I Am Dynamite! A Life of Nietzsche Quotes

“People who think deeply feel themselves to be comedians in their relationship with others because they first have to simulate a surface in order to be understood.”
― Sue Prideaux, I Am Dynamite!: A Life of Nietzsche

“When I was twelve years old I conjured up for myself a marvelous trinity: God the Father, God the Son, and God the Devil. My deduction was that God, thinking himself, created the second person of the godhead, but that to be able to think himself he had to think his opposite, and thus had to create it.—That is how I began to philosophize.”
― Sue Prideaux, I Am Dynamite!: A Life of Nietzsche

“If you have your why? in life, you can get along with almost any how? People don’t strive for happiness, only the English do.”
― Sue Prideaux, I Am Dynamite!: A Life of Nietzsche

“musical dissonance must be the most effective artistic means of representing the pain of individual existence.”
― Sue Prideaux, I Am Dynamite!: A Life of Nietzsche

“Whoever fights with monsters should see to it that he does not become one himself. And when you stare for a long time into an abyss, the abyss stares back into you.”
― Sue Prideaux, I Am Dynamite!: A Life of Friedrich Nietzsche

“Nietzsche needed no flamboyance, no outward proof of genius, so long as he had his illness. It enabled him to live numberless lifetimes within one. She noticed how his life fell into a general pattern. A regular recurrent decline into sickness always demarcated one period of his life from another. Every illness was a death, a dip down into Hades. Every recuperation was a joyful rebirth, a regeneration. This mode of existence refreshed him. During each fleeting recuperation the world gleamed anew. And so each recuperation became not only his own rebirth, but also the birth of a whole new world, a new set of problems that demanded new answers. It was like the annual fertility cycle of the god being plowed into the ground.”
― Sue Prideaux, I Am Dynamite! A Life of Nietzsche

“No one can construct for you the bridge on which you must cross the stream of life, no one but you alone.”
― Sue Prideaux, I Am Dynamite!: A Life of Nietzsche

“Meaning must be found through saying “yes” to the divine accidents on the dance floor.”
― Sue Prideaux, I Am Dynamite!: A Life of Nietzsche

“One repays a teacher badly if one remains only a pupil. ECCE HOMO, Foreword, Section 4”
― Sue Prideaux, I Am Dynamite!: A Life of Nietzsche

“Nietzsche specifically chooses the French word ressentiment to describe the foundation of slave morality. Ressentiment is a word with a fuller meaning than mere resentment and jealousy. It is a neurosis, a need to inflict pain upon the self as well as upon the other. Ressentiment encompasses the position of the resentful powerless who lack (or enjoy the lack of) the means to purge their resentment by taking revenge. And so, ressentiment led the slaves to lie their weakness into strength, to “take revenge on Rome and its noble and frivolous tolerance” by overturning the previous morality of power and superiority, and replacing it with the moral superiority of victimhood and the glorification of the downtrodden.”
― Sue Prideaux, I Am Dynamite!: A Life of Nietzsche

“To be alone, and without gods, this—this it is, is Death,” Hölderlin puts into Empedocles’s mouth in the play and maybe in this we can trace the first whisper of the gigantic tragedy that Nietzsche would articulate in the death of God.”
― Sue Prideaux, I Am Dynamite!: A Life of Nietzsche

“In the week following the meeting in St. Peter’s, Lou became ever more fascinated by Nietzsche. She saw him as one who wore his mask awkwardly. It was obvious to her that he was playing a part so as to fit into the world. He was like some god who had come out of the wilderness and down from the high places, and put on a suit in order to pass among men. The visage of the god must be masked, lest men die faced with his dazzling glance. It allowed her to reflect that she herself had never worn a mask, never felt the need of one in order to be understood. She interpreted his mask as placatory, as springing from his goodness and pity toward other people. She quoted his aphorism, 'People who think deeply feel themselves to be comedians in their relationship with others because they first have to simulate a surface in order to be understood.”
― Sue Prideaux, I Am Dynamite! A Life of Nietzsche

“He is important for being the first writer to name the four elements:”
― Sue Prideaux, I Am Dynamite!: A Life of Nietzsche

