site author: Anthony Wheeler email: anthonywheeler72@hotmail.com
What Nietzsche Wrote
What follows is a personal selection from Nietzsche’s work. Not necessarily the very best, but simply what struck me as particularly meaningful and interesting. They are roughly organized in eight arbitrary categories:
- Art and Music
- The Psychologist, the Self
- Humanity and Society
- Nihilism and Truth
- Knowledge and Science
- Christianity
- Words of Wit
- Personal Favorites
Art and Music
Let such “serious” readers learn something from the fact that I am convinced that art represents the highest task and the truly metaphysical activity of this life...
Nietzsche, Birth of Tragedy
In this sense the Dionysian man resembles Hamlet: both have once looked truly into the essence of things, they have gained knowledge, and nausea inhibits action; for their action could not change anything in the eternal nature of things; they feel it to be ridiculous or humiliating that they should be asked to set right a world that is out of joint. Knowledge kills action; action requires the veils of illusion: that is the doctrine of Hamlet, not that cheap wisdom of Jack the Dreamer who reflects too much and, as it were, from an excess of possibilities does not get around to action. Not reflection, no--true knowledge, an insight into the horrible truth, outweighs any motive for action, both in Hamlet and in the Dionysian man.
...Conscious of the truth he has once seen, man now sees everywhere only the horror or absurdity of existence...
Here, when the danger to his will is greatest, artapproaches as a saving sorceress, expert at healing. She alone knows how to turn these nauseous thoughts about the horror or absurdity of existence into notions with which one can live: these are the sublimeas the artistic taming of the horrible, and the comicas the artistic discharge of the nausea of absurdity.
Nietzsche, Birth of Tragedy
At bottom, the aesthetic phenomenon is simple: let anyone have the ability to behold continually a vivid play and to live constantly surrounded by hosts of spirits, and he will be a poet; let anyone feel the urge to transform himself and to speak out of other bodies and souls, and he will be a dramatist.
Nietzsche, Birth of Tragedy
As [Socrates] tells his friends in prison, there often came to him one and the same dream apparition, which always said the same thing to him: “Socrates, practice music.”
...The voice of the Socratic dream vision is the only sign of any misgivings about the limits of logic: Perhaps--thus he must have asked himself--what is not intelligible to me is not necessarily unintelligent? Perhaps there is a realm of wisdom from which the logician is exiled? Perhaps art is even a necessary correlative of, and supplement for science?
Nietzsche, Birth of Tragedy
What you see is the birth of a hybrid species, the artist—removed from crime through weakness of will and fear of society, though not yet ready for the insane asylum, and oddly extending his antennae in both directions.
Nietzsche, quoted by Georges Bataille, On Nietzsche
That is why there is in all philosophies so much high-flying metaphysics and such a dread of the explanations offered by physics, which seem so modest and insignificant; for the significance of knowledge for life hasto appear as great as it possibly can. Here lies the antagonism between the individual regions of science and philosophy. The latter wants, as art does, to bestow on life and action the greatest possible profundity and significance; in the former one seeks knowledge and nothing further…
Nietzsche, Human, All Too Human
Indeed, if life were ever to be ordered within the perfect state, there would no longer exist in the present any motive whatever for poetry and fiction, and it would be only the retarded who still had a desire for poetical unreality. These would in any case look back in longing to the times of the imperfect state, of society still half barbaric, to ourtimes.
Nietzsche, Human, All Too Human
One does best to separate artists from their work, not taking them as seriously as their work. They are, after all, only the precondition of their work, the womb, the soil, sometimes the dung and manure on which, out of which, it grows—and therefore in most cases something one must forget if one is to enjoy the work itself.
Nietzsche, quoted in Nietzsche: Modern Critical Views
We tolerate pathos only in art; actual living beings are supposed to be straightforward and not too loud.
Nietzsche, quoted by Rudiger Safranski in Nietzsche
Flight from boredom is the mother of all art.
Nietzsche, quoted by Rudiger Safranski in Nietzsche
[Art] is intended to ward off discomfort, boredom, the half-clear conscience for hours or moments and, if possible, transform the mistakes of their lives and characters into mistakes of the world’s destiny.
Nietzsche, quoted by Rudiger Safranski in Nietzsche
This artist is ambitious, nothing more. Ultimately, his work is merely a magnifying glass that he offers everybody who looks his way.
Nietzsche, The Gay Science
An artist chooses his subjects; that is his way of praising.
Nietzsche, The Gay Science
The artistic view of the world: to sit down to contemplate life. But any analysis of the aesthetic outlook is lacking: its reduction to cruelty, a feeling of security, playing the judge and standing outside, etc. One must examine the artist himself, and his psychology (critique of the drive to play as a release of force, a pleasure in change, in impressing one’s soul on something foreign, the absolute egoism of the artist, etc.) What drives he sublimates.
Nietzsche, The Will to Power
What is essential in art remains its perfection of existence, its production of perfection and plenitude; art is essentially affirmation, blessing, deification of existence—What does a pessimistic art signify? Is it not a conradictio?--Yes.—Schopenhauer is wrong when he says that certain works of art serve pessimism. Tragedy does not teach “resignation”—To represent terrible and questionable things is in itself an instinct for power and magnificence in an artist: he does not fear them—There is no such thing as pessimistic art—Art affirms. Job affirms.—But Zola? But the Goncourts?-- The things they display are ugly: but thatthey display them comes from their pleasure in the ugly—It’s no good! If you think otherwise, you’re deceiving yourselves.—How liberating is Dostoevsky!
Nietzsche, The Will to Power
For a philosopher to say, “the good and the beautiful are one,” is infamy; if he goes on to add, “also the true,” one ought to thrash him. Truth is ugly.
We possess artlest we perish from the truth.
Nietzsche, The Will to Power
Art as freedom from moral narrowness and corner-perspectives; or as mockery of them. Flight into nature, where its beauty is coupled with frightfulness. Conception of the great human being.
Nietzsche, The Will to Power
The profundity of the tragic artist lies in this, that his aesthetic instinct surveys the more remote consequences, that he does not halt shortsightedly at what is closest at hand, that he affirms the large-scale economy which justifies the terrifying,the evil, the questionable—and more than merely justifies them.
Nietzsche, The Will to Power
How far does art reach down into the essence of strength?
Nietzsche, The Will to Power
What does the tragic artist tell us about himself? Does he not precisely demonstrate fearlessness in confronting the terrifying and questionable?...Bravery and freedom of feeling before a mighty enemy, before a lofty calamity, before a problem that awakens dread—that triumphantattitude is chosen and glorified by the tragic artist. The combative in our soul celebrates its Saturnalia in the presence of tragedy. Whoever is accustomed to sorrow and whoever searches out sorrow, to him alone the tragedian offers a drink from this sweetest cruelty and the heroic human extols his own existence through tragedy.
Nietzsche, Twilight of the Idols
Artists, an intermediary species: they at least fix an image of that which ought to be; they are productive, to the extent that they actually alter and transform; unlike men of knowledge, who leave everything as it is.
Nietzsche, Will to Power
…it seems impossible to be an artist and not to be sick.
