346 Being misunderstood -When we are wholly misunderstood, it is impossible to completely root out any individual point of misunderstanding. We must realize this in order not to waste excessive energy in defending ourselves.
203 In the moment before the solution. -In science, it happens all the time that someone remains standing directly in front of the solution, convinced now that his effort has been wholly in vain -like someone who, untying a bow, hesitates in the moment when it has practically been undone: for that is precisely when it looks most like a knot.
44 Formula for my happiness: a yes, a no, a straight line, a goal . . .
Plato
Be kind. Every person you meet
is fighting a difficult battle.
Friedrich Nietzsche
Thus Spake Zarathustra
The lonely one offers his hand too quickly to whomever he encounters.
Friedrich Nietzsche
Thus Spoke Zarathustra
I am a forest, and a night of dark trees: but he who is not afraid of my darkness, will find banks full of roses under my cypresses.
279 Not mistrusting our feelings. -The womanly saying that we should not mistrust our feelings means nothing more than: we should eat what tastes good to us. This may even be a good everyday rule, especially for moderate natures. Different natures, however, must live according to a different principle: “you must eat not only with your mouth, but also with your head, so that your mouth’s sweet tooth does not destroy you.”
251 In parting.- Not in how one soul draws near to another, but in how it distances itself from the other, do I recognize its relation to and affinity with the other.
“Moral certainty is always a sign of cultural inferiority. The more uncivilized the man, the surer he is that he knows precisely what is right and what is wrong. All human progress, even in morals, has been the work of men who have doubted the current moral values, not of men who have whooped them up and tried to enforce them. The truly civilized man is always skeptical and tolerant, in this field as in all others. His culture is based on “I am not too sure.”
H.L. Mencken
“Faith is the surrender of the mind, it’s the surrender of reason, it’s the surrender of the only thing that makes us different from other animals. It’s our need to believe and to surrender our skepticism and our reason, our yearning to discard that and put all our trust or faith in someone or something, that is the sinister thing to me. … Out of all the virtues, all the supposed virtues, faith must be the most overrated”
Christopher Hitchens
We might all be stardust, but what we make of it is still incredible.
“The amazing thing is that every atom in your body came from a star that exploded. And, the atoms in your left hand probably came from a different star than your right hand. It really is the most poetic thing I know about physics: You are all stardust. You couldn’t be here if stars hadn’t exploded, because the elements – the carbon, nitrogen, oxygen, iron, all the things that matter for evolution – weren’t created at the beginning of time. They were created in the nuclear furnaces of stars, and the only way they could get into your body is if those stars were kind enough to explode. So, forget Jesus. The stars died so that you could be here today.”
Lawrence M. Krauss,
“Men are mistaken in thinking themselves free; their opinion is made up of consciousness of their own actions, and ignorance of the causes by which they are determined.”
Spinoza
Can we imagine a world where we first become conscious of what determines our actions and form our opinions accordingly?
I read Spinoza’s quote in the following way: we are conscious of shouting at another person and the anger we feel; consequently, our opinion is that we are angry at that person. What might have happened and caused your anger was the realization (at the crossroad of your conscious and unconscious mind) that you were caught in a lie, and you don’t want to admit it and protest loudly and angrily. And if the person was, in fact, insulting you, how does an insult actually hurt you? Most of the time, the feeling of anger has little to do with the person you are angry at but more with a complex history.
Another example is sports. If you catch a ball in mid-air, you might proclaim that you caught it, as in you guided your hand consciously to the ball by “telling” it where to go. The reality is that your hand can’t wait for your brain to make these decisions but has a shortcut to your eyes and other senses; we catch balls unconsciously, you might say. It’s the same with walking; we are not active in it, but it sure feels like we control every move. In reality, we merely point to a general direction and let our legs and the rest of our body do the rest.
Thinking about free will is hard. Try to think why you decided to get up and get some coffee. You might say you want some coffee, and that’s why, but where came that urge from? Why now coffee and not 5 minutes ago? Who and what in you “decided” that you want it now? You can say that the “I” that wants coffee we talk about here is (the whole of) you, including all your unconscious behaviors and needs. But most people feel some sort of central place within that is their “I”, the place where our thoughts come from. But then we must return to the quote above and use it to analyze this place we call “I”. Try it.
“The less the mind understands and the more things it perceives, the greater its power of feigning is; and the more things it understands, the more that power is diminished.”
“The more you struggle to live, the less you live. Give up the notion that you must be sure of what you are doing. Instead, surrender to what is real within you, for that alone is sure.”
“I realised that all the things which were the source and object of my anxiety held nothing of good or evil in themselves save in so far as the mind was influenced by them,”
Baruch Spinoza
Of three metamorphoses of the spirit I tell you: how the spirit becomes a camel; and the camel, a lion; and the lion, finally, a child.
There is much that is difficult for the spirit, the strong reverent spirit that would bear much: but the difficult and the most difficult are what its strength demands. What is difficult? asks the spirit that would bear much, and kneels down like a camel wanting to be well loaded. What is most difficult, 0 heroes, asks the spirit that would bear much, that I may take it upon myself and exult in my strength? Is it not humbling oneself to wound one’s haughtiness? Letting one’s folly shine to mock one’s wisdom?
Or is it this: parting from our cause when it triumphs? Climbing high mountains to tempt the tempter?
Or is it this: feeding on the acorns and grass of knowledge and, for the sake of the truth, suffering hunger in one’s soul?
Or is it this: being sick and sending home the comforters and making friends with the deaf, who never hear what you want?
Or is it this: stepping into filthy waters when they are the waters of truth, and not repulsing cold frogs and hot toads?
Or is it this: loving those who despise us and offering a hand to the ghost that would frighten us?
All these most difficult things the spirit that would bear much takes upon itself: like the camel that, burdened, speeds into the desert, thus the spirit speeds into its desert.
Friedrich Nietzsche
I want to learn more and more to see as beautiful what is necessary in things:—then I shall be one of those who make things beautiful. Amor fati: let that be my love from henceforth!
226 We immoralists! – This world as it concerns us, in which we need to love and be afraid, this almost invisible, inaudible world of subtle command, subtle obedience, a world of the “almost” in every respect, twisted, tricky, barbed, and loving: yes, it is well defended against clumsy spectators and friendly curiosity! We have been woven into a strong net and shirt of duties, and cannot get out of it –, in this sense we are “people of duty,” – even us! It is true that we sometimes dance quite well in our “chains” and between our “swords”; it is no less true that more often we grind our teeth and feel impatient at all the secret harshness of our fate. But we can do as we please: fools and appearances will speak up against us, claiming “those are people without duties” – fools and appearances are always against us
31 The illogical necessary. – Among the things that can reduce a thinker to despair is the knowledge that the illogical is a necessity for mankind, and that much good proceeds from the illogical. It is implanted so firmly in the passions, in language, in art, in religion, and in general in everything that lends value to life, that one cannot pull it out of these fair things without mortally injuring them. Only very naive people are capable of believing that the nature of man could be transformed into a purely logical one; but if there should be degrees of approximation to this objective, what would not have to be lost if this course were taken! Even the most rational man from time to time needs to recover nature, that is to say his illogical original relationship with all things.
75 Love and duality. -What then is love besides understanding and rejoicing in the fact that someone else lives, acts, and feels in a different and opposite way than we do? If love is to use joy to bridge over oppositions, it must not suspend or deny them. -Even love of self assumes an unalloyable duality (or multiplicity) within a single person as its precondition.
Nochrisis 