“He sets the same thought out rather more fully in Fate and History: “Free will without fate is just as unthinkable as spirit without reality, good without evil…Only antithesis creates the quality…There will be great revolutions once the masses finally realize that the totality of Christianity is grounded in presuppositions: the existence of God, immortality”
― Sue Prideaux, I Am Dynamite!: A Life of Nietzsche

“Yea-sayer”
― Sue Prideaux, I Am Dynamite!: A Life of Nietzsche

“The human is between beast and superman, a rope fastened over an abyss.”
― Sue Prideaux, I Am Dynamite!: A Life of Nietzsche

“genius”
― Sue Prideaux, I Am Dynamite!: A Life of Nietzsche

“He who has a why? in life can tolerate almost any how?”
― Sue Prideaux, I Am Dynamite!: A Life of Nietzsche

“What doesn’t kill me makes me stronger. Twilight of the Idols, “Epigrams and Maxims,” Section 8”
― Sue Prideaux, I Am Dynamite!: A Life of Nietzsche

“My formula for human greatness: amor fati, love your fate. Want nothing different, neither backward or forward for all eternity. Not just to tolerate necessity—but to love it… Ecce Homo, “Why I Am so Clever,” Section 10”
― Sue Prideaux, I Am Dynamite!: A Life of Nietzsche

“[Are we happy? I am God, I have created this parody]”
― Sue Prideaux, I Am Dynamite!: A Life of Friedrich Nietzsche

“autobiography is probably the most monstrous act of conceit that exists.”
― Sue Prideaux, I Am Dynamite!: A Life of Friedrich Nietzsche

“I distrust all systematisers and avoid them. The will to a system is a lack of integrity.”
― Sue Prideaux, I Am Dynamite!: A Life of Friedrich Nietzsche

“Great art demands intellects that stand on a level with the most individual personalities of contemporary thought, in exceptionality, in independence, in defiance and in aristocratic self-supremacy.”
― Sue Prideaux, I Am Dynamite!: A Life of Friedrich Nietzsche

“Every true faith is indeed infallible; it performs what the believing person hopes to find in it, but it does not offer the least support for the establishing of an objective truth … Here the ways of men divide. If you want to achieve peace of mind and happiness, then have faith; if you want to be a disciple of truth, then search.’5”
― Sue Prideaux, I Am Dynamite!: A Life of Friedrich Nietzsche

“Strindberg himself was not at the greatest moment of mental stability in his life. He had no money, his first marriage to the wife he worshipped was crashing to disaster and they were living in a wing of a dilapidated castle overrun with peacocks and feral dogs and ruled over by a self-styled countess and her companion, a blackmailer, alchemist, magician and thief.”
― Sue Prideaux, I Am Dynamite!: A Life of Nietzsche

“He visited Robert Schumann's grave to lay a wreath and he became so indebted by the purchase of a piano that he could not afford the journey home to his mother and sister at Christmas. Observing that his money always ran out fast, 'probably because it was so round', he sent in his place a volume of eight of his musical compositions...”
― Sue Prideaux, I Am Dynamite! A Life of Nietzsche

“The essay that follows, 'Why I Am so Clever,' plays on an obsession with his lungs and his stomach as central to the whole philosophical exercise. He becomes a diet-and-exercise guru. If you avoid coffee and live in dry air, you will attain health equal to his own. Odd that he bans coffee while delighting in the world-beating coffee of Turin.”
― Sue Prideaux, I Am Dynamite! A Life of Nietzsche

“It was uncanny how his thoughts had power over physical events. There were no coincidences anymore. He only had to think of a person for a letter to from them to arrive politely through the door.”
― Sue Prideaux, I Am Dynamite! A Life of Nietzsche

“And, December 24, he collapsed, and three days later he lost consciousness. His weeks of recovery were not helped by his mother nagging him to keep up his Greek. He was beginning to admit to his friends that he did not like his mother and his sister's voice grated on his nerves. He was always ill when he was with them. He avoided quarrels and conflict; he felt he knew how to handle them but it did not agree with him to have to do so.”
― Sue Prideaux, I Am Dynamite! A Life of Nietzsche