Day 3641, the end.

Daily picture, Quotes

Friedrich Nietzsche

Daybreak
Book V

564 just beyond experience!– Even great spirits have only their five-fingers’ breadth of experience- just beyond it their thinking ceases and their endless empty space and stupidity begins.

575 We aeronauts of the spirit!– All those brave birds which fly out into the distance, into the farthest distance- it is certain! somewhere or other they will be unable to go on and will perch on a mast or a bare cliffface- and they will even be thankful for this miserable accommodation! But who could venture to infer from that, that there was not an immense open space before them, that they had flown as far as one could fly! All our great teachers and predecessors have at last come to a stop and it is not with the noblest or most graceful of gestures that weariness comes to a stop: it will be the same with you and me! But what does that matter to you and me! Other birds will fly farther! This insight and faith of ours vies with them in flying up and away; it rises above our heads and above our impotence into the heights and from there surveys the distance and sees before it the flocks of birds which,
far stronger than we, still strive whither we have striven, and where everything is sea, sea, sea!- And whither then would we go? Would we cross the sea? Whither does this mighty longing draw us, this longing that is worth more to us than any pleasure? Why just in this direction, thither where all the suns of humanity have hitherto gone down? Will it perhaps be said of us one day that we too, steering westward, hoped to reach an India- but that it was our fate to be wrecked against infinity? Or, my brothers. Or? –

Day 3834, all this.

Daily picture, Quotes

Friedrich Nietzsche

Daybreak
Book V

560 What we are at liberty to do. – One can dispose of one’s drives like a gardener and, though few know it, cultivate the shoots of anger, pity, curiosity, vanity as productively and profitably as a beautiful fruit tree on a trellis; one can do it with the good or bad taste of a gardener and, as it were, in the French or English or Dutch or Chinese fashion; one can also let nature rule and only attend to a little embellishment and tidying-up here and there; one can, finally, without paying any attention to them at all, let the plants grow up and fight their fight out among themselves – indeed, one can take delight in such a wilderness, and desire precisely this delight, though it gives one some trouble, too. All this we are at liberty to do: but how many know we are at liberty to do it? Do the majority not believe in themselves as in completefully-developed facts? Have the great philosophers not put their seal on this prejudice with the doctrine of the unchangeability of character?