Man Alone with Himself (Penguin Great Ideas)

by Friedrich Nietzsche

Greatness means: to give a direction. No river is great and bounteous through itself alone, but rather because it takes up so many tributaries and carries them onwards: that makes it great. It is the same with all great minds. All that matters is that one man give the direction, which the many tributaries must then follow; it does not matter whether he is poorly or richly endowed in the beginning.

Forgetting one’s experiences. It is easy for a man who thinks a lot – and objectively – to forget his own experiences, but not the thoughts that were evoked by them.

The day’s length. If a man has a great deal to put in them, a day will have a hundred pockets.

The life of the enemy. Whoever lives for the sake of combating an enemy has an interest in the enemy’s staying alive.

Fantasy of fear. The fantasy of fear is that malevolent, apelike goblin which jumps onto man’s back just when he already has the most to bear.

Superficial knowledge. He who speaks a bit of a foreign language has more delight in it than he who speaks it well; pleasure goes along with superficial knowledge.

Industriousness and conscientiousness. Industriousness and conscientiousness are often antagonists, in that industriousness wants to take the fruits off the tree while still sour, but conscientiousness lets them hang too long, until they drop off the tree and come to nothing.

Lacking the circumstances. Many men wait all their lives for the opportunity to be good in their way.

Want of friends. A want of friends points to envy or arrogance. Many a man owes his friends simply to the fortunate circumstance that he has no cause for envy.

Model for others. He who wants to set a good example must add a grain of foolishness to his virtue; then others can imitate and, at the same time, rise above the one being imitated – something which people love.

In danger. When we have just gotten out of the way of a vehicle, we are most in danger of being run over.

Made an enemy to one’s advantage. Men who are unable to make their merit completely clear to the world seek to awaken an intense enmity towards themselves. Then they have the comfort of thinking that this stands between their merit and its recognition – and that other people assume the same thing, which is of great advantage to their own importance.

Bad memory. The advantage of a bad memory is that, several times over, one enjoys the same good things for the first time.

The hour-hand of life. Life consists of rare, isolated moments of the greatest significance, and of innumerably many intervals, during which at best the silhouettes of those moments hover about us. Love, springtime, every beautiful melody, mountains, the moon, the sea – all these speak completely to the heart but once, if in fact they ever do get a chance to speak completely. For many men do not have those moments at all, and are themselves intervals and intermissions in the symphony of real life.

The first thought of the day. The best way to begin each day well is to think upon awakening whether we could not give at least one person pleasure on this day. If this practice could be accepted as a substitute for the religious habit of prayer, our fellow men would benefit by this change.

Growth of happiness. Near to the sorrow of the world, and often upon its volcanic earth, man has laid out his little gardens of happiness; whether he approaches life as one who wants only knowledge from existence, or as one who yields and resigns himself, or as one who rejoices in a difficulty overcome – everywhere he will find some happiness sprouting up next to the trouble. The more volcanic the earth, the greater the happiness will be – but it would be ludicrous to say that this happiness justified suffering per se.

Philosophical novices. If we have just partaken of a philosopher’s wisdom, we go through the streets feeling as if we had been transformed and had become great men; for we encounter only people who do not know this wisdom, and thus we have to deliver a new, unheard-of judgment about everything; because we have acknowledged a book of laws, we also think we now have to act like judges.

Desire for deep pain. When it has gone, passion leaves behind a dark longing for itself, and in disappearing throws us one last seductive glance. There must have been a kind of pleasure in having been beaten with her whip. In contrast, the more moderate feelings appear flat; apparently we still prefer a more violent displeasure to a weak pleasure.

Solitary people. Some people are so used to solitude with themselves that they never compare themselves to others, but spin forth their monologue of a life in a calm, joyous mood, holding good conversations with themselves, even laughing. But if they are made to compare themselves with others, they tend to a brooding underestimation of their selves: so that they have to be forced to learn again from others to have a good, fair opinion of themselves. And even from this learned opinion they will always want to detract or reduce something. Thus one must grant certain men their solitude, and not be silly enough, as often happens, to pity them for it.

Without melody. There are people for whom a constant inner repose and a harmonious ordering of all their capabilities is so characteristic that any goal-directed activity goes against their grain. They are like a piece of music consisting entirely of sustained harmonious chords, with no evidence of even the beginning of a structured, moving melody. At any movement from the outside, their boat at once gains a new equilibrium on the sea of harmonic euphony. Modern people are usually extremely impatient on meeting such natures, who do not become anything – though it may not be said that they are not anything. In certain moods, however, their presence evokes that rare question: why have melody at all? Why are we not satisfied when life mirrors itself peacefully in a deep lake? The Middle Ages was richer in such natures than we are. How seldom do we now meet a person who can keep living so peacefully and cheerfully with himself even amidst the turmoil, saying to himself like Goethe: ‘The best is the deep quiet in which I live and grow against the world, and harvest what they cannot take from me by fire or sword.’

