Excerpts from the Great Books

2009-03-07T19:00:00.000-08:00

The compass and tower-building of the sciences has grown enormous, and therewith the probability has also grown enormous that the philosopher will become weary while still no more than a learner, or that he will let himself be stopped somewhere and “specialize”: so that he will never reach his proper height, the height from which he can survey, look around and look down. Or that he will reach this height too late, when his best time is past and his best strength spent; or damaged, coarsened, degenerate, so that his view, his total value judgment, no longer means much. Perhaps it is the very refinement of his intellectual conscience which makes him linger on the way and arrive late; he fears he may be seduced into dilettantism, into becoming an insect with a thousand feet and a thousand antennae, he knows too well that one who has lost respect for himself can no longer command, can no longer lead as a man of knowledge either, unless he wants to be come a great actor, a philosophical Cagliostro and pied piper of the spirit, in short a misleader.

2009-03-06T13:35:00.000-08:00

Fear is the mother of morality.

2009-03-05T13:28:00.000-08:00

There are certain strong and dangerous drives, such as enterprisingness, foolhardiness, revengefulness, craft, rapacity, ambition, which had hitherto had not only to be honoured from the point of view of their social utility – under different names, naturally, from those chosen here – but also mightily developed and cultivated (because they were constantly needed to protect the community as a whole against the enemies of the community as a whole); these drives are now felt to be doubly dangerous – now that the diversionary outlets for them are lacking – and are gradually branded as immoral and given over to calumny.

2009-03-04T13:27:00.000-08:00

“Love of one’s neighbor” is always something secondary, in part conventional and arbitrarily illusory, when compared with fear of one’s neighbor.

2009-03-03T13:19:00.000-08:00

The man of an era of dissolution which mixes the races together and who therefore contains within him the inheritance of a diversified descent, that is to say contrary and often not merely contrary drives and values which struggle with one another and rarely leave one another in peace – such a man of late cultures and broken lights will, on average, be a rather weak man....Then there arise those marvelously incomprehensible and unfathomable men, those enigmatic men predestined for victory and the seduction of others…

2009-03-02T10:23:00.000-08:00

Inasmuch as ever since there have been human beings there have also been human herds (family groups, communities, tribes, nations, states, churches), and always very many who obey compared with the very small number those who command – considering, that is to say, that hitherto nothing has been practiced and cultivated among men better or longer than obedience, it is fair to suppose that as a rule a need for it is by now innate as a kind of formal conscience which commands: “thou shalt unconditionally do this, unconditionally not do that,” in short “thou shalt.”

2009-03-01T10:28:00.000-08:00

If we think of this instinct taken to its ultimate extravagance there would be no commanders or independent men at all; or, if they existed, they would suffer from a band conscience and in order to be able to command would have to practice a deceit upon themselves: the deceit, that is, that they too were only obeying.

2009-02-28T10:06:00.000-08:00

We fabricate the greater part of the experience and can hardly be compelled not to contemplate some event as its “inventor.” All this means: we are from the very heart and from the very first – accustomed to lying. Or, to express it more virtuously and hypocritically, in short more pleasantly: one is much more of an artist than one realizes.

2009-02-27T10:01:00.000-08:00

It is the premature hypotheses, the fictions, the good stupid will to “believe,” the lack of mistrust and patience which are evolved first—it is only late, and then imperfectly, that our senses learn to be subtle, faithful, cautious organs of understanding. It is more comfortable for our eye to react to a particular object by producing again an image it has often produced before than by retaining what is new and different in an impression: the latter requires more strength, more “morality.” To hear something new is hard and painful for the ear.

2009-02-26T09:29:00.000-08:00

The industrious races find leisure very hard to endure: it was the masterpiece of English instinct to make Sunday so extremely holy and boring that the English unconsciously long again for their week – and working-days…

There have to be fasts of many kinds; and wherever powerful drives and habits prevail legislators have to see to it that there are intercalary days on which such a drive is put in chains and learns to hunger again.

...

2009-02-25T07:32:00.000-08:00

Every morality is, as opposed to laisser aller, a piece of tyranny against “nature,” likewise against “reason”: but that can be no objection to it unless one is in possession of some other morality which decrees that any kind of tyranny and unreason is impermissible.

2009-02-24T07:07:00.000-08:00

There are moralities which are intended to justify their authors before others; other moralities are intended to calm him and make him content with himself, with others he wants to crucify and humiliate himself; with others he wants to wreak vengeance , with others hide himself, with others transfigure himself and set himself on high; this morality serves to make its author forget, that to make him or something about him forgotten; many moralist would like to exercise power and their creative moods on mankind; other, Kant perhaps among them, give to understand with their morality: “what is worthy of respect in me is that I know how to obey—and things ought to be no different with you!”

