358 Grounds and their groundlessness. -You dislike him and present many grounds for this dislike – but I believe only in your dislike, not in your grounds! You flatter yourself in your own eyes when you suggest to yourself and to me that what has happened through instinct is the result of a process of reasoning.
330 Not enough! – It is not enough to prove something, one has also to seduce or elevate people to it. That is why the man of knowledge should learn how to speak his wisdom: and often in such a way that it sounds like folly!
342 Beware ofconfusion!– Yes! He considers the matter from all sides, and you think he is a genuine man of knowledge. But he only wants to lower the price – he wants to buy it
312 The forgetful – In outbursts of passion, and in the fantasising of dreams and insanity, a man rediscovers his own and mankind’s prehistory: animality with its savage grimaces; on these occasions his memory goes sufficiently far back, while his civilised condition evolves out of a forgetting of these primal experiences, that is to say out of a relaxation of his memory. He who, as a forgetter on a grand scale, is wholly unfamiliar with all this does not understand man- but it is to the general advantage that there should appear here and there such individuals as ‘do not understand us’ and who are as it were begotten by the seed of the gods and born of reason.
281 The ego wants everything.- It seems that the sole purpose of human action is possession: this idea is, at least, contained in the various languages, which regard all past action as having put us in possession of something (‘I have spoken, struggled, conquered’: that is to say, I am now in possession of my speech, struggle, victory). How greedy
man appears here! He does not want to extricate himself even from the past, but wants to continue to have it!
257 Words present in us. -We always express our thoughts with the words that lie to hand. Or, to express my whole suspicion: we have at any moment only the thought for which we have to hand the words.
254 Anticipators. -The distinguishing, but also perilous quality in poetic natures is their exhaustive imagination: they anticipate, enjoy and suffer in advance that which is to come or could come, so that when it finally does come they are already tired of it. Lord Byron, who was only too familiar with all this, wrote in his diary: ‘If I have a son he shall become something quite prosaic- a lawyer or a pirate.’
249 Who is ever alone? – The timid man does not know what it is to be alone: an enemy is always standing behind his chair.- Oh, if there were someone who could tell us the history of that subtle feeling called solitude!
250 Night and music. – The ear, the organ of fear, could have evolved as greatly as it has only in the night and twilight of obscure caves and woods, in accordance with the mode of life of the age of timidity, that is to say the longest human age there has ever been: in bright daylight the ear is less necessary. That is how music acquired the character of an art of night and twilight.
251 Stoical. -There is a cheerfulness peculiar to the Stoic: he experiences it whenever he feels hemmed in by the formalities he himself has prescribed for his conduct; he then enjoys the sensation of himself as dominator.
243 The two directions. -When we try to examine the mirror in itself we discover in the end nothing but things upon it. If we want to grasp the things we finally get hold of nothing but the mirror.- This, in the most general terms, is the history of knowledge.
232 From a disputation. – A: Friend, you have talked yourself hoarse! – B: Then I am refuted. Let us speak of it no more!
219 Deception in self-humiliation. -Through your irrational behaviour you have done your neighbour great harm and destroyed an irrecoverable happiness – and then you subdue your vanity sufficiently to go to him, expose your irrationality to his contempt and believe that after this painful and to you very difficult scene everything has again been put to rights- that your voluntary loss ofhonour compensates for his involuntary loss of happiness: suffused with this feeling you go away uplifted and restored in your virtue. But your neighbour is still as unhappy as he was before, he derives no consolation from the fact that you are irrational and have admitted it, he even remembers the
painful sight ofyou pouring contempt upon yourselfbefore him as a fresh injury for which he has to thank you- but he has no thought of revenge and cannot grasp how you could in any way compensate him. At bottom that scene you performed was performed before yourself and for the sake of yourself: you invited in a witness of it, again for
your own sake and not for his – do not deceive yourself.
26 Animals and morality. – The practices demanded in polite society: careful avoidance of the ridiculous, the offensive, the presumptuous, the suppression of one’s virtues as well as of one’s strongest inclinations, self-adaptation, self-deprecation, submission to orders of rank – all this is to be found as social morality in a crude form everywhere, even in the depths of the animal world – and only at this depth do we see the purpose of all these amiable precautions: one wishes to elude one’s pursuers and be favoured in the pursuit of one’ s prey. For this reason the animals learn to master themselves and alter their form, so that many, for example, adapt their colouring to the colouring of their surroundings (by virtue of the socalled ‘chromatic function’), pretend to be dead or assume the forms and colours of another animal or of sand, leaves, lichen, fungus (what English researchers designate ‘mimicry’). Thus the individual hides himself in the general concept ‘man’, or in society, or adapts himself to princes, classes, parties, opinions of his time and place:
283 Domestic peace and peace of soul. – The mood in which we usually exist depends upon the mood in which we maintain our environment.
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!
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!
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.
3 Everything has its day.– When man gave all things a sex he thought, not that he was playing, but that he had gained a profound insight: – it was only very late that he confessed to himself what an enormous error this was, and perhaps even now he has not confessed it completely. – In the same way man has ascribed to all that exists a connection with morality and laid an ethical significance on the world’s back. One day this will have as much value, and no more, as the belief in the masculinity or femininity of the sun has today.
Nochrisis 