Life and experience. If one notices how some individuals know how to treat their experiences (their insignificant everyday experiences) so that these become a plot of ground that bears fruit three times a year; while others (and how many of them!) are driven through the waves of the most exciting turns of fate, of the most varied currents of their time or nation, and yet always stay lightly on the surface, like cork: then one is finally tempted to divide mankind into a minority (minimality) of those people who know how to make much out of little and a majority of those who know how to make a little out of much; indeed, one meets those perverse wizards who, instead of creating the world out of nothing, create nothing out of the world.

Then I thought of Plato’s words and felt them suddenly in my heart: all in all, nothing human is worth taking very seriously; nevertheless

No – there is no law, no obligation of that kind; we must become traitors, act unfaithfully, forsake our ideals again and again. We do not pass from one period of life to another without causing these pains of betrayal, and without suffering from them in turn.

It is not the struggle of opinions that has made history so violent, but rather the struggle of belief in opinions, that is, the struggle of convictions. If only all those people who thought so highly of their conviction, who sacrificed all sorts of things to it and spared neither their honor, body nor life in its service, had devoted only half of their strength to investigating by what right they clung to this or that conviction, how they had arrived at it, then how peaceable the history of mankind would appear!

And in fact, the fervor about having the truth counts very little today in relation to that other fervor, more gentle and silent, to be sure, for seeking the truth, a search that does not tire of learning afresh and testing anew.

The wanderer. He who has come only in part to a freedom of reason cannot feel on earth otherwise than as a wanderer – though not as a traveler towards a final goal, for this does not exist.

After all, you know well enough that it cannot matter in the least whether precisely you are in the right, just as no philosopher hitherto has been in the right, and that a more praiseworthy veracity may lie in every little question-mark placed after your favourite words and favourite theories (and occasionally after yourselves) than in all your solemn gesticulations and smart answers before courts and accusers! Better to step aside! Flee away and conceal yourselves! And have your masks and subtlety, so that you may be misunderstood! Or feared a little!

Few are made for independence – it is a privilege of the strong. And he who attempts it, having the completest right to it but without being compelled to, thereby proves that he is probably not only strong but also daring to the point of recklessness. He ventures into a labyrinth, he multiplies by a thousand the dangers which life as such already brings with it, not the smallest of which is that no one can behold how and where he goes astray, is cut off from others, and is torn to pieces limb from limb by some cave-minotaur of conscience. If such a one is destroyed, it takes place so far from the understanding of men that they neither feel it nor sympathize – and he can no longer go back! He can no longer go back even to the pity of men!

Our supreme insights must – and should! – sound like follies, in certain cases like crimes, when they come impermissibly to the ears of those who are not predisposed and predestined for them.

Books for everybody are always malodorous books: the smell of petty people clings to them. Where the people eats and drinks, even where it worships, there is usually a stink. One should not go into churches if one wants to breathe pure air.

so that the strength of a spirit could be measured by how much ‘truth’ it could take, more clearly, to what degree it needed it attenuated, veiled, sweetened, blunted, and falsified.

Should not nothing less than the opposite be the proper disguise under which the shame of a god goes abroad?

Every profound spirit needs a mask: more, around every profound spirit a mask is continually growing, thanks to the constantly false, that is to say shallow interpretation of every word he speaks, every step he takes, every sign of life he gives.

One must test oneself to see whether one is destined for independence and command; and one must do so at the proper time. One should not avoid one’s tests, although they are perhaps the most dangerous game one could play and are in the end tests which are taken before ourselves and before no other judge.

We, who are the opposite of this, and have opened our eyes and our conscience to the question where and how the plant ‘man’ has hitherto grown up most vigorously, we think that this has always happened under the opposite conditions, that the perilousness of his situation had first to become tremendous, his powers of invention and dissimulation (his ‘spirit’ – ) had, under protracted pressure and constraint, to evolve into subtlety and daring, his will to life had to be intensified into unconditional will to power – we think that severity, force, slavery, peril in the street and in the heart, concealment, stoicism, the art of experiment and devilry of every kind, that everything evil, dreadful, tyrannical, beast of prey and serpent in man serves to enhance the species ‘man’ just as much as does its opposite – we do not say enough when we say even that much, and at any rate we are, in what we say and do not say on this point, at the other end from all modern ideology and herd desiderata: at its antipodes perhaps?

You turn away? – O heart, you have borne up well, your hopes stayed strong: now keep your door open to new friends! Let the old go! Let memories go! If once you were young, now – you are younger!