When Nietzsche Wept: A Novel Of Obsession

by Irvin D. Yalom

Breuer had an absolutely infallible test for the risk of suicide. Does the patient project himself into the future?

“It is not the truth that is holy, but the search for one’s own truth! Can there be a more sacred act than self-inquiry? My philosophical work, some say, is built on sand: my views shift continually. But one of my granite sentences is: ‘Become who you are.’ And how can one discover who and what one is without the truth?”

“If he doesn’t know he is about to die, how can your patient make a decision about how to die?” “How to die, Professor Nietzsche?” “Yes, he must decide how to face death: to talk to others, to give advice, to say the things he has been saving to say before his death, to take his leave of others, or to be alone, to weep, to defy death, to curse it, to be thankful to it.”

Hope is the worst of evils because it protracts torment.”

“Dying is hard. I’ve always felt the final reward of the dead is to die no more!”

One does not, strictly speaking, choose or select a disease; but one does choose stress—and it is stress that chooses the disease!”

Do you know what the real question for a thinker is?” He did not pause for an answer. “The real question is: How much truth can I stand? It is no occupation for those of your patients who wish to eliminate stress, to live the tranquil life.”

he who does not obey himself is ruled by others. It is easier, far easier, to obey another than to command oneself.”

Not yet does he understand that there is a my way and a your way, but that there is no “the” way.

“I’ve always believed, Josef, that we are more in love with desire than with the desired!”

“Words, words, words! A thirty-six-year-old Jewess traveling free. Josef, you talk like a fool! Wake up! Live in reality, not in words! What about the children? Change my name! Shall each of them, too, choose a new name?”

‘How much truth can you stand?’ I know that’s how you measure a person. I’m afraid my answer is, ‘Not very much!’

“Amor fati—love your fate. It’s eerie, Josef, how twin-minded we are! I had planned to make Amor fati my next, and final, lesson in your instruction. I was going to teach you to overcome despair by transforming ‘thus it was’ into ’thus I willed it.

“A paradox!” said Breuer. “Isolation exists only in isolation. Once shared, it evaporates.”