Quotes

Day 2913, next two.

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Friedrich Nietzsche

The Will To Power
Preface (Nov. 1887-March 1888)

2 What I relate is the history of the next two centuries. I describe what is coming, what can no longer come differently: the advent of nihilism. This history can be related even now; for necessity itself is at work here. This future speaks even now in a hundred signs, this destiny announces itself everywhere; for this music of the future all ears are cocked even now. For some time now, our whole European culture has been moving as toward a catastrophe, with a tortured tension that is growing from decade to decade: restlessly, violently, headlong, like a river that wants to reach the end, that no longer reflects, that is afraid to reflect.

Day 2899, three times.

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Friedrich Nietzsche

The Gay Science
Book three

163 After a great victory.– What is best about a great victory is that it liberates the victor from the fear of defeat. “Why not be defeated some time, too?., he says to himself; “Now I am rich enough for that..

166 Always in our company.- Whatever in nature and in history is of my own kind, speaks to me, spurs me on, and cormforts me; the rest I do not hear or forget right away. We are always only in our own company.

179 Thoughts.– Thoughts are the shadows of our feelings-always darker, emptier. and simpler.

Day 2877, driven.

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Friedrich Nietzsche

The Will To Power
Book Two: Critique of Highest Values

259 Insight: all evaluation is made from a definite perspective: that of the preservation of the individual, a community, a race, a  state, a church, a faith, a culture.- Because we forget that valua­tion is always from a perspective, a single individual contains within him a vast confusion of contradictory valuations and con­sequently of contradictory drives. This is the expression of the diseased condition in man, in contrast to the animals in which all existing instincts answer to quite definite tasks.

Day 2869, nihilism.

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Several notes from Nietzsche written in 1987 are to be found in the book The Will to Power, a collection of his notes published after his death and not meant for publication. 

Friedrich Nietzsche

The Will to Power
Book One: European Nihilism

What does nihilism mean? That the highest values evaluate themselves. The aim is lacking; “why?” finds no answer.

The supreme values in whose service man should live, especially when they were very hard on him and exacted a high price – these social values were erected over man to strengthen their voice, as if they were commands of God, as “reality,” as the “true” world, as a hope and future world. Now that the shabby origin of these values is becoming clear, the universe seems to have lost value, seems “meaningless”-but that is only a transitional stage. 

Values and their changes are related to increases in the power of those positing the values. The measure of unbelief, of permitted “freedom of the spirit” as an expression of an increase in power. “Nihilism” an ideal of the highest degree of powerfulness of the spirit, the over-richest life-partly destructive, partly ironic.

Day 2862, something to read.

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Friedrich Nietzsche

Human All Too Human II
Part II. The Wanderer And His Shadow.

23. Whether the Adherents of the Doctrine of Free Will have a Right to Punish?—Men whose vocation it is to judge and punish try to establish in every case whether an evil-doer is really responsible for his act, whether he was able to apply his reasoning powers, whether he acted with motives and not unconsciously or under constraint. If he is punished, it is because he preferred the worse to the better motives, which he must consequently have known. Where this knowledge is wanting, man is, according to the prevailing view, not responsible—unless his ignorance, e.g. his ignorantia legis, be the consequence of an intentional neglect to learn what he ought: in that case he already preferred the worse to the better motives at the time when he refused to learn, and must now pay the penalty of his unwise choice. If, on the other hand, perhaps through stupidity or shortsightedness, he has never seen the better motives, he is generally not punished, for people say that he made a wrong choice, he acted like a brute beast. The intentional rejection of the better reason is now needed before we treat the offender as fit to be punished.

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Day 2856, cannot.

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Friedrich Nietzsche

The Will to Power
Book III: Principle of a New Determination of Values/Part 1. The Will to Power as Knowledge

473 The intellect cannot criticize itself, precisely because it cannot be compared with different kinds of intellects, and because its ability to acquire knowledge would be manifested only in the face of ‘true reality’; i.e. in order to criticize the intellect, we should have to be superior beings who possessed ‘absolute knowledge’. This already presupposes that, apart from all perspectival kinds of observation and sensory and intellectual appropriation, there is something, an ‘in-itself’ – but the psychological derivation of the belief in things forbids our speaking of ‘things in themselves’.

Day 2850, nihilism.

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Friedrich Nietzsche

The Will to Power
Part 1. Nihilism

38 There has recently been a great deal of idle talk using a loose and altogether inapplicable term: pessimism. Everywhere the talk is about pessimism, and everywhere people (occasionally even sensible people!) are wrangling over a specific question which they think admits of an answer: whether optimism or pessimism is correct. What they do not understand, although it is palpable, is that pessimism is not a problem but a symptom, that the term should be replaced by nihilism, that the question of whether it is better to be or not to be, is itself an illness, a decline in strength, a kind of hypersensitivity. The pessimistic movement is only an expression of physiological décadence . . .

Day 2842, nothingnesses.

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Friedrich Nietzsche

The will to power
Book two: Critique of highest Values

302 (Nov. 1887-March 1888)
If only human values would be put back once and for all into the places in which alone they belong: as loafers’ values. Many species of animals have already vanished; if man too should vanish nothing would be lacking in the world. One must be sufficient of a philosopher to admire this nothing, too (-Nil admirari)*

303 (Spring 1888)
Man a little, eccentric species of animal, which-fortunately -has its day; all on earth a mere moment, an incident, an exception without consequences, something of no importance to the general character of the earth; the earth itself, like every star, a hiatus between two nothingnesses, an event without plan, reason, will, self-consciousness, the worst kind of necessity, stupid necessity- Something in us rebels against this view; the serpent vanity says to us: “all that must be false, for it arouses indignation could all that not be merely appearance? And man, in spite of all, as Kant says-“

*Admire nothing-usually quoted in the sense of “wonder at nothing (from Horace, Epistles, I.6.1.).

Day 2836, power.

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Friedrich Nietzsche

The will to power

Preface (Nov. 1887-March 1888)

1 Of what is great one must either be silent or speak with greatness. With greatness, that means cynically and with innocence.

2 What I relate is the history of the next two centuries. I describe what is coming, what can no longer come differently: the advent of nihilism. This history can be related even now; for necessity itself is at work here. This future speaks even now in a hundred signs, this destiny announces itself everywhere; for this music of the future all ears are cocked even now. For some time now, our whole European culture has been moving as toward a catastrophe, with a tortured tension that is growing from decade to decade: restlessly, violently, headlong, like a river that wants to reach the end, that no longer reflects, that is afraid to reflect.

3 He that speaks here, conversely, has done nothing so far but reflect: a philosopher and solitary by instinct, who has found his advantage in standing aside and outside, in patience, in procrastination, in staying behind; as a spirit of daring and experiment that has already lost its way once in every labyrinth of the future; as a soothsayer-bird spirit who looks back when relating what will come; as the first perfect nihilist of Europe who, however, has even now lived through the whole of nihilism, to the end, leaving it behind, outside himself.

Editie translated by Walter Kaufmann and R.J. Hollingdale

Day 2832, steps.

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Krishnamurti

I maintain that truth is a pathless land, and you cannot approach it by any path whatsoever, by any religion, by any sect. That is my point of view, and I adhere to that absolutely and unconditionally. Truth, being limitless, unconditioned, unapproachable by any path whatsoever, cannot be organized; nor should any organization be formed to lead or to coerce people along any particular path. If you first understand that, then you will see how impossible it is to organize a belief. A belief is purely an individual matter, and you cannot and must not organize it. If you do, it becomes dead, crystallized; it becomes a creed, a sect, a religion, to be imposed on others”