Nietzsche, Friedrich Wilhelm

1844-1900, German philosopher, b. Rocken, Prussia. The son of a clergyman, Nietzsche studied Greek and Latin at Bonn and Leipzig and was appointed to the chair of classical philology at Basel in 1869. In his early years he was friendly with the composer Richard Wagner, although later he was to turn against him. Nervous disturbances and eye trouble forced Nietzsche to leave Basel in 1879; he moved from place to place in a vain effort to improve his health until 1889, when he became hopelessly insane. Nietzsche was not a systematic philosopher but rather a moralist who passionately rejected Western bourgeois civilization. He regarded Christian civilization as a decadent, and in place of its “slave morality” he looked to the superman, the creator of a new heroic morality that would consciously affirm life and the life values. That superman would represent the highest passion and creativity and would live at a level of experience beyond the conventional standards of good and evil. His creative “will to power” would set him off from “the herd” of inferior humanity. Nietzsche’s thought had widespread influence but was of particular importance in Germany. Apologists for Nazism seized on much of his writing as a philosophical justification for their doctrines, but most scholars regard this as a perversion of Nietzsche’s thought. Among his famous works are The Birth of Tragedy (1872, tr.1910); Thus Spake Zarathustra (1883-91, tr. 1909, 1930), and Beyond Good and Evil (1886, tr. 1907).

• We hear only those questions for which we are in a position to find answers.

• In the consciousness of the truth he has perceived, man now sees everywhere only the awfulness of the absurdity of existence… and loathing seizes him.

• Art is not merely an imitation of the reality of nature, but in truth a metaphysical supplement to the reality of nature, placed alongside thereof for its conquest.

• Again and again I am brought up against it, and again and again I resist it: I don’t want to believe it, even though it is almost palpable: the vast majority lack an intellectual conscience; indeed, it often seems to me that to demand such a thing is to be in the most populous cities as solitary as in the desert.

• Those with very loud voices in their throats are nearly incapable of thinking subtle thoughts.

• We, however, want to become those we are—human beings who are new, unique, incomparable, who give themselves laws, who create themselves. To that end we must become the best learners and discovers of everything that is lawful and necessary in the world: we must become physicists in order to be creators in the sense—while hitherto all valuations and ideals have been on ignorance of physics or were constructed so as to contradict it. Therefore: long live physics! And even more so that which compels us to turn to physics—our honesty!

• He is a thinker: which is to say, he knows how to take things more simply than they are.

• Whoever knows he is deep tries to be clear, but whoever wants to seem deep to the crowd tries to be obscure. For the crowd supposes that anything it cannot see to the bottom must be deep: it is so timid and goes so unwillingly into the water.

• When we have a great goal we are superior even to justice, not merely to our deeds and our judges.

• Thoughts are the shadows of our feelings—always darker, emptier, simpler than they are.

• The purpose of punishment is to improve those who do the punishing—that is the final recourse of those who support punishment.

• What does your conscience say?—“You must become who it is that you are.”

• We operate exclusively with things that do not exist, with lines, surfaces, bodies, atoms, divisible time spans, divisible spaces—how could explanations be possible at all when we initially turn everything into images, into our images!

• We cannot even reproduce our thoughts entirely in words.

• Finding everything deep—that is an inconvenient trait: it causes a person constantly to strain his eyes and eventually to find out more than he might have wished.

• What is the seal of liberation?—No longer to be ashamed in our own presence.

• Although the most incisive judges of the witches themselves were convinced of the guilt of witchcraft, this guilt nevertheless did not exist. Thus it is with all guilt.

• Everyone who has ever built anywhere a “new heaven” first found the power thereto in his own hell.

• With deep men, as with deep wells, it takes a long time for anything that falls into them to hit bottom. Onlookers, who almost never wait long enough, readily suppose that such men are callous and unresponsive- or even boring.

• This thinker needs no one to refute him: he manages to do that himself.

• I teach you the Overman. Man is something which shall be surpassed.

Nietzsche, Friedrich Wilhelm Part Two

• The good generally displeases us when it is beyond our ken.

• Everyone who enjoys thinks that the principle thing to the tree is the fruit, but in point of fact the principle thing to it is the seed. Herein lies the difference between them that create and them that enjoy.