Nietzsche, Will to Power
Our whole discussion insists that lyric poetry is dependent on the spirit of music just as music itself in its absolute sovereignty does not need the image and the concept, but merely endures them as accompaniments. The poems of the lyrist can express nothing that did not already lie hidden in that vast universality and absoluteness in the music that compelled him to figurative speech. Language can never adequately render the cosmic symbolism of music, because music stands in symbolic relation to the primordial contradiction and primordial pain in the heart of the primal unity, and therefore symbolizes a sphere which is beyond and prior to all phenomena. Rather, all phenomena, compared with it, are merely symbols: hence language, as the organ and symbol of phenomena, can never by any means disclose the innermost heart of music; language, in its attempt to imitate it, can only be in superficial contact with music; while all the eloquence of lyric poetry cannot bring the deepest significance of the latter one step nearer to us.
Nietzsche, Birth of Tragedy
Not every end is a goal. A melody’s end is not its goal; nevertheless, so long as the melody has not reached its end, it also has not reached its goal. A parable.
Nietzsche, quoted in Nietzsche: Modern Critical Views
How sweet it is, that words and sounds of music exist: are words and music not rainbows and seeming bridges between things eternally separated?
Nietzsche, Thus Spoke Zarathustra
Regarding all aesthetic values I now avail myself of this main distinction: I ask in every single case, ‘Is it hunger or overflow which has here become creative?’
Nietzsche, The Gay Science
The Artist Studio, by Vermeer
The Psychologist, the Self
Early in the morning, at break of day, in all the freshness of dawn of one’s strength, to read a book– I call that vicious!
Nietzsche, Alain de Botton’s The Consolation of Philosophy
I cannot advise all more spiritual natures too seriously to abstain from alcohol absolutely. Water suffices.
Nietzsche, Alain de Botton’s The Consolation of Philosophy
This alone is fitting for a philosopher. We have no right to isolated acts of any kind: we may not make isolated errors or hit upon isolated truths. Rather do our ideas, our values, our yeas and nays, our ifs and buts, grow out of us with the necessity with which a tree bears fruit—related and each with an affinity to each, and evidence of one will, one health, one soil, one sun.”
Nietzsche, Genealogy of Morals
Our love of our neighbor--is it not a love for new possessions? And likewise our love of knowledge, of truth, and altogether any love for what is new? Gradually we become tired of the old, of what we safely possess, and we stretch out our hands again. Even the most beautiful scenery is no longer assured of our love after we have lived in it for three months, and some more distant coast attracts our avarice: possessions are generally diminished by possession…
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.
Nietzsche, Walter Kaufmann Discovering the Mind
What does a philosopher demand of himself, first and last? To overcome his time in himself, to become 'timeless'.
Nietzsche
Every smallest step in the field of free thinking, and of the personally formed life, has ever been fought for at the cost of spiritual and physical tortures ... change has required its innumerable martyrs.... Nothing has been bought more dearly than that little bit of human reason and sense of freedom that is now the basis of our pride."
Nietzsche, quoted by Walter Kaufman in Nietzsche
Young souls should look back on their lives with the question: what have you truly loved so far, what has attracted your soul higher, what has dominated it and at the same time made it rejoice? Assemble these revered objects in sequence before you, and perhaps their nature and sequence will reveal a law to you, the basic law of your true self.
Nietzsche
You are totally ignorant of what you experience, you run through life a drunk and now and then fall down some stairs. But still, thanks to your drunkenness, you don’t break your limbs in your fall….For us, life is more dangerous: we are made of glass—woe if we are hit! And all is lost if we fall!
Nietzsche
It clearly seems that the chief thing in heaven and on earth is to obey at length and in a single direction: in the long run there results something for which it is worth the trouble of living on this earth as, for example, virtue, art, music, the dance, reason, the mind—something that transfigures, something delicate, mad, or divine.
Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil
The manifold torture of the psychologist who has discovered this ruination, who discovers this whole inner hopelessness of the higher man, this eternal “too late”…may perhaps lead him one day to turn against his own lot, embittered, and to make an attempt at self-destruction.
Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil
Fame brings a loss.– What an advantage to be allowed to address men as an unknown! The gods take from us ‘half our virtue’ when they take from us our incognito and make us famous.
Nietzsche, Daybreak
Gradually we become tired of the old, of what we safely possess, and we stretch out our hands again. Even the most beautiful scenery is no longer assured of our love after we have lived in it for three months, and some more distant coast attracts our avarice: possessions are generally diminished by possession.
Nietzsche, Gay Science
Either we have no dreams or our dreams are interesting. We should learn to arrange our waking life the same way: nothing or interesting.
Nietzsche, Gay Science
…in a time of decline, a time when all is counterfeit and pointless activity, thinking in the grand styleis genuine action, indeed, action in its most powerful—though most silent—form.
Nietzsche, quoted by Heidegger in Nietzsche
If, however, a man should wish to be, like that God, wholly love, and to do and desire everything for others and nothing for himself, then the latter is impossible simply because he has to do a great dealfor himself if he is to be able to do anything whatever for the sake of others. Moreover, such a thing presupposes that the other is sufficiently egoistical to accept this sacrifice, this life lived for his sake, over and over again: so that men of love and self-sacrifice would have to have an interest in the continuance of the loveless egoist incapable of self-sacrifice, and the highest morality would, if it was to continue to exist, have to downright compel the existence of immorality (whereby it would, to be sure, abolish itself).
Nietzsche, Human, All Too Human
The recipe for becoming a good novelist…is easy to give, but to carry it out presupposes qualities one is accustomed to overlook when one says ‘I do not have enough talent.’ One has only to make a hundred or so sketches for novels, none longer than two pages but of such distinctness that every word in them is necessary; one should write down anecdotes each day until one has learned how to give them the most pregnant and effective form; one should be tireless in collecting and describing human types and characters; one should above all relate things to others and listen to others relate, keeping one’s eyes and ears open for the effect produced on those present; one should travel like a landscape painter or costume designer; one should excerpt for oneself out of the individual sciences everything that will produce an artistic effect when it is well described; one should, finally, reflect on the motives of human actions, disdain no signpost to instruction about them and be a collector of these things by day and night. One should continue in this many-sided exercise some ten years: what is then created in the workshop, however, will be fit to go out into the world. – What, however, do most people do? They begin, not with the parts, but with the whole.
Nietzsche, Human, All Too Human
That author has drawn the happiest lot who as an old man can say that all of life-engendering, strengthening, elevating, enlightening thought and feeling that was in him lives on in his writings, and that he himself is now nothing but the gray ashes, while the fire has everywhere been rescued and borne forward.
Nietzsche, Human, All Too Human
Joy in age. – The thinker, and the artist likewise, whose better self has taken refuge in his work, feels an almost malicious joy when he sees how his body and his spirit are being slowly broken down and destroyed by time: it is as though he observed from a corner a thief working away at his money-chest, while knowing that the chest is empty and all the treasure it contained safe.
Nietzsche, Human, All Too Human
The Italian Renaissance contained within it all the positive forces to which we owe modern culture: liberation of thought, disrespect for authorities, victory of education over the arrogance of ancestry, enthusiasm for science and the scientific past of mankind, unfettering of the individual, a passion for truthfulness and an aversion to appearance and mere effect…
Nietzsche, Human, All Too Human
As at all times, so now too, men are divided into the slaves and the free; for he who does not have two-thirds of his day to himself is a slave, let him be what he may otherwise: statesman, businessman, official, scholar.
