Friedrich Nietzsche

Human, All Too Human II

Mixed Opinions and Maxims

63 Belated pregnancy. – Those who have come to their works and deeds without understanding how, generally go around afterward all the more pregnant with them: as if in order to prove after the fact that these are their children and not those of chance.

105 Language and feeling. -We see that language has not been given to us for the communication of feeling in the way that all simple humans are ashamed of looking for words to describe their deeper agitations: such things are expressed only in ac­tions and even here they blush if someone else seems to guess their motives. Among poets, who were in general denied this shame by the gods, the nobler ones are nonetheless more monosyllabic in the language of feeling and betray a certain constraint: whereas the true poets of feeling are mostly shame­ less in practical life.

127 Against the faulters of brevity. -A brief saying can be the fruit and harvest of much long thought: but the reader who is a novice in this field and has not yet reflected upon it at all sees in all brief sayings something embryonic, not without a dis­paraging sign to the author for having placed upon his table something so immature and unripe.