• In the mountains of truth, you never climb in vain. Either you already reach a higher point today, or you exercise your strength in order to be able to climb higher tomorrow.

• The value of many men and books rests solely on their faculty for compelling all to speak out the most hidden and intimate things.

• Merchant and pirate were for a long period one and the same person. Even today mercantile morality is really nothing but a refinement of piratical morality.

• Many a man fails to become a thinker for the sole reason that his memory is too good.

• Finding everything deep—that is an inconvenient trait: it causes a person constantly to strain his eyes and eventually to find out more than he might have wished.

• What is the seal of liberation? —No longer to be ashamed in our own presence.

• What is originality? To se something that is as yet without a name, that is as yet impossible to designate, even though it stares us in the face. The way it usually is with people, it is a thing’s name that makes it perceptible to them in the first place. —For the most part, the original ones have also been the name-givers.

• What do you believe in? In this, that the weights of all things must be determined anew.

• After Buddha was dead, his shadow was still shown for centuries in a cave—a tremendous, gruesome shadow. God is dead; but given the way of man, there may still be caves for thousands of years in which his shadow will be shown. And we—we still have to vanquish his shadow, too.

• An artist chooses his subjects: that is the way he praises.

• For believe me! —the secret to harvesting the greatest abundance and the greatest enjoyment from existence is this—living dangerously! Build your cities on the slopes of Vesuvius! Send your ships into uncharted seas! Live at war with your peers and yourselves! Be robbers and conquerors. So long as you cannot be rulers and possessors, you knowing ones! The time will soon be past when you could be content to live hidden in the forests like timid deer.

• We have no organ at all for knowledge, for “truth”: we “know” (or believe or imagine) precisely as much as may be useful in the interest of the human herd, the species: and even what is here called “usefulness” is in the end only a belief, something imagined and perhaps precisely that most fatal piece of stupidity by which we shall one day perish.

• All in all, Punishment hardens and renders people more insensible; it concentrates; it increases the feeling of estrangement; it strengthens the power of resistance.

• Every word is a prejudice.

• For some natures, changing their opinions is just as much a requirement of cleanliness as changing their clothes: for others, however, it is merely a requirement of vanity.

• Here is a hero who did nothing but shake the tree as soon as the fruit was ripe. Does this seem to be too small a thing to you? Then take a good look at the tree he shook.

Nietzsche Part Three

• Unexplained, obscure matters are regarded as more important than explained, clear ones.

• The educational system in large countries will always be utterly mediocre, for the same reason that the cooking in large kitchens is mediocre at best.

• Whether a man hides his bad qualities an vices or confesses them openly, his vanity wants to gain an advantage by it in both cases: just note how subtly he distinguishes between those he will hide his bad qualities from and those he will face honestly and candidly.

• One who speaks a foreign language just a little takes more pleasure in it then one who speaks it well. Enjoyment belongs to those who know things halfway.

• Convictions are more dangerous enemies of truth than lies.

• Nobody dies of fatal truths these days: there are too many antidotes.

• A vocation makes us unthinking; that it’s greatest blessing. For it is a bulwark behind which we are permitted to withdraw when commonplace doubts and cares assail us.

• For both parties, the most disagreeable way of responding to a polemic is to be angry and keep silent: for the aggressor usually takes the silence as a sign of disdain.

• The significance of language for the evolution of culture lies in this, that mankind set up in language a separate world beside the other world, a place it took to be so firmly set that, standing upon it, it could lift the rest of the world off its hinges and make itself master of it. To the extent that man has for long ages believed in the concepts and names of things as in aeternae veritates he has appropriated to himself that pride by which he raised himself above the animal: he really thought that in language he possessed knowledge of the world.

• This mother needs happy, reputable children, and that one needs unhappy ones: otherwise she cannot show her kindness as a mother.

• One sticks to an opinion because he prides himself on having come to it on his own, and another because he has taken great pains to learn it and is proud to have grasped it: and so both do so out of vanity.

• Sometimes it just takes stronger eyeglasses to cure those who are in love- and someone with the ability to imagine a face or a figure twenty years older might perhaps pass through life quite undisturbed.

• In all institutions where the brisk air of public criticism fails to circulate (as, for example, in scholarly bodies and senates), an innocent corruption grows up, like a mushroom.