Nietzsche, Human, All Too Human
He who really wants to get to know something new (be it a person, an event, a book) does well to entertain it with all possible love and to avert his eyes quickly from everything in it he finds inimical, repellent, false, indeed to banish it from mind: so that, for example, he allows the author of a book the longest start and then, like one watching a race, desires with beating heart that he may reach his goal. For with this procedure one penetrates to the heart of the new thing, to the point that actually moves it: and precisely this is what is meant by getting to know it. If one has got this far, reason can afterwards make its reservations; that over-estimation, that temporary suspension of the critical pendulum, was only an artifice for luring forth the soul of the thing.
Nietzsche, Human, All Too Human
We do not hesitate to take the path to a virtue even when we are clearly aware that the motives which impel us – utility, personal comfort, fear, considerations of health, of fame or reputation – are nothing but egoism. These motives are called selfish and ignoble: very well, but when they incite us to a virtue – to, for example, renunciation, dutifulness, orderliness, thrift, measure and moderation – we pay heed to them, whatever they may be called! For if we attain what they summon us to, achieved virtue ennobles the remoter motives for our action through the pure air it lets us breathe and the psychical pleasure it communicates…
Nietzsche, Human, All Too Human
Good writers have two things in common: they prefer to be understood rather than admired; and they do not write for knowing and over-acute readers.
Nietzsche, Human, All Too Human
Men who think deeply appear as comedians when they traffic with others, because in order to be understood they always have first to simulate a surface.
Nietzsche, Human, All Too Human
The wise man’s philanthropy sometimes leads him to poseas excited, angry, delighted, so that the coldness and reflectiveness of his true nature shall not harm those around him.
Nietzsche, Human, All Too Human
I too have been in the underworld, like Odysseus, and will often be there again; and I have not sacrificed only rams to be able to talk with the dead, but have not spared my own blood as well. There have been four pairs who did not refuse themselves to me, the sacrificer: Epicurus and Montaigne, Goethe and Spinoza, Plato and Rousseau, Pascal and Schopenhauer. With these I have had to come to terms when I have wandered long alone, from them will I accept judgment, to them will I listen when in doing so they judge one another. Whatever I say, resolve, cogitate for myself and others: upon these eight I fix my eyes and see their fixed upon me. – May the living forgive me iftheysometimes appear to me as shades, so pale and ill-humored, so restless and, alas! so lusting for life: whereas those others then seem to me so alive, as though now, afterdeath, they could never again grow weary of life. Eternal liveliness, however, is what counts: what do ‘eternal life’, or life at all, matter to us!
Nietzsche, Human, All Too Human
So long as we do not feelthat we are dependent on anything we regard ourselves as independent: a false conclusion that demonstrates how proud and lusting for power man is. For he here assumes that as soon as he experiences dependence he must under all circumstances notice and recognize it, under the presupposition that he is accustomedto living in independence and if, exceptionally, he lost it, he would at once perceive a sensation antithetical to the one he is accustomed to. –But what if the opposite were true: that he is alwaysliving in manifold dependence but regards himself as freewhen, out of long habituation, he no longer perceives the weight of the chains? It is only from new chains that he now suffers: – ‘freedom of will’ really means nothing more than feeling no new chains.
Nietzsche, Human, All Too Human
Don’t talk to me about being gifted, or of inborn talent! We can name great men of all sorts who were not very talented. But they became great and became ‘geniuses’…they had the earnestness of craftsmen who build parts from the ground up first before attempting to shape a grand design; they allowed themselves sufficient time for that because they took more pleasure in perfecting small and incidental things instead of aiming for a dazzling effect of the whole design.
Nietzsche, Human, All Too Human
In solitude the solitary man consumes himself, in the crowd the crowd consumes him. Now choose.
Nietzsche, Human, all too Human
The philosopher is a philosopher first only for himself, and then for others.
Nietzsche, Philosophy and Truth
My general task: to show how life, philosophy, and art can be related to one another in a more profound affinity, without the philosophy becoming banal or the philosopher’s life dishonest.
Nietzsche, quoted by David Krell in Postponements
Where is this whole philosophy headed with all of its meandering? Does it do anything more than translate a constant strong drive into reason, a drive for gentle sunlight, bright and breezy air, southern vegetation, a breath of the sea, fleeting nourishment with meat, eggs, and fruits, hot water to drink, silent walks that last for days, sparse discussion, infrequent and cautious reading, solitary living, clean, simple, and almost military habits—in short, for all things that taste best to me specifically and are healthiest for me specifically? A philosophy that is essentially the instinct for a personal diet? An instinct that seeks my air, my height, my climate, and my personal health by taking a detour through my head? There are many other, and surely also many higher, sublimities of philosophy, and not only those that are gloomier and more demanding than mine. Perhaps all of them are also nothing but intellectual detours of these sorts of personal drives?
Nietzsche, quoted by Rudiger Safranski in Nietzsche
Man’s utter lack of responsibility for his actions and his nature is the bitterest pill for the knowledgeable person to swallow.
Nietzsche, quoted by Rudiger Safranski in Nietzsche
How often I see that blindly raging industriousness does create wealth and reap honors while at the same time depriving the organs of their subtlety, which alone would make possible the enjoyment of wealth and honors; also that this chief antidote to boredom and the passions at the same time blunts the senses and leads the spirit to resist new attractions.
Nietzsche, The Gay Science
Different types of dangerous lives.—You have no idea what you are living through; you rush through life as if you were drunk and now and then fall down some staircase. But thanks to your drunkenness you never break a limb; your muscles are too relaxed and your brain too benighted for you to find the stones of these stairs as hard as we do. For us life is more dangerous: we are made of glass; woe unto us if we merely bumpourselves! And all is lost if we fall!
Nietzsche, The Gay Science
To what extent is it desirable that man should become more virtuous? Or cleverer? Or happier?…and if one desires one of these things, who knows, perhaps one is precluded from desiring the others. Is an increase in virtuousness compatible with an increase in cleverness and insight?…Has virtuousness as a goal not hitherto been in the most rigorous sense incompatible with being happy? Does it not, on the contrary, require misfortune, self-denial and self-mistreatment as a necessary means? And if the deepest insight were the goal, would one not then have to renounce the increase of happiness? And choose danger, adventure, mistrust, seduction as the road to insight?--And if one desires happiness, well, perhaps one has to become one of the “poor in spirit.”
Nietzsche, The Will to Power
Likewise our love of the beautiful: it also is our shaping will. The two senses stand side-by-side; the sense for the real is the means of acquiring the power to shape things according to our wish. The joy in shaping and reshaping—a primeval joy! We can comprehend only a world that we ourselves have made.
Nietzsche, The Will to Power
For what does one have to atone most? For one’s modesty; for having failed to listen to one’s most personal requirements; for having mistaken oneself; for having underestimated oneself; for having lost a good ear for one’s instincts.
Nietzsche, The Will to Power
I wish men would begin by respecting themselves: everything else follows from that. To be sure, as soon as one does this one is finished for others: for this is what they forgive last: “What? A man who respects himself?”
