Quotes

Day 3179, For many people.

Daily picture, Quotes

Friedrich Nietzsche

Human, All Too Human
By Oneself Alone

586 Of the hour hand ef /life. -Life consists of rare individual moments of the highest significance and countless intervals of time in which at best the shadowy images of those moments hover around us. Love, spring, every beautiful melody, mountains, the moon, the sea – only once do all those things speak fully to the heart: if in fact they ever do find their way completely into words. For many people do not have any such moments and are themselves intervals and pauses in the symphony of real life.

Day 3172, three times.

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Friedrich Nietzsche

The Gay Science
Joke, Cunning, and Revenge

18 Narrow Souls
Narrow souls I cannot abide;
There’s almost no good or evil inside.

21 Against Airs
Those who inflate themselves are cursed
When pricked by a small pin to burst.

25 Request
The minds of others I know well;
But who I am. I cannot tell:

My eye is much too close to me,
I am not what I saw and see.
It would be quite a benefit
If only I could sometimes sit
Farther away; but my foes are
Too distant; close friends. still too far;
Between my friends and me, the middle
Would do. My wish? You guess my riddle.

Day 3164, far away.

Daily picture, Quotes

Friedrich Nietzsche

Human, all too Human
From the Souls of Artists and Writers

148 Poets as the easers of life. -The poets, insofar as they, too, want to make our lives easier, either turn our gaze away from the toilsome present or help the present acquire new colors by shining light upon it from the past. To be capable of this, they must themselves be turned back toward the past in many respects: so that we can use them as bridges to far away times and ideas, to dying or deceased religions and cultures. They are, in fact, always and necessarily epigones. Admittedly, we can say some unfavorable things about the means that they use to make life easier: they soothe and heal only temporarily, only for the moment; they even keep people from working toward genuine improvement of their circumstances, because they suspend and, by palliating it, discharge the passion that impels dissatisfied people toward action. 

Day 3158, Escape from Freedom.

Daily picture, Poetry, Quotes 
There is a line going through me
from one outside
to another
outside

It is not clear if something happens
in between
in me
between
these two...

events

“Modern man lives under the illusion that he knows ‘what he wants,’ while he actually wants what he is supposed to want. In order to accept this it is necessary to realize that to know what one really wants is not comparatively easy, as most people think, but one of the most difficult problems any human being has to solve. It is a task we frantically try to avoid by accepting ready-made goals as though they were our own.”
Erich Fromm, Escape from Freedom

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Day 3154, current.

Daily picture, My thoughts, Poetry, Quotes 
We've all been in a line
upwards 
to a horizon
counting the steps we take
as if we count for something

Infinity was, for a long time, a philosophical concept. We now live our lives as if we live forever, having a handful of genuine experiences at the end, where the rest is just meaningless time between these events, meaningless like a single drop is in a stream going down, part of it all but also not. We live as if life has no value because we still cannot believe that this is it; you don’t wash away hundreds of generations of indoctrination in the big promise of an afterlife or reincarnation.

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Day 3152, yardstick.

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Friedrich Nietzsche

Daybreak
Book II

139 Said to be higher! – You say that the morality of pity is a higher morality than that of stoicism? Prove it! but note that ‘higher’ and ‘ lower’ in morality is not to be measured by a moral yardstick: for there is no absolute morality. So take your yardstick from elsewhere and – watch out!

Day 3148, eternity.

Daily picture, Quotes

Friedrich Nietzsche

Thus Spoke Zarathustra
The Seven Seals (or the yes and amen song)

3 If ever one breath came to me of the creative breath and of that heavenly need that constrains even accidents to dance star-dances; if I ever laughed the laughter of creative lightning which is followed obediently but grumblingly by the long thunder of the deed; if I ever played dice with gods at the gods’ table, the earth, till the earth quaked and burst and snorted up floods of fire-for the earth is a table for gods and trembles with creative new words and gods’ throws: Oh, how should I not lust after eternity and after the nuptial ring of rings, the ring of recurrence? Never yet have I found the woman from whom I wanted children, unless it be this woman whom I love: for I love you, 0 eternity. For I love you, 0 eternity!

Day 3144, many.

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Friedrich Nietzsche

Daybreak
Book II

1 25 On the ‘realm of freedom‘. – We can think many, many more things than we can do or experience – that is to say, our thinking is superficial and content with the surface; indeed, it does not notice that it is the surface. If our intellect had evolved strictly in step with our strength and the extent to which we exercise our strength, the dominant principle of our thinking would be that we can understand only that which we can do – if understanding is possible at all. A man is thirsty and cannot get water, but the pictures his thought produces bring water ceaselessly before his eyes, as though nothing were easier to procure – the superficial and easily satisfied character of the intellect cannot  grasp the actual need and distress, and yet it feels superior; it is proud of being able to do more, to run faster, to be at its goal almost in a twinkling – and thus it is that the realm of thought appears to be, in comparison with the realm of action, willing and experience, a realm of freedom: while in reality it is, as aforesaid, only a realm of surfaces and self-satisfaction.

Day 3129, neighbour.

