Friedrich Nietzsche

Daybreak

118 What is our neighbor! – What do we understand to be the boundaries of our neighbor: 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 ourselves 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! Inverted, upside-down, empty world, yet dreamed of as full and upright!