Nietzsche, The Will to Power
…he [one that has turned out well] is always in his own company, whether he deals with books, men, or landscapes…
Nietzsche, The Will to Power
And how many new ideals are, at bottom, still possible! Here is a little ideal I stumble upon once every five weeks on a wild and lonely walk, in an azure moment of sinful happiness. To spend one’s life amid delicate and absurd things; a stranger to reality; half an artist, half a bird and metaphysician; with no care for reality, except now and then to acknowledge it in the manner of a good dancer with the tips of one’s toes; always tickled by some sunray of happiness; exuberant and encouraged even by misery—for miserypreserves the happy man; fixing a little humorous tail even to the holiest things: this, as is obvious, is the ideal of a heavy, hundredweight spirit—a spirit of gravity.
Nietzsche, The Will to Power
“Why?” said Zarathustra. “You ask, why? I am not one of those whom one may ask about their why. Is my experience but of yesterday? It was long ago that I experienced the reasons for my opinions. Would I not have to be a barrel of memory if I wanted to carry my reasons around with me? It is already too much for me to remember my own opinions; and many a bird flies away.”
Nietzsche, Thus Spoke Zarathustra
“This is my way; where is yours?”--this I answered those who asked me “the way.” For the way--that does not exist.
Nietzsche, Thus Spoke Zarathustra
How little is required for pleasure! The sound of a bagpipe. Without music, life would be an error. The German imagines even God singing songs.
Nietzsche, Twilight of the Idols
…the nature of scientific man…contains a real paradox: he behaves like the proudest idler of fortune, as though existence were not a dreadful and questionable thing but a firm possession guaranteed to last for ever. He seems to be permitted to squander his life on questions whose answer could at bottom be of consequence only to someone assured of an eternity. The heir of but a few hours, he is ringed around with frightful abysses, and every step he takes ought to make him ask: Whither? Whence? To what end? But his soul is warmed with the task of counting the stamens of a flower or breaking up the stones of the pathway and all the interest, joy, strength and desire he possesses is absorbed in this work.
Nietzsche, Untimely Meditations
We are responsible to ourselves for our own existence; consequently we want to be the true helmsman of this existence and refuse to allow our existence to resemble a mindless act of chance.
Nietzsche, Untimely Meditations
The moral fashions.... These greatest wonders of classical morality--Epicetus, for example--did not know anything of the now customary glorification of thinking of others and living for others. In view of our moral fashion, one would have to call them flatly immoral; for they fought with all their energies fortheir ego and againstsympathy for others (especially sympathy for their suffering and moral shortcomings). Perhaps they would reply to us: 'If you have such a boring and ugly object in yourselves, by all means do think more of others than of yourselves.'
Nietzsche, quoted by Walter Kaufman in Nietzsche
My profound indifference toward myself: I desire no advantage from my insights and do not avoid the disadvantages that accompany them.
Nietzsche, Will to Power
A man with a taste of his own, enclosed and concealed by his solitude, incommunicable, reserved—an unfathomed man, thus a man of a higher, at any rate a different species: how should you be able to evaluate him, since you cannot know him, cannot compare him?
Nietzsche, Will to Power
His most selfless act hitherto has been to admire and worship and know how to conceal from himself that it was hewho created what he admired.
Nietzsche, Will to Power
psychology
Humanity and Society
It is with people as it is with the trees. The more they aspire to the height and light, the more strongly do their roots strive earthward, downward, into the dark, the deep—into evil.
Nietzsche, Thus Spoke Zarathustra
The value of a human being ... does not lie in his usefulness: for it would continue to exist even if there were nobody to whom he could be useful.
Nietzsche
“Good society” consists of those whom at bottom nothing interests except what is forbiddenin bourgeois society and gives a bad reputation: the same applies to books, music, politics, and the estimation of woman.
Nietzsche, Human, all too Human
On the other side, the herd man in Europe today gives himself the appearance of being the only permissible kind of man, and glorifies his attributes, which make him tame, easy to get along with, and useful to the herd, as if they were the truly human virtues: namely, public spirit, benevolence, consideration, industriousness, moderation, modesty, indulgence, and pity.
Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil
Just as little as a reader today reads all of the individual words (let alone syllables) on a page--rather he picks about five words at random out of twenty and "guesses" at the meaning that probably belongs to these five words--just as little do we see a tree exactly and completely with reference to leaves, twigs, color, and form; it is so very much easier for us simply to improvise some approximation of a tree. Even in the midst of the strangest experience we will do the same: we make up the major part of the experience and can scarcely be forced notto contemplate some event as its "inventors." All this means: basically and from time immemorial we are--accustomed to lying. Or to put it more virtuously and hypocritically, in short, more pleasantly: one is much more of an artist than on knows.
Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil
Whence comes the seductive charm of such an emasculated ideal of man? Why are we not disgusted by it as we are perhaps disgusted by the idea of a castrato? The answer lies precisely here: the voice of a castrato does notdisgust us, despite the cruel mutilation that is its condition: it has grown sweeter—Just because the “male organ” has been amputated from virtue, a feminine note has been brought to the voice of virtue that it did not have before.
Nietzsche, The Will to Power
The apparently crazy idea that a man should esteem the actions he performs for another more highly than those he performs for himself, and that this other should likewise, etc. (that one should call good only those actions that a man performs with an eye, not to himself, but to the welfare of another) has a meaning: namely, as the social instinct resting on the valuation that the single individual is of little account, but all individuals together are of very great account provided they constitute a community with a common feeling and a common conscience.
Nietzsche, The Will to Power
But we others would laugh if an animal-trainer spoke of his “improved” animals. In most cases, the taming of a beast is achieved through the harming of a beast: the moral man, too, is not a better man but only a weaker one.
Nietzsche, The Will to Power
To what extent even our intellect is a consequence of conditions of existence--: we would not have it if we did not need to have it, and we would not have it as it is if we did not need to have it as it is,if we could live otherwise.
Nietzsche, The Will to Power
In the tremendous multiplicity of events within an organism, the art which becomes conscious to us is a mere means: and the little bit of “virtue,” “selflessness,” and similar fictions are refuted radically by the total balance of events. We should study our organism in all its immorality—
The animal functions are, as a matter of principle, a million times more important than all our beautiful moods and heights of consciousness: the latter are a surplus, except when they have to serve as tools of those animal functions. The entire conscious life, the spirit along with the soul, the heart, goodness, and virtue—in whose service do they labor? In the service of the greatest possible perfection of the means (means of nourishment, means of enhancement) of the basic animal functions: above all, the enhancement of life.
What one used to call “body” and “flesh” is of such unspeakably greater importance: the remainder is a small accessory. The task of spinning on the chain of life, and in such a way that the thread grows ever more powerful—that is the task.
But consider how heart, soul, virtue, spirit practically conspire together to subvert this systematic task—as if they were the end in view!
Nietzsche, The Will to Power
It must be shown to what extent everything conscious remains on the surface; how an action and the image of an action differ, how little one knows of what precedes an action; how fantastic are our feelings of “freedom of will,” “cause and effect”; how thoughts and images are, like words, only signs of thoughts; the inexplicability of every action; the superficiality of all praise and blame; how essential fiction and conceits are in which we dwell consciously; how all our words refer to fictions (our affects, too), and how the bond between man and man depends on the transmission and elaboration of these fictions; while fundamentally the real bond (through procreation) goes its unknown way. Does this belief in common fictions really changemen? Or is the entire realm of ideas and evaluations itself only an expression of unknown changes? Are there really will, purposes, thoughts, values? Is the whole of conscious life perhaps only a reflected image? And even when evaluation seems to determine the nature of a man, fundamentally something quite different is happening! In short: supposing that purposiveness in the work of nature could be explained without the assumption of an ego that posits purposes: could ourpositing of purposes, our willing etc., not perhaps be also only a language of signs for something altogether different, namely something that does not will and is unconscious? Only the faintest reflection of that natural expediency in the organic hut not different from it?