• At one time or another, almost every politician needs an honest man so badly that, like a ravenous wolf, he breaks into a sheep-fold: not to devour the ram he has stolen, however, but rather conceal himself behind its wooly back.

• The irrationality of a thing is no argument against its existence, rather a condition of it.

• The so-called paradoxes of an author, to which a reader takes exception, often exist not in the author’s book at all, but rather in the reader’s head.

• The first opinion that occurs to us when we are suddenly asked about something is usually not our own but only the current one pertaining to our class, position, or parentage; our own opinions seldom swim on the surface.

• To one who us accustomed to thinking a lot, every new thought that he hears or reads about immediately appears as a link in a chain.

• In every philosophical school, three thinkers succeed one another in the following way: the first produces out of himself the sap and seed, the second draws it out into threads and spins a synthetic web, the third waits in this web for the sacrificial victims that are caught in it- and tries to live off philosophy.

• In the mountains of truth, you never climb in vain. Either you already reach a higher point today, or you exercise your strength n order to be able to climb higher tomorrow.

Nietzsche, Friedrich Wilhelm Part Four

• The machine is impersonal, it takes the pride away from a piece of work, the individual merits and defects that go along with all that work is not done by a machine—which is to say, its little bit of humanity.

• One receives as reward for much ennui, despondency, boredom—such as a solitude without friends, books, duties, passions must bring with it—those quarter- hours of profoundest contemplation within oneself and nature. He who completely entrenches himself against boredom also entrenches himself against himself: he will never get to drink the strongest refreshing draught from his own innermost fountain.

• There are horrible people who, instead of solving a problem, tangle it up and make it harder to solve for anyone who wants to deal with it. Whoever does not know how to hit the nail on the head should be asked not to hit it at all.

• A book should long for a pen, ink, and writing-table: but usually it is pen, ink, and writing-table that long for a book. That is why books are so negligible nowadays.

• And perhaps a great day will come, when a people distinguished by war and victory, by the highest development of military organization and intelligence, and accustomed to making the gravest sacrifices to these things, will voluntarily exclaim, “We will break the sword into pieces”—and will demolish its entire military machine down to its deepest foundations. To disarm while being the best armed, as an expression of elevated feelings-that is the means to real peace, which must always rest on a disposition toward peace: whereas so-called “armed peace,” such as the one that parades around in every country nowadays, is a disposition toward hostility which trusts neither itself nor its neighbor and, partly out of hatred, partly out of fear, refuses to put down its weapons.

• To become wise you have to want to experience certain experiences, and so to run into their open jaws. This is very dangerous, to be sure; many a “wise man” has been eaten up in doing so.

• Illusions are certainly expensive amusements: but the destruction on illusions is even more expensive-when looked upon as an amusement, which to many people is what it undeniably is.

• “Dark times” is what they call it in Norway when the sun remains below the horizon all day long: the temperature falls slowly but surely at such times.—A nice metaphor for all those thinkers for whom the sun of mankind’s future has temporarily disappeared.

• Only the most acute and active animals are capable of boredom.—A theme for a great poet would be God’s boredom on the seventh day of creation.

• Along the journey we commonly forget its goal. Almost every vacation is chosen and entered upon as a means to a purpose but is ultimately continued as a final purpose in itself. Forgetting our objectives is the most frequent stupidity in which we indulge ourselves. Before we go seeking man we will have to have found the lantern.—Will it have to be the Cynic’s lantern?

• A philosophical mythology lies concealed in language, which breaks out again at every moment, no matter how cautious we may be.

• Whatever is gold does not glitter. A gentle radiance belongs to the noblest metal.

• Everyone nowadays lives through too much and thinks too little: they have a ravenous appetite and colic at the same time so that they keep getting thinner and thinner no matter how much they eat.

• Once we have found ourselves, we must understand how from time to time to lose-and then to find – ourselves once again: assuming, that is, that we are thinkers. For a thinker it is a drawback to be bound to a single person all the time.

• How can anyone become a thinker unless he spends at least a third of every day away from passions, people, and books?

• I assess the power of a will by how much resistance, pain, torture it endures and knows how to turn to its advantage.

• Distrust everyone in whom the impulse to punish is powerful!

• Be not too liberal; it doth belong to dogs alone to fuck the whole day long.

