against each other as if it were a matter of quarantine. For that we are too openminded, too malicious, too spoiled, also too well informed, too “traveled”: we far prefer to live on mountains, apart, “untimely” in past or future centuries, merely in order to keep ourselves from experiencing the silent rage to which we know we should be condemned as eyewitnesses of politics that are desolating the German spirit by making it vain and that is, moreover, petty politics: to keep its own creation from immediately falling apart again, is it not finding it necessary to plant it between two deadly hatreds? must it not desire the eternalization of the European system of a lot of petty states?
We who are homeless are too manifold and mixed racially and in our descent, being “modern men,” and consequently do not feel tempted to participate in the mendacious racial self-admiration and racial indecency that parades in Germany today as a sign of a German way of thinking and that is doubly false and obscene among the people of the “historical sense.” We are, in one word—and let this be our word of honor—good Europeans, the heirs of Europe, the rich, oversupplied, but also overly obligated heirs of thousands of years of European spirit. As such, we have also outgrown Christianity and are averse to it—precisely because we have grown out of it, because our ancestors were Christians who in their Christianity were uncompromisingly upright: for their faith they willingly sacrificed possessions and position, blood and fatherland. We—do the same. For what? For our unbelief? For every kind of unbelief? No, you know better than that, friends! The hidden Yes in you is stronger than all Nos and Maybes that afflict you and your age like a disease; and when you have to embark on the sea, you emigrants, you, too, are compelled to this by—a faith!
andgineer's review against another edition
2.0
Очевидно, я так никогда и не дорасту до Ницше.
Сейчас в 50 лет я только мучился, продираясь через этот поток сознания.
Да, видно, что это очень умный человек.
Да, я завидую его способности публично выкладывать все свои мысли и мнения.
И да, я считаю многие его мысли глубокими.
Но как же невозможно мучительно читать этот текст.
Конечно, если ты должен осознать и продумать каждую фразу, это и не должно быть легким чтивом.
Но автор как будто намеренно усугубляет этот труд полным отсутствием структуры в книге.
Это можно было бы сравнить с Конфуцием, но у Ницше все существенно хуже.
Дополнительно все усложняет сиюминутность части высказываний - Ницше говорит о понятных каждому его современнику проблемах, совершено непонятных для нас. Чтобы изучить каждую из них потребовалось бы очень глубоко погружать в то время, и тогда чтение книги превратилось бы в титанический многолетний труд.
Мое заключение - Ницше мудр, но читать его больно и жутко неэффективно.
Кроме того, в очередной раз вижу, что гениальные люди ходят по грани психического расстройства и депрессии.
Или это расторможенность оказавшегося на грани нормальности человека выглядит гениально?
Сейчас в 50 лет я только мучился, продираясь через этот поток сознания.
Да, видно, что это очень умный человек.
Да, я завидую его способности публично выкладывать все свои мысли и мнения.
И да, я считаю многие его мысли глубокими.
Но как же невозможно мучительно читать этот текст.
Конечно, если ты должен осознать и продумать каждую фразу, это и не должно быть легким чтивом.
Но автор как будто намеренно усугубляет этот труд полным отсутствием структуры в книге.
Это можно было бы сравнить с Конфуцием, но у Ницше все существенно хуже.
Дополнительно все усложняет сиюминутность части высказываний - Ницше говорит о понятных каждому его современнику проблемах, совершено непонятных для нас. Чтобы изучить каждую из них потребовалось бы очень глубоко погружать в то время, и тогда чтение книги превратилось бы в титанический многолетний труд.
Мое заключение - Ницше мудр, но читать его больно и жутко неэффективно.
Кроме того, в очередной раз вижу, что гениальные люди ходят по грани психического расстройства и депрессии.
Или это расторможенность оказавшегося на грани нормальности человека выглядит гениально?
ozbtvs's review against another edition
marcus aurelius for washed up stem kids who smoke too much