Put briefly: perhaps the entire evolution of the spirit is a question of the body; it is the history of the development of a higher body that emerges into our sensibility. The organic is rising to yet higher levels. Our lust for knowledge of nature is a means through which the body desires to perfect itself. Or rather: hundreds of thousands of experiments are made to change the nourishment, the mode of living and of dwelling of the body; consciousness and evaluations in the body, all kinds of pleasure and displeasure, are signs of these changes and experiments. In the long run, it is not a question of man at all: he is to be overcome.
Nietzsche, The Will to Power
Put in the crudest form: how could one sacrifice the development of mankind to help a higher species than man to come into existence?
Nietzsche, The Will to Power
Every smallest step in the field of free thinking, and of the personally formed life, has ever been fought for at the cost of spiritual and physical tortures ... change has required its innumerable martyrs.... Nothing has been bought more dearly than that little bit of human reason and sense of freedom that is now the basis of our pride.
Nietzsche, Walter Kaufman’s Nietzsche
society
Nihilism and Truth
It seems to me, however, that human transcendence is by nature negative. I lack the power of putting any object aboveme, whether to apprehend it or let it lacerate me, except for nothingness, which doesn’t exist.
Nietzsche, George Bataille’s On Nietzsche
…one does encounter those inverted sorcerers who, instead of creating the world out of nothing, create nothingness out of the world.
Nietzsche, Human, all too Human
Given these two insights, that becoming has no goal and that underneath all becoming there is no grand unity in which the individual could immerse himself completely as in an element of supreme value, an escape remains: to pass sentence on this whole world of becoming as a deception and to invent a world beyond it, a true world. But as soon as man finds out how that world is fabricated solely from psychological needs, and how he has absolutely no right to it, the last form of nihilism comes into being: it includes disbelief in any metaphysical world and forbids itself any belief in a true world. Having reached this standpoint, one grants the reality of becoming as the only reality, forbids oneself every kind of clandestine access to afterworlds and false divinities—butcannot endure this world though one does not want to deny it.
Nietzsche, The Will to Power
Existence has no goal or end;
Nietzsche, The Will to Power
Briefly: the categories “aim,” “unity,” “being,” which we used to project some value into the world—we pull out again; so the world looks valueless.
…Suppose we realize how the world may no longer be interpreted in terms of these three categories, and that the world begins to become valueless for us after this insight: then we have to ask about the sources of our faith in these three categories.
…Conclusion: The faith in the categories of reason is the cause of nihilism. We have measured the value of the world according to categories that refer to a purely fictitious world.
Nietzsche, The Will to Power
The most extreme form of nihilism would be the view that every belief, every considering-something-true, is necessarily false because there simply is no true world.
Nietzsche, The Will to Power
A philosopher recuperates differently and with different means: he recuperates, e.g., with nihilism. Belief that there is no truth at all, the nihilistic belief, is a great relaxation for one who, as a warrior of knowledge, is ceaselessly fighting ugly truths. For truth is ugly.
Nietzsche, The Will to Power
...the strength of the spirit might be measured according to how much of the ‘truth’ he would be able to stand—more clearly, to what degree it would need to be watered down, shrouded, sweetened, blunted, and falsified.
Nietzsche
...there remains no choice--'I will not deceive, not even myself': and with this we are on the ground of morality.
Nietzsche
...if you wish to strive for peace of soul and pleasure, then believe; if you wish to be a devotee of truth, then inquire.
Nietzsche
Do we understand Hamlet? It is not doubt, it is certainty that brings on madness….But this requires depth. To feel thus, one must be deep, an abyss, a philosopher….We are afraid of the truth…
Nietzsche, quoted by Karl Jasper in Nietzsche
Only by forgetting this primitive world of metaphor can one live with any repose, security, and consistency: only by means of the petrification and coagulation of a mass of images which originally streamed from the primal faculty of human imagination like a fiery liquid, only in the invincible faith that this sun, this window, this table is a truth in itself, in short, only by forgetting that he himself is an artistically creating subject, does man live with any repose, security, and consistency. If but for an instant he could escape from the prison walls of this faith, his “self consciousness” would be immediately destroyed. It is even a difficult thing for him to admit to himself that the insect or the bird perceives an entirely different world from the one that man does, and that the question of which of these perceptions of the world is the more correct one is quite meaningless, for this would have to have been decided previously in accordance with the criterion of the correct perception, which means, in accordance with a criterion which is not available.
Nietzsche, Philosophy and Truth
The drive toward the formation of metaphors is the fundamental human drive, which one cannot for a single instant dispense with in thought, for one would thereby dispense with man himself.
Nietzsche, Philosophy and Truth
Consequently, “will to truth” does not mean “I will not allow myself to be deceived” but—there is not alternative—“I will not deceive, not even myself”; and with that we stand on moral ground.
Nietzsche, The Gay Science
That nothing formerly held is true—What was formerly despised as unholy, forbidden, contemptible, fateful—all these flowers grow today along the lovely paths of truth.
Nietzsche, The Will to Power
The most strongly believed a priori “truths” are for me—provisional assumptions; e.g., the law of causality, a very well acquired habit of belief, so much a part of us that not to believe in it would destroy the race. But are they for that reason truths? What a conclusion! As if the preservation of man were a proof of truth!
Nietzsche, The Will to Power
That a great deal of belief must be present; that judgments may be ventured; that doubt concerning all essential values is lacking—that is the precondition of every living thing and its life. Therefore, what is needed is that something must be held to be true—not that something is true.
Nietzsche, The Will to Power
Kant infers (1) there are assertions which are valid only under a certain condition; (2) this condition is that they derive, not from experience, but from pure reason.
Therefore: the question is, whence do we derive our reasons for believing in the truth of such assertions? No, how our belief is caused! But the origin of a belief, of a strong conviction, is a psychological problem: and a very narrow and limited experience often produces such a belief! It already presupposes that there is not “data a posteriori” but also data a priori, “preceding experence.” Necessity and universal validity could never be given to us by experience: why does that mean that they are present without any experience at all?
Nietzsche, The Will to Power
…punishment does not expiate, forgiveness does not extinguish, what is done is not undone. That someone forgets something is certainly not evidence that something has ceased to exist.
Nietzsche, The Will to Power
…it is more comfortable to obey than to examine; it is more flattering to think “I possess the truth” than to see only darkness around one…
Nietzsche, The Will to Power
truth
Knowledge and Science
The cause of the origin of a thing and its eventual utility, its actual employment and place in a system of purposes, lie worlds apart.
Nietzsche, Daniel Dennett’s Darwin’s Dangerous Idea
What is originality? To see something that has no name as yet and hence cannot be mentioned although it stares us all in the face. The way men usually are, it takes a name to make something visible for them. Those with originality have for the most part also assigned names.
Nietzsche, The Gay Science
…the problem of science…cannot be recognized in the context of science.
