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rational-philosophical
creative-artistic
“a certain musical disposition of mind comes first, and after that follows the poetical idea”.
Music and intoxication
“mystical collective ecstasy”
order and reason,
form, visual beauty and rational understanding
Self-control, self-knowledge and moderation:
rational, scholastic approach
intuitive, libidinal passion
aesthetic and life-...
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“Second Reich”,
“We moderns have no culture to call our own. We fill ourselves with foreign customs, arts, philosophies, religions and sciences: we are wandering encyclopaedias.”
self-realization and action
“All great periods of culture have been periods of political decline.”
“At the end of the cure they are men again and have ceased to be mere shadows of humanities.”
Teleology: the theory that processes and events are related to ultimate goals or ends.
“It is true, there could be a metaphysical world; the absolute possibility of it is hardly to be disputed. We behold all things through the human head and cannot cut off this head; while the question nonetheless remains what of the world would still be there if one had cut it off.”
Kant describes this domain of timeless truth as noumena or “things-in-themselves”, opposing it to phenomena or “things-as-they-appear” to us through our senses.
“Lack of historical sense is the hereditary defect of all philosophers … Everything has become [what it is]. There are neither eternal facts nor even eternal truths. Therefore what is needed from now on is a historical philosophizing, and with it the virtue of modesty.”
“the resentment of the metaphysicians against the real”. (This idea of “Becoming” will later produce Nietzsche’s maxim “Become what you are” – the notorious symbol of the “Superman”.)
“What destroys [a person] more quickly than to think, to feel without inner necessity, without a deep personal choice, without joy – as an automaton of ‘duty’?” … “A virtue has to be our invention, our most personal defence and necessity.”
“The irrationality of a thing is no argument against its existence, rather a condition of it.”
“Just as the clouds tell us the direction of the wind high above our heads, so the lightest and freest spirits are in their tendencies foretellers of the weather that is coming …”
“Something said briefly can be the fruit of much long thought; but the reader who is a novice in this field … sees in everything said briefly something embryonic, not without censuring the author for having served him up such immature and unripened fare.”
“The aphorism, the apophthegm, are forms of eternity; my ambition is to say in ten sentences what everyone else says in a book – what everyone else does not say in a book.”
“Of what account is a book that never carries us away beyond all books?”
“Paradoxes are only assertions that carry no conviction. The author has made them wishing to appear brilliant, or to mislead, or above all to pose.”
“A book is made better by good readers and clearer by good opponents.”
“Ultimately, no one can extract from things, books included, more than he already knows. What one has no access to through experience one has no ear for.”
“All that which has given colour to existence has had no history hitherto. Where is there a history of love, avarice, envy, conscience, piety, cruelty? Even a comparative history of justice, or even only punishment, is completely lacking.”
“There are no moral phenomena at all, only a moral interpretation of phenomena …”
“If you possess a virtue … you are its victim!”
“With morality, the individual can only ascribe value to himself as a function of the herd.”
“The whole of religion may appear to some distant age as an exercise and a prelude.”
“I come too early. My time has not yet come. This great event is still on its way, still travelling; it has not yet reached the ears of men … This deed is still more distant from them than the most distant stars – and yet they have done it themselves.”
“What are these churches now, if not the tombs and sepulchres of God?”
Any truth which threatens life is no truth at all. It is an error.
But we have explained nothing.
“We have arranged for ourselves a world in which we are able to live – with the postulation of bodies, lines, surfaces, causes and effects, motion and rest, form and content: without these articles of faith, nobody could now manage to live!”
“Consciousness is the last and latest development of the organic, and consequently also the most unfinished and weakest part of it. From consciousness there proceed countless errors which cause an animal, a man, to perish earlier than necessary.”
happy accidents are eliminated, the more highly evolved types lead nowhere; it is the average and below average types which invariably ascend …”
“A nation is a detour of nature to arrive at six or seven great men. Yes, and then to get round them!”
The laws of the State emerge as the morality of the group, writ large.
“Only those who stand outside the political instincts know what they want from the State.”
“The robber and the man of power who promises to protect the community from robbers are at bottom beings of the same mould, but the latter attains his ends by different means than the former.”
“Politics may one day be found to be so vulgar as to be described, along with all party and daily journalism, under the heading: ‘Prostitution of the Intel lect’.”
Indifference to life (nihilism). Hypocrisy in morals (and religion). Fear of the unknown.
“Could it be possible! This old saint in his forest has not yet heard that God is dead.”
“a poor ignorant weariness, which no longer wants even to want: that created all gods and afterworlds”.
