Friedrich Nietzsche

Human, All Too Human

By Oneself Alone

621 Love as a trick. -Anyone who really wants to get to know something new (be it a person, an event, a book) does well to take up this new thing with all possible love, to quickly avert his eye from and even to forget everything in it that appears hostile, offensive, or false to him: so that, for example, we give the author of a book the greatest possible head start and, as at a race, actually yearn with a pounding heart for him to reach his goal. By proceeding in this way, we press into the heart of the new thing, to the point that gives it motion: and this is precisely what getting to know it means. If we have gotten this far, the understanding can set its restrictions afterward; that overestimation, that temporary staying of the critical pendulum, was simply a trick for enticing the soul of the thing to come forth.