Nietzsche, Birth of Tragedy
What is it that the common people take for knowledge?…Nothing more than this: Something strange is to be reduced to something familiar….Look, isn’t our need for knowledge precisely this need for the familiar, the will to uncover under everything strange, unusual, and questionable something that no longer disturbs us? Is it not the instinct of fear that bids us to know? And is the jubilation of those who attain knowledge not the jubilation over the restoration of a sense of security?
Nietzsche, The Gay Science
…by virtue of which every center of force—and not only man—construes all the rest of the world from its own viewpoint; that is, measures, touches, shapes, according to its own force.
Nietzsche, quoted by Martin Heidegger in Nietzsche
Restless knowledge leads to bleakness and ugliness. Let us be contentwith the aesthetic view of the world!
Nietzsche, Philosophy and Truth
Time, space, and causality are only metaphors of knowledge, with which we explain things to ourselves…This most universal of all feelings is already a metaphor.
Nietzsche, Philosophy and Truth
Using only the eye, we should never have arrived at the notion of time; using only the ear, we should never have arrived at the notion of space…
From the very beginning, we see the visual images only within ourselves; we hear the sound only within ourselves. It is a big step from this to the postulation of an external world.
Nietzsche, Philosophy and Truth
After all, what is a law of nature as such for us? We are not acquainted with it in itself, but only with its effects, which means in its relation to other laws of nature—which, in turn, are known to us only as sums of relations. Therefore all these relations always refer again to others and are thoroughly incomprehensible to us in their essence.
Nietzsche, Philosophy and Truth
Everything which is knowable is illusion.
Nietzsche, Philosophy and Truth
In some remote corner of the universe that is poured out in countless flickering solar systems, there once was a star on which clever animals invented knowledge. That was the most arrogant and untruthful moment in “world history”—yet indeed only a moment. After nature had taken a few breaths, the star froze over and the clever animals had to die.
Nietzsche, quoted by Laurence Lampert in Nietzsche and Modern Times
One should not understand this compulsion to construct concepts, species, forms, purposes, laws (“a world of identical cases”) as if they enabled us to fix the real world; but as a compulsion to arrange a world for ourselves in which our existence is made possible:--we thereby create a world which is calculable, simplified, comprehensible, etc., for us.
Nietzsche, The Will to Power
It is we who created the “thing,” the “identical thing,” subject, attribute, activity, object, substance, form, after we had long pursued the process of making identical, coarse and simple. The world seems logical to us because we have made it logical.
Nietzsche, The Will to Power
An artist cannot endure reality, he looks away from it, back: he seriously believes that the value of a thing resides in that shadowy residue one derives from colors, form, sound, ideas; he believes that the more subtilized, attenuated, transient a thing or a man is, the more valuable he becomes; the less real, the more valuable. This is Platonism, which, however, involved yet another bold reversal: Plato measured the degree of reality by the degree of value and said: The more "Idea," the more being. He reversed the concept "reality" and said: "What you take for real is an error, and the nearer we approach the 'Idea,' the nearer we approach 'truth.'" -- Is this understood? It was the greatest of rebaptisms; and because it has been adopted by Christianity we do not recognize how astonishing it is. Fundamentally, Plato, as the artist he was, preferred appearance to being! lie and invention to truth! the unreal to the actual! But he was so convinced of the value of appearance that he gave it the attributes "being," "causality" and "goodness," and "truth," in short everything men value.
Nietzsche, The Will to Power
Science—this has been hitherto a way of putting an end to the complete confusion in which things exist, by hypotheses that “explain” everything—so it has come from the intellect’s dislike of chaos.
Nietzsche, The Will to Power
Thus: a man wants to arrange all events as events accessible to sight and touch, consequently as motions: he wants to find formulas so as to simplify the tremendous quantity of his experiences. Reduction of all events to the level of the man of the senses and the mathematician. It is a question of an inventory of human experiences—under the supposition that man, or rather the human eye and ability to form concepts, are the eternal witness of all things.
Nietzsche, The Will to Power
Our apparatus for acquiring knowledge is not designed for “knowledge.”
Nietzsche, The Will to Power
The world seems logical to us because we have made it logical.
Nietzsche, The Will to Power
The concepts “individual” and “species” equally false and merely apparent. “Species” expresses only the fact that an abundance of similar creatures appear at the same time and that the tempo of their further growth and change is for a long time slowed down, so actual small continuations and increases are not very much noticed (--a phase of evolution in which the evolution is not visible, so an equilibrium seems to have been attained, making possible the false notion that a goal has been attained—and that evolution has a goal--).
Nietzsche, The Will to Power
Christianity
In truth, nothing could be more opposed to the purely aesthetic interpretation and justification of the world which are taught in this book than the Christian teaching, which is, and wants to be, only moral and which relegates art, every art, to the realm of lies; with its absolute standards, beginning with the truthfulness of God, it negates, judges, and damns art. Behind this mode of thought and valuation, which must be hostile to art if it is at all genuine, I never failed to sense ahostility to life--a furious, vengeful antipathy to life itself: for all of life is based on semblance, art, deception, points of view, and the necessity of perspectives and error. Christianity was from the beginning, essentially and fundamentally, life’s nausea and disgust with life, merely concealed behind, masked by, dressed up as, faith in “another” or “better” life. Hatred of “the world,” condemnations of the passions, fear of beauty and sensuality, a beyond invented the better to slander this life, at bottom a craving for the nothing, for the end, for respite, for “the Sabbath of Sabbaths”--all this always struck me, no less than the unconditional will of Christianity to recognize onlymoral values, as the most dangerous and uncanny form of all possible forms of a “will to decline”--at the very least a sign of abysmal sickness, weariness, discouragement, exhaustion, and the impoverishment of life. For, confronted with morality (especially Christian, or unconditional, morality), life must continually and inevitably be in the wrong, because life is something essentially amoral--and eventually, crushed by the weight of contempt and the eternal No, life must then be felt to be unworthy of desire and altogether worthless. Morality itself--how now? might not morality be “a will to negate life,” a secret instinct of annihilation, a principle of decay, diminution, and slander--the beginning of the end ? Hence, the danger of dangers?
Nietzsche, Birth of Tragedy
Man as poet, as thinker, as God, as love, as power: with what regal liberality he has lavished gifts upon things so as to impoverish himself and make himself feel wretched! His most unselfish act hitherto has been to admire and worship and to know how to conceal from himself that it was he who created what he admired.
Nietzsche, The Will to Power
What did Christ deny? Everything that is today called Christian.
Nietzsche, The Will to Power
The Christian way of life is no more a fantasy than the Buddhist way of life: it is a means to be being happy.
Nietzsche, The Will to Power
This is the humor of the situation, a tragic humor: Paul re-erected on a grand scale precisely that which Christ had annulled through his way of living. At last, when the church was complete, it sanctioned even the existence of the state.
