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July 2, 2017 - March 1, 2018
"The knight of knowledge must be able not only to love his enemies, but also to hate his friends.
He divines remedies for injuries; he knows how to turn serious accidents to his own advantage; that which does not kill him makes him stronger.
My form of retaliation consists in this: as soon as possible to set a piece of cleverness at the heels of an act of stupidity; by this means perhaps it may still be possible to overtake it.
Those who keep silent are almost always lacking in subtlety and refinement of heart; silence is an objection, to swallow a grievance must necessarily produce a bad temper—it even upsets the stomach. All silent people are dyspeptic.
If illness and weakness are to be charged with anything at all, it is with the fact that when they prevail, the very instinct of recovery, which is the instinct of defence and of war in man, becomes decayed.
Everything wounds him.
Owing to the fact that one would be used up too quickly if one reacted, one no longer reacts at all: this is the principle.
"Not through hostility is hostility put to flight; through friendship does hostility end":
To regard one's self as a destiny, not to wish one's self "different"—this, in such circumstances, is sagacity itself.
First, I attack only things that are triumphant—if
Secondly, I attack only those things against which I find no allies, against which I stand alone—against
Thirdly, I never make personal attacks—I
Fourthly, I attack only those things from which all personal differences are excluded, in which any such thing as a background of disagreeable experiences is lacking.
what is he saying here
Animal vigour never acquires enough strength in him in order to reach that pitch of artistic freedom which makes his own soul whisper to him: I, alone, can do that.
Let anybody make a list of the places in which men of great intellect have been found, and are still found; where wit, subtlety, and malice constitute happiness; where genius is almost necessarily at home: all of them rejoice in exceptionally dry air.
Paris, Provence, Florence, Jerusalem, Athens—these names prove something, namely: that genius is conditioned by dry air, by a pure sky—that is to say, by rapid organic functions, by the constant and ever-present possibility of procuring for one's self great and even enormous quantities of strength.
I lacked all subtlety in egoism, all the fostering care of an imperative instinct; I was in a state in which one is ready to regard one's self as anybody's equal, a state of "disinterestedness," a forgetting of one's distance from others—something, in short, for which I can never forgive myself. When I had well-nigh reached the end of my tether, simply because I had almost reached my end, I began to reflect upon the fundamental absurdity of my life—"Idealism." It was illness that first brought me to reason.
for everything that marks an epoch in it has been brought to me by accident and never by means of a recommendation.
same
Delacroix—that
To the most exceptional of my readers I should like to say just one word about what I really exact from music. It must be cheerful and yet profound, like an October afternoon. It must be original, exuberant, and tender, and like a dainty, soft woman in roguishness and grace.
The scholar who, in sooth, does little else than handle books—with the philologist of average attainments their number may amount to two hundred a day—ultimately forgets entirely and completely the capacity of thinking for himself. When he has not a book between his fingers he cannot think. When he thinks, he responds to a stimulus (a thought he has read),—finally all he does is to react. The scholar exhausts his whole strength in saying either "yes" or "no" to matter which has already been thought out, or in criticizing it—he is no longer capable of thought on his own account.
how one becomes what one is.
An order of rank among capacities; distance; the art of separating without creating hostility; to refrain from confounding things; to keep from reconciling things; to possess enormous multifariousness and yet to be the reverse of chaos—all
Beware of all picturesque men! Life was easy—in fact easiest—to me, in those periods when it exacted the heaviest duties from me.
My formula for greatness in man is amor fati: the fact that a man wishes nothing to be different, either in front of him or behind him, or for all eternity.
After all, no one can draw more out of things, books included, than he already knows.
A man has no ears for that to which experience has given him no access.
ive had this same observation
In this case nothing it contains will really be heard at all, and, thanks to an acoustic delusion, people will believe that where nothing is heard there is nothing to hear.
But that's an old story: save, of course, the abortions among them, the emancipated ones, those who lack the wherewithal to have children. Thank goodness I am not willing to let myself be torn to pieces! the perfect woman tears you to pieces when she loves you: I know these amiable Mænads. . . . Oh! what a dangerous, creeping, subterranean little beast of prey she is!
Woman is incalculably more wicked than man, she is also cleverer. Goodness in a woman is already a sign of degeneration.
The more womanly a woman is, the more she fights tooth and nail against rights in general: the natural order of things, the eternal war between the sexes, assigns to her by far the foremost rank.
Christianity is most profoundly nihilistic,
In order to understand this, a certain courage is necessary, and, as a prerequisite of this, a certain superfluity of strength: for a man can approach only as near to truth as he has the courage to advance—that is to say, everything depends strictly upon the measure of his strength.
At bottom all I had done was to put one of Stendhal's maxims into practice: he advises one to make one's entrance into society by means of a duel.
My wisdom consists in my having been many things, and in many places, in order to become one thing—in order to be able to attain to one thing.
only too many are condemned to determine their choice too soon, and then to pine away beneath a burden that they can no longer throw off. . . . Such creatures crave for Wagner as for an opiate,—they are thus able to forget themselves, to be rid of themselves for a moment.
Every kind of life, the most unfavourable circumstances, illness, poverty—anything seemed to me preferable to that undignified "selflessness" into which I had fallen; in the first place, thanks to my ignorance and youth, and in which I had afterwards remained owing to laziness—the so-called "sense of duty."
But all this means thinking! . . . The state of my eyes alone put an end to all book-wormishness, or, in plain English—philology: I was thus delivered from books; for years I ceased from reading, and this was the greatest boon I ever conferred upon myself! That nethermost self, which was, as it were, entombed, and which had grown dumb because it had been forced to listen perpetually to other selves (for that is what reading means!), slowly awakened; at first it was shy and doubtful, but at last it spoke again. Never have I rejoiced more over my condition than during the sickest and most
...more
This book closes with the word "or?"—it is the only book which closes with an "or?".
The question concerning the origin of moral valuations is therefore a matter of the highest importance to me because it determines the future of mankind.
He who disagrees with me on this point, I regard as infected.
If the most insignificant organ within the body neglects, however slightly, to assert with absolute certainty its self-preservative powers, its recuperative claims, and its egoism, the whole system degenerates.
"Thou who with cleaving fiery lances The stream of my soul from its ice dost free, Till with a rush and a roar it advances To enter with glorious hoping the sea: Brighter to see and purer ever, Free in the bonds of thy sweet constraint,— So it praises thy wondrous endeavour, January, thou beauteous saint!"*
The last poem of all, "To the Mistral,"—an exuberant dance song in which, if you please, the new spirit dances freely upon the corpse of morality,—is a perfect Provençalism.
just as I also shall found a city some day, as a memento of an atheist and genuine enemy of the Church,
A man pays dearly for being immortal: to this end he must die many times over during his life.
There is such a thing as what I call the rancour of greatness: everything great, whether a work or a deed, once it is completed, turns immediately against its author.
One goes among men; one greets friends: but these things are only new deserts, the looks of those one meets no longer bear a greeting. At the best one encounters a sort of revolt. This feeling of revolt, I suffered, in varying degrees of intensity, at the hands of almost every one who came near me; it would seem that nothing inflicts a deeper wound than suddenly to make one's distance felt. Those noble natures are scarce who know not how to live unless they can revere.
poets of the Veda were priests and not even fit to unfasten Zarathustra's sandal—all
new testament