• One lives for today, one lives on the spur of the moment- one lives most irresponsibly: and it is precisely this that one calls “freedom.”

• Could it be that wisdom appears on earth as a raven, drawn by the faint smell of carrion?

• Not to be cowardly when it comes to our own actions! Not to leave them in the lurch!—The sting of conscience is indecent.

• At bottom, man mirrors himself in things; he considers everything beautiful that reflects his own image: the judgment “beautiful” is the vanity of his species.

• Even the bravest among us rarely possesses the courage for what he really knows.

• Formula of my happiness: a Yes, a No, a straight line, a goal.

• Once and for all, there are many things I choose not to know.-Wisdom sets limits even to knowledge.

Nietzsche Part Five

• You run ahead? Do you do it as a shepherd? Or as an exception? A third possibility would be as a runaway…First question of conscience.

• It is obvious that rationality has been utterly lost in modern marriage: which is no objection to marriage, however, but rather to modernity.

• Judgments, value judgments concerning life, whether for or against it, can in the end never be true: their only value is as symptoms, they only come into consideration, as symptoms-in themselves such judgments are stupidities. We must reach out and attempt to put our finger on this astonishing finesse, that the value of life cannot be assessed.

• Considered physiologically, everything ugly weakens and saddens man. It reminds him of decay, danger, impotence; it actually reduces his strength. The effect of ugliness can be measured with a dynamometer. Whenever anyone feels depressed, he senses the proximity of something “ugly.” His feelings of power, his will to power, his courage, his pride—they decline with ugliness, they rise with beauty.

• Whether we immoralists do any harm to virtue?—Just as little as anarchists do to princes. It is only because they have been shot at that they once again sit securely on their thrones. Moral: we must shoot at morals.

• How much disgruntled heaviness, lameness, dampness, dressing gown-how much beer there is in the German intelligence! How is it at all possible that young men who dedicate their lives to the most spiritual goals do not feel the first instinct of spirituality, the spirit’s instinct of self-preservation—and drink beer?…The alcoholism of the young scholars is perhaps no question mark concerning their scholarliness—without spirit one can still be a great scholar-but in every other respect it remains a problem.—Where would one not find the gentle degeneration which beer produces in the spirit?

• I mistrust all systematizers and avoid them. The will to a system is a lack of integrity.

• There are instances when we are like horses, we psychologists, and grow restless: We see our own shadow wavering up and down before us. A psychologist must look away from himself in order to see anything at all.

• In being wildly natural we recover best from being unnatural, from being spiritual.

• Are you genuine? Or just an actor? A representative? Or what it is that is represented?-In the end, you might merely be someone mimicking an actor…Second question of conscience.

• What? You seek something? You wish to multiply yourself tenfold, a hundredfold? You seek followers?-Seek zeros!

• What? You have chosen virtue and the uplifted bosom, and yet you leer at the advantages of the unscrupulous? But virtue involves renouncing “advantages”…(to be nailed on an anti-Semite’s door).

• The most spiritual human beings, assuming they are the most courageous, also experience the most painful tragedies by far: but for just this reason they honor life, because it pits its greatest opposition against them.

• Our drives are reducible to the will to power. The will to power is the ultimate fact at which we arrive.

• I fly in dreams, I know it is my privilege, I do not recall a single situation in dreams when I was unable to fly. To execute every sort of curve and angle with a light impulse, a flying mathematics—that is so distinct a happiness that it has permanently suffused my basic sense of happiness.

• To become artist (creator), saint (lover), and philosopher (knower) in a single person: My practical goal!

…Ma hiatus between two nothings---…

• Forgetting: that is a divine capacity. And whoever aspires to the heights and wants to fly must cast off much that is heavy and make himself light—I call it a divine capacity for lightness.

• There they stand, the small ones, like grass and weeds and scrub—innocent in their wretched insignificance. And now I make my furtive way through them and trample down as few as I can—but in doing so disgust consumes my heart.

• Animals know nothing of themselves, and they also know nothing of the world.

• The empty, the one, the unmoved, the full, satiation, wanting nothing—that would be my evil: in short, dreamless sleep.

• All signs of superman nature appear in man as illness or insanity.

• You must await your thirst and allow it to become complete: otherwise you will never discover your spring, which can never be anyone else’s!