More on this book
Community
Kindle Notes & Highlights
Read between
December 26 - December 28, 2022
Will is seen as the source of all suffering, since willing never brings contentment, but only further desire!
we are wandering encyclopaedias.”
History is a dead weight on the present.
This indifference to history and education will finally produce a genuinely vital culture: a freedom of spirit.
mere shadows of humanities.
but what do we gain if we accept the existence of a metaphysical dimension?
There are neither eternal facts nor even eternal truths.
Morality cannot be based upon reason alone, or if it is, then my reason may not be the same as yours …
“Q. Why do you write? A. I have found no other way of getting rid of my thoughts.”
“Nowadays the text often disappears under the [reader’s] interpretation.”
Moral censure and control can only emerge through social consensus.
Too much information causes indigestion of the spirit.
Behind this lies a fear of doing, risking and seeking one’s own fate. A fear of wanting too much and facing failure.
This modern fear of pain and of suffering shows only that we have not suffered enough. All knowledge requires a price.
it is a psychological principle of human behaviour that every being seeks to extend its sphere of action and influence: to consolidate itself.
yet the hardest overcoming will be the overcoming of itself: “He who cannot obey himself will be commanded.”
together with the total responsibility for every action goes the requirement of creating one’s own value for that action.
“Who else should we wish to serve, if not ourselves?”
If “eternal recurrence” offers us the promise of an eternity, it is not one with a “happy ending” – for it offers no ending at all.
any moral system has a practical aim – to control human behaviour.
Ultimately the choice is a simple one. We either make our values for ourselves or observe (unwillingly) the values of others.
all the knowledge that we seek, the hardest by far to achieve is self-knowledge.
“Bad” means simply the lack of life-affirming qualities.
“respect is already a bridge to love”.
(Conscience: inmost thought, particularly concerning the sense of right and wrong.
We may regard conscience as a peculiarly human characteristic, but The Genealogy of Morals suggests that it is a comparatively recent development in the history of human psychology. It coincides with the beginnings of social structure and law-making, which in turn depend on the repression of instinct and the development of rationality.
Just as the free-swimming sea-creature forced to leave its natural habitat and adapt to land finds its new condition awkward and clumsy, so do we find our newly acquired “moral sense” a burden which impedes our former freedom of action. This “declaration of war” against our old instincts is unhealthy.
The human need to find meaning in existence – even a negative meaning which denies the possibility of human improvement
Religion: God is a gross answer… at bottom merely a gross prohibition for us: you shall not think!
fundamental role of the will provides the bedrock of Existential thought – a philosophy of willed freedom and the inescapable fact of human choice.
“Any truth which threatens life is no truth at all. It is an error.”
“Knowledge – for what purpose? ”