2009-02-23T07:09:00.000-08:00

“Not that you lied to me but that I no longer believe you—that is what has distressed me--.”

2009-02-22T07:09:00.001-08:00

The consequences of our actions take us by the scruff of the neck, altogether indifferent to the fact that we have “improved” in the meantime.

2009-02-22T07:09:00.000-08:00

Ultimately one loves one’s desires and not that which is desired.

2009-02-21T07:09:00.000-08:00

To talk about oneself a great deal can also be a means of concealing oneself.

2009-02-20T07:09:00.000-08:00

One no longer loves one’s knowledge enough when one has communicated it.

2009-02-19T07:08:00.000-08:00

Madness is something rare in individuals—but in groups, parties, peoples, ages it is the rule.

2009-02-18T07:07:00.000-08:00

“Where the tree of knowledge stands is always Paradise”: thus speak the oldest and youngest serpents.

2009-02-17T06:58:00.000-08:00

He who fights with monsters should look to it that he himself does not become a monster. And when you gaze long into an abyss the abyss also gazes into you.

Beyond Good and Evil: Prelude to a Philosophy of the Future (by Friedrich Nietzsche)

2009-02-16T11:23:00.000-08:00

What we do in dreams we also do when we are awake: we invent and fabricate the person with whom we associate – and immediately forget we have done so.

2009-02-15T11:23:00.000-08:00

One seeks a midwife for his thoughts, another someone to whom he can be a midwife: thus originates a good conversation.

2009-02-14T11:22:00.000-08:00

All credibility, all good conscience, all evidence of truth comes only from the senses.

2009-02-13T11:22:00.000-08:00

He who does not know how to find the road to his ideal lives more frivolously and imprudently than the man without an ideal.

2009-02-12T11:22:00.000-08:00

One is punished most for one’s virtues.

2009-02-11T11:21:00.000-08:00

The sexes deceive themselves about one another: the reason being that fundamentally they love and honor only themselves (or their own ideal, to express it more pleasantly).

2009-02-10T11:21:00.000-08:00

The more abstract the truth you want to teach the more you must seduce the senses to it.

2009-02-09T11:21:00.000-08:00

The will to overcome an emotion is ultimately only the will of another emotion or of several others.

...

2009-02-08T05:27:00.000-08:00

To close your ears to even the best counter argument once the decision has been taken: sign of a strong character. Thus an occasional will to stupidity.

2009-02-07T05:26:00.000-08:00

The disappointed man speaks. – “I listened for an echo and I heard only praise.”

2009-02-06T05:23:00.000-08:00

What? A great man? I always see only the actor of his own ideal.

2009-02-05T05:22:00.000-08:00

Mature manhood: that means to have rediscovered the seriousness one had as a child at play.

2009-02-04T05:18:00.000-08:00

Terrible experiences make one wonder whether he who experiences them is not something terrible.

2009-02-03T05:16:00.000-08:00

One begins to mistrust very clever people when they become embarrassed.

2009-02-02T05:13:00.000-08:00

A thing explained is a thing we have no further concern with – what did that god mean who counseled: “know they self!”? Does that perhaps mean: “Have no further concern with they self! Be objective!”

2009-02-01T05:11:00.000-08:00

Under conditions of peace the warlike man attacks himself.

2009-01-31T05:10:00.000-08:00

A man with genius is unendurable if he does not also possess at least two other things: gratitude and cleanliness.

2009-01-30T05:05:00.000-08:00

As long as you still feel the stars as being something "over you" you still lack the eye of the man of knowledge.

2009-01-29T23:28:00.000-08:00

Among men, as among every other species, there is a surplus of failures, of the sick, the degenerate, the fragile, of those who are bound to suffer; the successful cases are, among men too, always the exception, and, considering that man is the animal whose nature has not yet been fixed, the rare exception. But worse still: the higher the type of man a man represents, the greater the improbability he will turn out well...

2009-01-28T23:00:00.000-08:00

To ordinary men, finally the great majority who exist for service and general utility and who may exist only for that purpose, religion gives an invaluable contentment with their nature and station, manifold peace of heart, ennobling of obedience, one piece of joy and sorrow more to share with their fellows, and some transfiguration of the whole everydayness, the whole lowliness, the whole half-bestial poverty of their souls. Religion and religious significance of life sheds sunshine over these perpetual drudges and makes their own sight tolerable to them, it has the effect which an Epicurean philosophy usually has on sufferers of a higher rank, refreshing, refining as it were making the most use of suffering, ultimately even sanctifying and justifying. Perhaps nothing in Christianity and Buddhism is so venerable as there are of teaching even the lowliest to set themselves through piety in an apparently higher order of things and thus to preserve their contentment with the real order, within which they live hard enough lives – and necessarily have to!

