On the Advantage and Disadvantage of History for Life Quotes

“Without forgetting it is quite impossible to live at all.”
― Friedrich Nietzsche, On the Advantage and Disadvantage of History for Life

“One who cannot leave himself behind on the threshold of the moment and forget the past, who cannot stand on a single point, like a goddess of victory, without fear or giddiness, will never know what happiness is; and, worse still, will never do anything that makes others happy.”
― Friedrich Nietzsche, On the Advantage and Disadvantage of History for Life

“Happiness: being able to forget or, to express in a more learned fashion.”
― Friedrich Nietzsche, On the Advantage and Disadvantage of History for Life

“Human existence basically is──a never to be completed imperfect tense.”
― Friedrich Nietzsche, On the Advantage and Disadvantage of History for Life

“The crowd of influences streaming on the young soul is so great, the clods of barbarism and violence flung at him so strange and overwhelming, that an assumed stupidity is his only refuge.”
― Friedrich Nietzsche, On the Advantage and Disadvantage of History for Life

“The beast lives unhistorically; for it 'goes into' the present, like a number, without leaving any curious remainder.”
― Friedrich Nietzsche, On the Advantage and Disadvantage of History for Life

“As if it were the task of every time to be just to everything before it! Ages and generations have never the right to be the judges of all previous ages and generations: only to the rarest men in them can that difficult mission fall. Who compels you to judge? If it is your wish—you must prove first that you are capable of justice. As judges, you must stand higher than that which is to be judged: as it is, you have only come later. The guests that come last to the table should rightly take the last places: and will you take the first? Then do some great and mighty deed: the place may be prepared for you then, even though you do come last.”
― Friedrich Nietzsche, On the Advantage and Disadvantage of History for Life

“When death brings at last the desired forgetfulness, it abolishes life and being together, and sets the seal on the knowledge that "being" is merely a continual "has been," a thing that lives by denying and destroying and contradicting itself.”
― Friedrich Nietzsche, On the Advantage and Disadvantage of History for Life

“When the past speaks it always speaks as an oracle: only if you are an architect of the future and know the present will you understand it.”
― Friedrich Nietzsche, On the Advantage and Disadvantage of History for Life

“Nothing lives which would be worthy of your striving, and the earth deserves not a sigh. Pain and boredom is our being and the world is excrement, −−nothing else. Calm yourself.”
― Friedrich Nietzsche, On the Advantage and Disadvantage of History for Life

“What a school of politeness is such a contemplation of the past! To take everything objectively, to be angry at nothing, to love nothing, to understand everything-- makes one gentle and pliable.”
― Friedrich Nietzsche, On the Advantage and Disadvantage of History for Life

“Every past is worth condemning.”
― Friedrich Nietzsche, On the Advantage and Disadvantage of History for Life

“There is something the child sees that he does not see; something the child hears that he does not hear; and this something is the most important thing of all. Because he does not understand it, his understanding is more childish than the child's and more simple than simplicity itself; in spite of the many clever wrinkles on his parchment face, and the masterly play of his fingers in unravelling the knots.”
― Friedrich Nietzsche, On the Advantage and Disadvantage of History for Life

“And that discovery would betray the closely guarded secret of modern culture to the laughter of the world. For we moderns have nothing of our own. We only become worth notice by filling ourselves to overflowing with foreign customs, arts, philosophies, religions and sciences: we are wandering encyclopaedias, as an ancient Greek who had strayed into our time would probably call us. But the only value of an encyclopaedia lies in the inside, in the contents, not in what is written outside, in the binding or the wrapper. And so the whole of modern culture is essentially internal; the bookbinder prints something like this on the cover: “Manual of internal culture for external barbarians.” The opposition of inner and outer makes the outer side still more barbarous, as it would naturally be, when the outward growth of a rude people merely developed its primitive inner needs. For what means has nature of repressing too great a luxuriance from without? Only one,—to be affected by it as little as possible, to set it aside and stamp it out at the first opportunity. And so we have the custom of no longer taking real things seriously, we get the feeble personality on which the real and the permanent make so little impression. Men become at last more careless and accommodating in external matters, and the [Pg 34] considerable cleft between substance and form is widened; until they have no longer any feeling for barbarism, if only their memories be kept continually titillated, and there flow a constant stream of new things to be known, that can be neatly packed up in the cupboards of their memory.”
― Friedrich Nietzsche, On the Advantage and Disadvantage of History for Life

“The power of gradually losing all feeling of strangeness or astonishment, and finally being pleased at anything, is called the historical sense or historical culture.”
― Friedrich Nietzsche, On the Advantage and Disadvantage of History for Life

“It takes a great deal of strength to be able to live and to forget how far living and being unjust are one.”
― Friedrich Nietzsche, On the Advantage and Disadvantage of History for Life

