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“Don’t you see, Josef, that the problem is not that you feel discomfort? What importance is tension or pressure in your chest? Who ever promised you comfort? So you sleep poorly! So? Who ever promised you good sleep? No, the problem is not discomfort. The problem is that you have discomfort about the wrong thing!”
“you must realize that there is no reality to any of your preoccupations! Your vision of Bertha, the halo of attraction and love that surround her—these don’t really exist. These poor phantasms are not part of numinal reality. All seeing is relative, and so is all knowing. We invent what we experience. And what we have invented, we can destroy.”
“Live when you live! Death loses its terror if one dies when one has consummated one’s life! If one does not live in the right time, then one can never die at the right time.”
“Yes, eternal recurrence means that every time you choose an action you must be willing to choose it for all eternity. And it is the same for every action not made, every stillborn thought, every choice avoided. And all unlived life will remain bulging inside you, unlived through all eternity. And the unheeded
“I teach that life should never be modified, or squelched, because of the promise of some other kind of life in the future. What is immortal is this life, this moment. There is no afterlife, no goal toward which this life points, no apocalyptic tribunal or judgment. This moment exists forever, and you, alone, are your only audience.”
“To live forever with the sense that I have not lived, have not tasted freedom—the idea fills me with horror.” “Then, ” Nietzsche exhorted, “live in such a way that you love the idea!”
Your goodness, your duty, your faithfulness—these are the bars of your prison. You will perish from such small virtues. You must learn to know your wickedness. You cannot be partially free: your instincts, too, thirst for freedom; your wild dogs in the cellar—they bark for freedom. Listen harder, can’t you hear them?”
Marriage should be no prison, but a garden in which something higher is cultivated. Perhaps the only way to save your marriage is to give it up.”
“Wedlock is sacred. Yet”—Nietzsche’s voice was harsh—“it is better to break wedlock than to be broken by it!”
“Do not create children until one is ready to be a creator and to spawn creators.” It is wrong to bear children out of need, wrong to use a child to alleviate loneliness, wrong to provide purpose in life by reproducing another copy of oneself. It is wrong also to seek immortality by spewing one’s germ into the future—as though sperm contains your consciousness!
“Only a duty to become who you are. Become strong: otherwise, you will forever use others for your own enlargement.”
Ergo, if one is unable to give up a marriage, then the marriage is doomed.”
I know that the key to living well is first to will that which is necessary and then to love that which is willed.”