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Friedrich Nietzsche

Daybreak
Book II

1 1 8 What is our neighbour! – What do we understand to be the boundaries of our neighbour: I mean that with which he as it were engraves and impresses himself into and upon us? We understand nothing of him except the change in us of which he is the cause – our knowledge of him is like hollow space which has been shaped. We attribute to him the sensations his actions evoke in us, and thus bestow upon him a false, inverted positivity. According to our knowledge of ourself we make of him a satellite of our own system: and when he shines for us or grows dark and we are the ultimate cause in both cases – we nonetheless believe the opposite! World of phantoms in which we live! I nverted, upsidedown, empty world, yet dreamed of as full and upright!

Day 3122, two.

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Friedrich Nietzsche

Daybreak
Book 1

21 Observance of the law‘. – If obedience to a moral precept produces a result different from the one promised and expected, and instead of the promised good fortune the moral man unexpectedly encounters ill fortune and misery, the conscientious and fearful will always be able to recourse to saying: ‘ something was overlooked in the way it was performed’. In the worst event, a profoundly sorrowful and crushed mankind will even decree: ‘ it is impossible to perform the precept properly, we are weak and sinful through and through and in the depths of us incapable of morality, consequently we can lay no claim to success and good fonune. Moral precepts and promises are for better beings than we are.

35 Feelings and their origination in judgments. – ‘Trust your feelings!’ – But feelings are nothing final or original; behind feelings there stand judgments and evaluations which we inherit in the form of feelings ( inclinations, aversions). The inspiration born of a feeling is the grandchild of a judgment – and often of a false judgment! – and in any event not a child of your own! To trust one’s feelings – means to give more obedience to one’s grandfather and grandmother and their grandparents than to the gods which are in us: our reason and our experience.

Day 3102, nothing against.

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Friedrich Nietzsche

Human, All Too Human
In Relations With Others

373 Arrogance. -There is nothing against which we should guard more carefully than against the growth of the weed that is called arrogance and that spoils all we reap; for there is an arrogance in affection, in signs of respect, in benevolent familiarity, in caresses, in friendly advice, in admission of errors, in pity for others, and all these beautiful things arouse repugnance if that weed sprouts among them. An arrogant person, that is, anyone who wants to seem more important than he is or is considered to be, always miscalculates. To be sure, he has a momentary success in his favor, insofar as those people in whose presence he behaves arrogantly generally pay him the degree of honor that he demands, whether out of fear or indolence; but they take a terrible revenge for this by subtracting exactly as much from the value that they previously ascribed to him as there is excess in the amount that he has demanded. There is nothing for which people make us pay more dearly than humiliating them. An arrogant person can make his genuinely great merit so suspect and so small in the eyes of others that they trample it into the dust.-Even a proud demeanor is something that we should allow ourselves only where we can be quite certain not to be misunderstood or to be considered arrogant, in front of friends or wives, for example. For there is no greater folly in our relations with other people than acquiring a reputation for being arrogant; it is even worse than not having learned how to tell lies politely.

Day 3094, things.

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Friedrich Nietzsche

Human,All Too Human I
By Oneself Alone

487 The passion for things. -Anyone who directs his passion toward things (sciences, the public welfare, cultural interests, arts) takes much of the fire away from his passion for people (even when they are representatives of those things, as statesmen, philosophers, artists are the representatives of their creations).

Day 3089, a morning in the city.

Day's pictures, Quotes

And except on a certain kind of winter evening—six-thirty in the Seventies, say, already dark and bitter with a wind off the river, when I would be walking very fast toward a bus and would look in the bright windows of brownstones and see cooks working in clean kitchens and and imagine women lighting candles on the floor above and beautiful children being bathed on the floor above that—except on nights like those, I never felt poor; I had the feeling that if I needed money I could always get it.
Joan Didion, Slouching Towards Bethlehem

Day 3088, reading notes.

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Friedrich Nietzsche

The Will Too Power
Book One: European Nihilism

118 If anything at all has been achieved, it is a more innocuous relation to the senses, a more joyous, benevolent, Goethean attitude toward sensuality; also a prouder feeling regarding the search for knowledge, so that the “pure fool” is not given much credit.

123 The unfinished problems I pose anew: the problem of civilization, the fight between Rousseau and Voltaire around 1760. Man becomes more profound, mistrustful, “immoral,” stronger, more confident of himself -and to this extent “more natural”: this is “progress.”- At the same time, in accordance with a kind of division of labor, the strata that have become more evil are separated from those that have become milder and tamer-so that the overall
fact is not noticed immediately.- It is characteristic of strength, of the self-control and fascination of strength, that these stronger strata possess the art of making others experience their progress in evil as something higher. It is characteristic of every “progress” that the strengthened elements are reinterpreted as “good.” 

Translation: Kaufmann

Day 3081, honesty.

Daily picture, Quotes

Friedrich Nietzsche

Human, all Too Human 
On the History of the Moral Sensations

65 Whither honesty can lead. – Someone had the bad habit of occasionally examining the motives of his actions, which were as good and bad as the motives of everyone else, and honestly saying what they were. He excited at first revulsion, then suspicion, gradually became altogether proscribed and declared an outlaw in society, until finally the law took notice of this infamous being on occasions when usually it closed its eyes. Lack of ability to keep silent about the universal secret, and the irresponsible tendency to see what no one wants to see – himself – brought him to prison and a premature death.