“Every past, however, is worth condemning—for that is how matters happen to stand with human affairs: human violence and weakness have always contributed strongly to shaping them.”
― Friedrich Nietzsche, On the Advantage and Disadvantage of History for Life

“... a thing can only live through a pious illusion.”
― Friedrich Nietzsche, On the Advantage and Disadvantage of History for Life

“The visible action is not the self-manifestation of the inward life, but only a weak and crude attempt of a single thread to make a show of representing the whole.”
― Friedrich Nietzsche, On the Advantage and Disadvantage of History for Life

“We suffer from the malady of words, and have no trust in any feeling that is not stamped with its special word.”
― Friedrich Nietzsche, On the Advantage and Disadvantage of History for Life

“The great works are produced in such an ecstasy of love that they must always be unworthy of it, however great their worth otherwise.”
― Friedrich Nietzsche, On the Advantage and Disadvantage of History for Life

“The historical imagination has never flown so far, even in a dream; for now the history of man is merely the continuation of that of animals and plants; the universal historian finds traces of himself even in the utter depths of the sea, in the living slime. He stands astounded in the face of the enormous way that man has run, and his gaze quivers before the mightier wonder, the modern man who can see all the way! He stands proudly on the pyramid of the world-process; and while he lays the final stone of his knowledge, he seems to cry aloud to listening Nature: "We are at the top, we are at the top; we are the completion of Nature!”
― Friedrich Nietzsche, On the Advantage and Disadvantage of History for Life

“The unselective knowledge drive resembles the indiscriminate sexual drive—signs of vulgarity!”
― Friedrich Nietzsche, On the Advantage and Disadvantage of History for Life

“This is a parable for every individual among us. He must organize the chaos in himself by recalling in himself his own real needs. His honesty, his better and more genuine character must now and then struggle against what will be constantly repeated, relearned, and imitated.”
― Friedrich Nietzsche, On the Advantage and Disadvantage of History for Life

“We stop too often at knowing the good without doing it, because we also know the better but cannot do it.”
― Friedrich Nietzsche, On the Use and Abuse of History for Life

“The progress of science has been amazingly rapid in the last decade; but consider the savants, those exhausted hens. They are certainly not “harmonious” natures: they can merely cackle more than before, because they lay eggs oftener: but the eggs are always smaller, [Pg 64] though their books are bigger. The natural result of it all is the favourite “popularising” of science (or rather its feminising and infantising), the villainous habit of cutting the cloth of science to fit the figure of the “general public.”
― Friedrich Nietzsche, On the Advantage and Disadvantage of History for Life

“A thing can only live through a pious illusion.”
― Friedrich Nietzsche, On the Advantage and Disadvantage of History for Life

“I hate everything that merely instructs me without increasing or directly quickening my activity.' These words of Goethe, like a sincere ceterum censeo, may well stand at the head of my thoughts on the worth and the worthlessness of history. I will show in them why instruction that does not “quicken,” knowledge that slackens the rein of activity, why in fact history, in Goethe's phrase, must be seriously “hated,” as a costly and superfluous luxury of the understanding: for we are still in want of the necessaries of life, and the superfluous is an enemy to the necessary. We do need history, but quite differently from the jaded idlers in the garden of knowledge, however grandly they may look down on our rude and unpicturesque requirements. In other words, we need it for life and action, not as a convenient way to avoid life and action, or to excuse a selfish life and a cowardly or base action. We would serve history only so far as it serves life; but to value its study beyond a certain point mutilates and degrades life: and this is a fact that certain marked symptoms of our time make it as necessary as it may be painful to bring to the test of experience.”
― Friedrich Nietzsche, On the Advantage and Disadvantage of History for Life

“All living things need an atmosphere around them, a secret circle of darkness. If this veil is taken from them, if people condemn a religion, an art, a genius to orbit like a star without an atmosphere, then we should no longer wonder about their rapid decay and the way they become hard and barren. That is the way it is now with all great things which never succeed without some delusion.”
― Friedrich Nietzsche, On the Advantage and Disadvantage of History for Life

“Nevertheless, to learn right away something new from the same example, how fleeting and weak, how imprecise that comparison would be! If the comparison is to carry out this powerful effect, how much of the difference will be missed in the process. How forcefully must the individuality of the past be wrenched into a general shape, with all its sharp corners and angles broken off for the sake of the correspondence! In fact, basically something that once was possible could appear possible a second time only if the Pythagoreans were correct in thinking that with the same constellations of the celestial bodies the same phenomena on the Earth had to repeat themselves, even in the small single particulars, so that when the stars have a certain position relative to each other, a Stoic and an Epicurean will, in an eternal recurrence, unite and assassinate Caesar, and with another stellar position Columbus will eternally rediscover America.”
― Friedrich Nietzsche, On the Advantage and Disadvantage of History for Life