2009-01-27T17:45:00.000-08:00

For the strong and independent prepared and predestined for command, in whom the art and reason of a ruling race is incarnated, religion is one more means of overcoming resistance so as to be able to rule: as a bond that unites together ruler and ruled and betrays and hands over to the former the consciences of the latter, all that is hidden and most intimate in them which would like to exclude itself from obedience; and if some natures of such noble descent incline through lofty spirituality to a more withdrawn and meditative life and reserve to themselves only the most refined kind of rule (over select disciples or brothers), then religion can even be used as a means of obtaining peace from the noise and effort of cruder modes of government, and cleanliness from the necessary dirt of all politics.

2009-01-26T17:40:00.000-08:00

He who has seen deeply into the world knows what wisdom there is in the fact that men are superficial. It is their instinct for preservation which teaches them to be fickle, light and false.

...

One could determine the degree to which life has been spoiled for them by the extent to which they want to see its image falsified, attenuated and made otherworldly and divine.

2009-01-23T17:39:00.000-08:00

Every age has its own divine kind of naivety for the invention of which other ages may envy it…

2009-01-22T16:07:00.000-08:00

We think that severity, force, slavery, peril in the street and in the heart, concealment, stoicism, the art of experiment and devilry of every kind, that everything evil, dreadful, tyrannical, beast of prey and serpent in man serves to enhance the species “man” just as much as does its opposite

2009-01-21T15:42:00.000-08:00

One has to get rid of the bad taste of wanting to be in agreement with many. “Good” is no longer good when your neighbor takes it into his mouth. And how could there exist a “common good”! The expression is a self-contradiction: what can be common has ever but little value. In the end, it must be as it is and has always been: great things are for the great, abysses for the profound, shudders and delicacies for the refined, and in sum, all rare things for the rare.

2009-01-20T15:42:00.000-08:00

One must test oneself to see whether one is destined for independence and command; and one must do so at the proper time. One should not avoid one’s test, although they are perhaps the most dangerous game one could play and are in the end tests which are taken before ourselves and before no other judge.

2009-01-19T15:41:00.000-08:00

There is some point to “truth,” to the search for truth; and if a human being goes about it too humanely—“il ne cherche le vrai que pour faire le bien”—I wager he finds nothing.

2009-01-16T15:40:00.000-08:00

Our supreme insights must—and should!—sound like follies, in certain cases like crimes, when they come impermissibly to the ears of those who are no predisposed and predestined for them.

2009-01-15T05:03:00.000-08:00

Few are made for independence – it is the privilege of the strong.

2009-01-14T05:02:00.000-08:00

Cynicism is the only form in which common souls come close to honesty.

2009-01-13T05:01:00.000-08:00

All company is bad company except the company of one’s equals.

2009-01-12T02:52:00.000-08:00

Every superior human being will instinctively aspire after a secret citadel where he is set free from the crowd, the many, the majority, where, as its exception, he may forget the rule “man”

2009-01-09T02:42:00.000-08:00

Take care, philosophers and friends of knowledge, and beware of martyrdom: Of suffering “for the sake of truth”! Even of defending yourselves! It spoils all the innocence and fine neutrality of your conscience, it makes you obstinate against rebuffs and red rages, it makes you stupid, brutal and bullish if in the struggle with danger, slander, suspicion, casting out and even grosser consequences of hostility you finally even have to act as defenders of truth on earth—as if “truth” were so innocuous and inept a person she stood in need of defending!

...

Better to step aside! Flee away and conceal yourselves! And have your masks and subtlety, so that you may be misunderstood! Or feared a little!

2009-01-08T02:36:00.000-08:00

…the desire to bear the whole and sole responsibility for one’s actions and to absolve God, world, ancestors, chance, society from responsibility for them, is nothing less than the desire to be precisely that causa sui and, with more than Munchhausen temerity, to pull oneself into existence out of the swamp of nothingness by one’s own hair.

2009-01-07T02:29:00.000-08:00

A man who wills—commands something in himself which obeys or which he believes obeys.

2009-01-06T02:28:00.000-08:00

Will is…above all an emotion: and in fact the emotion of command.

2009-01-05T02:28:00.000-08:00

A thought comes when “it” wants, not when “I” want; so that it is a falsification of the facts to say: the subject “I” is the condition of the predicate “think.”

2009-01-02T02:21:00.000-08:00

A living thing desires above all to vent its strength—life as such is will to power—:self-preservation is only one of the indirect and most frequent consequences of it.

2009-01-01T02:14:00.000-08:00

To recognize untruth as a condition of life: that, to be sure, means to resist customary value-sentiments in a dangerous fashion; and a philosophy which ventures to do so places itself, by that act alone, beyond good and evil.