434 Making intercession.– Unprepossessing landscapes exist for the great landscape painters, remarkable and rare ones for the petty. For the great things of nature and mankind have to intercede for all the petty, mediocre and ambitious among their admirers- but the great man intercedes for the simple things.
423 In the great silence. – Here is the sea, here we can forget the city. The bells are noisily ringing the angelus – it is the time for that sad and foolish yet sweet noise, sounded at the crossroads of day and night, but it will last only for a minute! Now all is still! The sea lies there pale and glittering; it cannot speak. The sky plays its everlasting silent evening game with red and yellow and green, it cannot speak. The little cliffs and ribbons of rock that run down into the sea as if to find the place where it is most solitary, none of them can speak. This tremendous muteness which suddenly overcomes us is lovely and dreadful, the heart swells at it. – Oh the hypocrisy of this silent beauty! How well it could speak, and how evilly too, if it wished! Its ued tongue and its expression of sorrowing happiness is a deception: it wants to mock at your sympathy!- So be it! I am not ashamed of being mocked by such powers. But I pity you, nature, that you have to be silent, even though it is only your malice which ties your tongue; yes, I pity you on account of your malice!- Ah, it is growing yet more still, my heart swells again: it is startled by a new truth, it too cannot speak, it too mocks when the mouth calls something into this beauty, it too enjoys its sweet silent malice. I begin to hate speech, to hate even thinking; for do I not hear behind every word the laughter of error, of imagination, of the spirit of delusion? Must I not mock at my pity? Mock at my mockery?- 0 sea, 0 evening! You are evil instructors! You teach man to cease to be man! Shall he surrender to you? Shall he become as you now arc, pale, glittering, mute, tremendous, reposing above himself? Exalted above himself?
381 Knowing one’s ‘individuality’. – We are too prone to forget that in the eyes of people who are seeing us for the first time we are something quite different from what we consider ourselves to be: usually we are nothing more than a single individual trait which leaps to the eye and determines the whole impression we make. Thus the gentlest and most reasonable of men can, if he wears a large moustache, sit as it were in its shade and feel safe there – he will usually be seen as no more than the appurtenance of a large moustache, that is to say a military type, easily angered and occasionally violent – and as such he will be treated.
385 The vain. – We are like shop windows in which we are continually arranging, concealing or illuminating the supposed qualities others ascribe to us- in order to deceive ourselves.
390 Concealing mind. -When we catch someone concealing his mind from us we call him evil: and all the more so, indeed, if we suspect that he has done so out of politeness and philanthropy.
419 Party courage. – The poor sheep say to their shepherd: ‘go on ahead and we shall never lack the courage to follow you’. The poor shepherd, however, thinks to himself: ‘follow me and I shall never lack the courage to lead you’.
379 Probable and improbable. – A woman was secretly in love with a man, raised him high above her, and said a hundred times in the most secret recesses of her hean: ‘if such a man loved me, it would be something I so little deserve I would have to humble myself in the dust!’- And the man felt in the same way, and in regard to the same woman, and he said the same thing in the most secret recesses of his heart. When at last their tongues were loosed and they told one another everything they had kept hidden, there followed a silence; then, after she had been sunk in thought for a time, the woman said in a cold voice: ‘but everything is now clear! neither of us is what we have loved! If you are that which you say, and no more, I have debased myself and loved you in vain; the demon seduced me, as he did you.’ – This story, which is not at all an improbable one, never happens – why not?
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.
Nochrisis 