Friedrich Nietzsche

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Book V

550 Knowledge and beauty. – If, as they still do, people as it were reserve their reverence and feeling of happiness for works of imagination and dissembling, we ought not to wonder if the opposite of imagination and dissembling makes them feel cold and disconsolate. The delight produced by even the smallest definite piece of real progress in knowledge, which science as it is now bestows so abundantly and already upon so many – this delight is for the present not credited by all those who have accustomed themselves to finding delight only in relinquishing reality and plunging into the depths of appearance. These believe reality is ugly: but they do not reflect that knowledge of even the ugliest reality is itself beautiful, nor that he who knows much is in the end very far from finding ugly the greater part of that reality whose discovery has always brought him happiness. For is anything ‘beautiful in itself? The happiness of the man of knowledge enhances the beauty of the world and makes all that exists sunnier; knowledge casts its beauty not only over things but in the long run into things- may future mankind bear witness to the truth of this proposition! In the meantime let us recall an experience of olden time: two men as fundamentally different as Plato and Aristotle were in agreement as to what constituted supreme happiness, not only for them or for mankind but in itself, even for gods
of the highest empyrean: they found it in knowledge, in the activity of a well-trained inquisitive and inventive mind (not, that is to say, in ‘intuition’, as German theologians and semi-theologians do; not in visions, as mystics do; and likewise not in creating, as all practical people do). Descartes and Spinoza came to a similar conclusion: how they must all have enjoyed knowledge! And what a danger their honesty faced of becoming a panegyrist of things! –

Friedrich Nietzsche

Daybreak

Book V

543 Do not make passion an argument for truth!– O you good-natured and even noble enthusiasts, I know you! You want to win your argument against us, but also against yourself, and above all against yourself!- and a subtle and tender bad conscience so often incites you against your enthusiasm! How ingenious you then become in the outwitting and deadening of this conscience! How you hate the honest, the simple, the pure, how you avoid their innocent eyes! That knowing better whose representatives they are and whose voice you hear all too loudly within you, how it casts doubt on your belief- how you seek to make it suspect as a bad habit, as a sickness of the age, as neglect and infection of your own spiritual health! You drive yourself to the point of hating criticism, science, reason! You have to falsify history so that it may bear witness for you, you have to deny virtues so that they shall not cast into the shade those of your idols and ideals! Coloured pictures where what is needed is rational grounds! Ardour and power of expression! Silvery mists! Ambrosial nights! You understand how to illuminate and how to obscure, and how to obscure with light! And truly, when your passion rises to the point of frenzy, there comes a moment when you say to yourself: now I have conquered the good conscience, now I am light of heart, courageous, self-denying, magnificent, now I am honest! How you thirst for those moments when your passion bestows on you perfect self-justification and as it were innocence; when in struggle, intoxication, courage, hope, you are beside yourself and beyond all doubting; when you decree: ‘he who is not beside himself as we are can in no way know what and where truth is!’ How you thirst to discover people of your belief in this condition – it is that of intellectual vice – and ignite your flame at their torch! Oh your deplorable martyrdom! Oh your deplorable victory of the sanctified lie! Must you inflict so much suffering upon yourself? – Must you?

Friedrich Nietzsche

Daybreak

Book V

530 Thinker’s digressions. -With many thinkers, the course of their thought as a whole is rigorous and inexorably bold, indeed sometimes cruel towards themselves, while in detail they are gentle and flexible; with benevolent hesitation they circle around a thing ten times, though in the end they resume their rigorous path. They are rivers with many meanderings and secluded hermitages; there are places in their course where the river plays hide-and-seek with itself and creates for itself a brief idyll, with islands, trees, grottos and waterfalls: and then it goes on again, past rocky cliffs and breaking its way through the hardest stone.

FriedrichNietzsche

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Book V

524 Jealousy of the solitary. – Between sociable and solitary natures there exists this distinction (presupposing they both possess spirit!): the former will be happy, or almost happy with a thing, whatever it may be, from the moment they have found in their spirita communicable and pleasing way of expressing it – this will reconcile them to the Devil himselfl The solitary, however, have their enjoyment or their torment ofa thing in silence, they hate a clever and glittering display of their innermost problems as they hate to see their beloved too carefully dressed: they gaze at her with melancholy eyes, as though becoming prey to the suspicion she wants to appear pleasing to others! This is the jealousy which all solitary thinkers and passionate dreamers feel towards esprit.

Friedrich Nietzsche

Daybreak

Book V

507 Against the tyranny of the true.- Even ifwe were mad enough to consider all our opinions true, we should still not want them alone to exist-: I cannot see why it should be desirable that truth alone should rule and be omnipotent; it is enough for me that it should possess great power. But it must be able to struggle and have opponents, and one must be able to find relief from it from time to time in untruth – otherwise it will become boring, powerless and tasteless to us, and make us the same.

Friedrich Nietzsche

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Book V

500 Against the grain– A thinker can for years on end force himself to think against the grain: that is to say, to pursue not the thoughts which offer themselves from within him but those to which an office, a prescribed schedule, an arbitrary kind of industriousness seem to oblige him. In the end, however, he will fall sick: for this apparently moral overcoming of himself will ruin his nervous energy just as thoroughly as any regularly indulged in excess could do.

Friedrich Nietzsche

Daybreak

Book V

495 Our teachers.- In our youth we take our teachers and guides from the time in which we happen to live and the circle in which we happen to move: we are thoughtlessly confident that the times we live in are bound to have teachers better suited to us than to anyone else and that we are bound to find them without much trouble. For this childishness we have in later years to pay a heavy price: we have to expiate our teachers in ourself We then perhaps go in search of our true guides throughout the whole world, the world of the past included, but perhaps it is too late. And in the worst case we discover that they were living when we were young – and that we missed them.

Friedrich Nietzsche

Daybreak

Book V

485 Distant perspectives. – A: But why this solitude? – B: I am not at odds with anyone. But when I am alone I seem to see my friends in a clearer and fairer light than when I am with them; and when I loved and appreciated music the most, I lived far from it. It seems I need a distant perspective if I am to think well of things.

487 Shame. – Here stands the handsome steed and paws the ground: it snorts, longs for the gallop and loves him who usually rides him – but oh shame! his rider cannot mount up onto his back today, he is weary.- This is the shame of the wearied philosopher before his own philosophy.

489 Friends in need. – Sometimes we notice that one of our friends belongs more to another than he does to us, and that his delicacy is troubled by and his selfishness inadequate to this decision: we then have to make things easier for him and estrange him from us.- This is likewise necessary when we adopt a way of thinking which would be ruinous to him: our love for him has to drive us, through an injustice which