Nietzsche, The Will to Power
A systematic school of the means to seduction to a faith: contempt, on principle, for the spheres from which contradiction might come (--the spheres of reason, philosophy and wisdom, mistrust, caution); a shameless praising and glorification of the doctrine, with constant reference to the fact that it was God who gave it—that the apostle signifies nothing—that nothing here is to be criticized, but only believed, accepted; that it is the most extraordinary grace and favor to receive such a doctrine of redemption; that the deepest gratitude and humility is the condition in which to receive it—
Theres sentiment which these lowly-placed persons feel toward everything held in honor is constantly gambled upon: that one represents this doctrine as a counterdoctrine in opposition to the wisdom of the world, to the power of the world, seduces them to it. It convinces the outcast and underprivileged of all kinds; it promises blessedness, advantage, privilege to the most insignificant and humble; it fills poor little foolish heads with an insane conceit, as if they were the meaning and the salt of the earth—
All this, I repeat, one cannot sufficiently despise.
Nietzsche, The Will to Power
Dionysus versus the “Crucified”: there you have the antithesis. It is not a difference in regard to their martyrdom—it is a difference in the meaning of it. Life itself, its eternal fruitfulness and recurrence, creates torment, destruction, the will to annihilation. In the other case, suffering—the “Crucified as the innocent one” –counts as an objection to this life, as a formula for its condemnation.—One will see that the problem is that of the meaning of suffering: whether a Christian meaning or a tragic meaning. In the former case, it is supposed to be the path to a holy existence; in the latter case, being is counted as holy enough to justify even a monstrous amount of suffering. The tragic man affirms even the harshest suffering: he is sufficiently strong, rich, and capable of deifying to do so. The Christian denies even the happiest lot on earth: he is sufficiently weak, poor, disinherited to suffer from life in whatever form he meets it. The god on the cross is a curse on life, a signpost to seek redemption from life; Dionysus cut to pieces is a promise of life: it will be eternally reborn and return again from destruction.
Nietzsche, The Will to Power
Words of Wit
Christianity gave Eros poison to drink. He did not die, but became vice.
Nietzsche
‘I have done that,’ says my memory. ‘I could not have done that,’ says my pride and remains inexorable. Finally, my memory yields.
Nietzsche
…even in the wisest, reason is the exception: chaos and necessity and swirling stars—that is the rule.
Nietzsche
Mankind has no goals other than great men and great works.
Nietzsche
What alone can regenerate us? Envisionment of what is perfect.
Nietzsche
But why pursue such painful matters? Assuming one does not have to.
Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil
Do not forget! – The higher we soar, the smaller we seem to those who cannot fly.
Nietzsche, Daybreak
They hate the sun, find steep the grade,
And love trees only for their shade.
Nietzsche, The Gay Science
It is easier to cope with a bad conscience than to cope with a bad reputation.
Nietzsche, The Gay Science
Thoughts are the shadows of our feelings—always darker, emptier, and simpler.
Nietzsche, The Gay Science
No victor believes in chance.
Nietzsche, The Gay Science
…man would rather will nothingness than not will.
Nietzsche, quoted by R. J. Hollingdale in Nietzsche
There is one thing one has to have: either a cheerful disposition by nature or a disposition made cheerfulby art and knowledge.
Nietzsche, Human, All Too Human
The philosopher believes that the value of his philosophy lies in the whole, in the building: posterity discovers it in the bricks with which he built and which are then often used again for better building: in the fact, that is to say, that that building can be destroyed and nonetheless possess value as material.
Nietzsche, Human, All Too Human
The public easily confuses him who fishes in troubled waters with him who plumbs the depths.
Nietzsche, Human, All Too Human
This thinker needs no one to refute him: he does that for himself.
Nietzsche, Human, All Too Human
One will seldom go wrong if one attributes extreme actions to vanity, moderate ones to habit and petty ones to fear.
Nietzsche, Human, all too Human
A brave army is a convincing argument for the cause for which it fights.
Nietzsche, Human, all too Human
Just as the bones, flesh, intestines and blood vessels are enclosed in a skin that makes the sight of a man endurable, so the agitations and passions of the soul are enveloped in vanity: it is the skin of the soul.
Nietzsche, Human, all too Human
Most people are much too much occupied with themselves to be wicked.
Nietzsche, Human, all too Human
As soon as a religion comes to dominate it has as its opponents all those who would have been its first disciples.
Nietzsche, Human, all too Human
Diverse sighs. – Some men have sighed over the abduction of their wives, most however over the fact that no one wanted to abduct them.
Nietzsche, Human, all too Human
We enjoy being in the open countryside so much because it has no opinion concerning us.
Nietzsche, Human, all too Human
One is most in danger of being run over when one has just avoided a carriage.
Nietzsche, Human, all too Human
Shadows in the flame. – The flame is not as bright to itself as it is to those it illumines: so too the sage.
Nietzsche, Human, all too Human
Through an excess of exertion they [the industrious] gain for themselves free time, and afterwards have no idea what to do with it except to count the hours until it has expired.
Nietzsche, Human, all too Human
Blessed are those who possess taste, even though it be bad taste!
Nietzsche, Human, all too Human
History perfect and complete would be cosmic self-consciousness.
Nietzsche, Human, all too Human
It is rare to break one’s leg when in the course of life one is toiling upwards – it happens much more often when one starts to take things easy and to choose the easy paths.
Nietzsche, Human, all too Human
…for the child too regards play as his work and fairy tales as his truth.
Nietzsche, Human, all too Human
‘freedom of will’ really means nothing more than feeling no new chains.
Nietzsche, Human, all too Human
If a god created the world then he created men as the apes of god, so as always to have on hand something to cheer him up in his all-too-protracted eternities.
Nietzsche, Human, all too Human
‘I am not fond of myself’, someone said in explanation of his love of society. ‘Society’s stomach is stronger than mine, it can digest me.’
Nietzsche, Human, all too Human
Men press towards the light, not so as to see better, but so as to shine better.
Nietzsche, Human, all too Human
The wheel and the brake have differing duties, but also one in common: to hurt one another.
Nietzsche, Human, all too Human
Man would sooner have the void for his purpose than be void of purpose…
Nietzsche, quoted by Bataille in On Nietzsche
You are not eagles…Not being birds, how do you propose to nest on an abyss?
Nietzsche, Thus Spoke Zarathustra
…under the whirl of phenomena eternal life keeps flowing indestructibly.
Nietzsche, Safranski’s Nietzsche
Consciousness is actually only a network to connect one person to another.
Nietzsche, quoted by Rudiger Safranski in Nietzsche
Even one’s thoughts one cannot reproduce entirely in words.
Nietzsche, The Gay Science
All ordered society puts the passions to sleep.
Nietzsche, The Gay Science
One would make a fit little boy stare if one asked him: “Would you like to become virtuous?” –but he will open his eyes wide if asked: “Would you like to become stronger than your friends?”
Nietzsche, The Will to Power
…we consider nothing great unless it includes a great crime;
Nietzsche, The Will to Power
To disengage oneself, but without rancor: that presupposes, to be sure, an astonishingly mild and sweet humanity—saints—
Nietzsche, The Will to Power
I hope that at this artificial inflation of a small species into the absolute measure of things one is still permitted to laugh?
Nietzsche, The Will to Power
All greatworks and deeds that have remained and have not been washed away by the waters of time—were they not all in the profoundest sense immoralities?
Nietzsche, The Will to Power
The value for life is ultimately decisive.
Nietzsche, The Will to Power
…because nothing exists besides the whole—
Nietzsche, The Will to Power
What determines your rank is the quantum of power you are: the rest is cowardice.
Nietzsche, The Will to Power
That one should like to do disagreeable things—that is the object of ideals.
Nietzsche, The Will to Power
How does one become stronger? By coming to decisions slowly; and by clinging tenaciously to what one has decided. Everything else follows.
Nietzsche, The Will to Power
Nor are they clean enough for me: they all muddy their waters to make them appear deep.
Nietzsche, Thus Spoke Zarathustra
And there is such a variety of well-invented things that the earth is like the breast of a woman: useful as well as pleasing.
Nietzsche, Thus Spoke Zarathustra
What does not destroy me, makes me stronger.
Nietzsche, Twilight of the Idols
If one wants an end, one must also want the means: if one wants slaves, then one is a fool if one educates them to be masters.
Nietzsche, Twilight of the Idols
…anything truly productive is offensive.
Nietzsche, Untimely Meditations
Luther himself once opined that the world existed only through a piece of forgetful negligence on God’s part: for if God had foreseen ‘heavy artillery’ he would not have created the world.
Nietzsche, Untimely Meditations
…he lives best who has no respect for existence.
Nietzsche, Untimely Meditations
…just as the most wretched little animal can prevent the mightiest oak-tree from coming into existence by eating the acorn.
Nietzsche, Untimely Meditations
Because so much is done for others, the world is so imperfect.
Nietzsche, quoted by Walter Kaufman in Nietzsche
The right way of life does not want happiness, turns away from happiness—
Nietzsche, Will to Power
…that the world is not an organism at all, but chaos;
Nietzsche, Will to Power
Oscar Wilde
Personal Favorites
Living cheaply. – The cheapest and most inoffensive way of living is that of the thinker: for, to get at once to the main point, the things he needs most are precisely those which others despise and throw away—. Then: he is easily pleased and has no expensive pleasures; his work is not hard but as it were southerly; his days and nights are not spoiled by pangs of conscience; he moves about, eats, drinks and sleeps in proportion as his mind grows ever calmer, stronger and brighter; he rejoices in his body and has no reason to be afraid of it; he has no need of company, except now and then so as afterwards to embrace his solitude the more tenderly; as a substitute for the living he has the dead, and even for friends he has a substitute: namely the best who have ever lived.
Nietzsche, Daybreak
But that is how I have always lived. I had no wishes. A man over forty-four who can say that he never strove for honors, for women, for money!
Nietzsche, Ecce Homo
What does your conscience say?— ‘You should become who you are.’
Nietzsche, The Gay Science
A voluntary obscurity perhaps; an avoidance of oneself; a dislike of noise, honor, newspapers, influence; a modest job, an everyday job, something that conceals rather than exposes one; an occasional association with harmless, cheerful beasts and birds whose sight is refreshing; mountains for company, but not dead ones, mountains with eyes (that is, with lakes); perhaps even a room in a full, utterly commonplace hotel, where one is certain to go unrecognized and can talk to anyone with impunity—that is what “desert” means here; oh, it is lonely enough, believe me!
Nietzsche, Genealogy of Morals
When his work opens its mouth, the author has to shut his.
Nietzsche, Human, All Too Human
Finally, the forties: mysterious, like everything stationary; resembling a high, wide mountain plateau wafted by a fresh breeze; above it a clear, cloudless sky which gazes down all day and into the night with the same unchanging gentleness: the time of harvest and the heartiest cheerfulness – it is the autumn of life.
Nietzsche, Human, All Too Human
Existence and the world are eternally justified solely as an aesthetic phenomenon.
Nietzsche, quoted by Rudiger Safranski in Nietzsche
For from the depths one loves only one’s child and work…
Nietzsche, Thus Spoke Zarathustra
One never perishes through anybody but oneself. But usually it is death under the most contemptible conditions, an unfree death, death not at the right time, a coward’s death. From love of life, one should desire a different death: free, conscious, without accident, without ambush.
Nietzsche, Twilgiht of the Idols
We are altogether unable to think anything at all just as it is—
Nietzsche, Will to Power
Die at the right time.
Nietzsche, Thus Spoke Zarathustra
Only by forgetting this primitive world of metaphor can one live with any repose, security, and consistency: only by means of the petrification and coagulation of a mass of images which originally streamed from the primal faculty of human imagination like a fiery liquid, only in the invincible faith that this sun, this window, this table is a truth in itself, in short, only by forgetting that he himself is an artistically creating subject, does man live with any repose, security, and consistency. If but for an instant he could escape from the prison walls of this faith, his “self consciousness” would be immediately destroyed. It is even a difficult thing for him to admit to himself that the insect or the bird perceives an entirely different world from the one that man does, and that the question of which of these perceptions of the world is the more correct one is quite meaningless, for this would have to have been decided previously in accordance with the criterion of the correct perception, which means, in accordance with a criterion which is not available.
Nietzsche, Philosophy and Truth
Where is this whole philosophy headed with all of its meandering? Does it do anything more than translate a constant strong drive into reason, a drive for gentle sunlight, bright and breezy air, southern vegetation, a breath of the sea, fleeting nourishment with meat, eggs, and fruits, hot water to drink, silent walks that last for days, sparse discussion, infrequent and cautious reading, solitary living, clean, simple, and almost military habits—in short, for all things that taste best to me specifically and are healthiest for me specifically? A philosophy that is essentially the instinct for a personal diet? An instinct that seeks my air, my height, my climate, and my personal health by taking a detour through my head? There are many other, and surely also many higher, sublimities of philosophy, and not only those that are gloomier and more demanding than mine. Perhaps all of them are also nothing but intellectual detours of these sorts of personal drives?
Nietzsche, Rudiger Safranski’s Nietzsche
It must be shown to what extent everything conscious remains on the surface; how an action and the image of an action differ, how little one knows of what precedes an action; how fantastic are our feelings of “freedom of will,” “cause and effect”; how thoughts and images are, like words, only signs of thoughts; the inexplicability of every action; the superficiality of all praise and blame; how essential fiction and conceits are in which we dwell consciously; how all our words refer to fictions (our affects, too), and how the bond between man and man depends on the transmission and elaboration of these fictions; while fundamentally the real bond (through procreation) goes its unknown way. Does this belief in common fictions really change men? Or is the entire realm of ideas and evaluations itself only an expression of unknown changes? Are there really will, purposes, thoughts, values? Is the whole of conscious life perhaps only a reflected image? And even when evaluation seems to determine the nature of a man, fundamentally something quite different is happening! In short: supposing that purposiveness in the work of nature could be explained without the assumption of an ego that posits purposes: could our positing of purposes, our willing etc., not perhaps be also only a language of signs for something altogether different, namely something that does not will and is unconscious? Only the faintest reflection of that natural expediency in the organic hut not different from it?
Put briefly: perhaps the entire evolution of the spirit is a question of the body; it is the history of the development of a higher body that emerges into our sensibility. The organic is rising to yet higher levels. Our lust for knowledge of nature is a means through which the body desires to perfect itself. Or rather: hundreds of thousands of experiments are made to change the nourishment, the mode of living and of dwelling of the body; consciousness and evaluations in the body, all kinds of pleasure and displeasure, are signs of these changes and experiments. In the long run, it is not a question of man at all: he is to be overcome.
Nietzsche, The Will to Power
And do you know what ‘the world’ is to me? Shall I show it to you in my mirror?
Nietzsche, Will to Power
Led Zeppelin ZoSo