Friedrich Nietzsche

Day 2836, power.

Daily picture, Quotes

Friedrich Nietzsche

The will to power

Preface (Nov. 1887-March 1888)

1 Of what is great one must either be silent or speak with greatness. With greatness, that means cynically and with innocence.

2 What I relate is the history of the next two centuries. I describe what is coming, what can no longer come differently: the advent of nihilism. This history can be related even now; for necessity itself is at work here. This future speaks even now in a hundred signs, this destiny announces itself everywhere; for this music of the future all ears are cocked even now. For some time now, our whole European culture has been moving as toward a catastrophe, with a tortured tension that is growing from decade to decade: restlessly, violently, headlong, like a river that wants to reach the end, that no longer reflects, that is afraid to reflect.

3 He that speaks here, conversely, has done nothing so far but reflect: a philosopher and solitary by instinct, who has found his advantage in standing aside and outside, in patience, in procrastination, in staying behind; as a spirit of daring and experiment that has already lost its way once in every labyrinth of the future; as a soothsayer-bird spirit who looks back when relating what will come; as the first perfect nihilist of Europe who, however, has even now lived through the whole of nihilism, to the end, leaving it behind, outside himself.

Editie translated by Walter Kaufmann and R.J. Hollingdale

Day 2831, every day.

Daily picture, Poetry

Friedrich Nietzsche

Human.All Too Human
The religious life

116 The everyday Christian. – If the Christian dogmas of a revengeful God, universal sinfulness, election by divine grace and the danger of everlasting damnation were true, it would be a sign of weakmindedness and lack of character not to become a priest, apostle or hermit and, in fear and trembling, to work solely on one’s own salvation; it would be senseless to lose sight of one’s eternal advantage for the sake of temporal comfort. If we may assume that these things are at any rate believed true, then the everyday Christian cuts a miserable figure; he is a man who really cannot count to three, and who precisely on account of his spiritual imbecility does not deserve to be punished so harshly as Christianity promises to punish him.

Day 2814, three times.

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Friedrich Nietzsche

Human, All Too Human II
Mixed Opinions and Maxims

63 Belated pregnancy. – Those who have come to their works and deeds without understanding how, generally go around afterward all the more pregnant with them: as if in order to prove after the fact that these are their children and not those of chance.

105 Language and feeling. -We see that language has not been given to us for the communication of feeling in the way that all simple humans are ashamed of looking for words to describe their deeper agitations: such things are expressed only in ac­tions and even here they blush if someone else seems to guess their motives. Among poets, who were in general denied this shame by the gods, the nobler ones are nonetheless more monosyllabic in the language of feeling and betray a certain constraint: whereas the true poets of feeling are mostly shame­ less in practical life.

127 Against the faulters of brevity. -A brief saying can be the fruit and harvest of much long thought: but the reader who is a novice in this field and has not yet reflected upon it at all sees in all brief sayings something embryonic, not without a dis­paraging sign to the author for having placed upon his table something so immature and unripe.

Day 2808, what others.

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Friedrich Nietzsche

The Gay Science
Book One

52 What others know about us. What we know about ourselves and remember is not as decisive to our life’s happiness as it is believed to be. One day, what others know (or think they know) about us assails us – and then we realize that that is more powerful. It is easier to deal with a bad conscience than a bad reputation.

Day 2801, purpose.

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Friedrich Nietzsche

Daybreak
Book 2

1 22 Purposes in nature. – The impartial investigator who pursues the history of the eye and the forms it has assumed among the lowest creatures, who demonstrates the whole step-by- step evolution of the eye, must arrive at the great conclusion that vision was not the intention behind the creation of the eye, but that vision appeared, rather, after chance had put the apparatus together. A single instance of this kind – and ‘ purposes’ fall away like scales from the eyes!

Day 2787, ourselves.

Daily picture, Quotes

Friedrich Nietzsche

Twilight of the idols

Expeditions of an Untimely Man

26. We no longer have a sufficiently high estimate of ourselves when we communicate. Our true experiences are not garrulous. They could not communicate themselves if they wanted to: they lack words. We have already grown beyond whatever we have words for. In all talking there lies a grain of contempt. Speech, it seems, was devised only for the average, medium, communicable. The speaker has already vulgarized himself by speaking. – From a moral code for deaf-mutes and other philosophers.

Day 2780, nonsensical.

Daily picture, Quotes

Friedrich Nietzsche

Human, All Too Human II
Mixed Opinions and Maxims

19 The picture of life. -The task of painting the picture of life, however often it may have been set by poets and philosophers, is nevertheless nonsensical: even in the hands of the greatest painter-thinkers only pictures and miniatures from a single life, that is, from their own lives, have been produced- and nothing else is even possible. Amid what is becoming, some­ thing that is itself becoming cannot reflect itself as fixed and enduring, as any specific “thing.”

45 Not taking things too hard. – Getting bedsores is unpleasant and yet no proof against the good points of the course of treat­ ment that decided upon putting us in bed. – Humans who have lived outside themselves for a long time and then finally turned to the philosophical inward, interior life know that there also exist bedsores of heart and soul. This is not there­ fore an argument against the whole of the lifestyle they have chosen, but it does make a few small exceptions and apparent relapses necessary.

 

Day 2773, to reckon.

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Friedrich Nietzsche

The Gay Science
Book one

41 Against remorse.— A thinker sees his own actions as experiments and questions—as attempts to find out something. Success and failure are for him answers above all. To be annoyed or feel remorse because something goes wrong—that he leaves to those who act because they have received orders and who have to reckon with a beating when his lordship is not satisfied with the result.

Day 2747, artists.

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Friedrich Nietzsche

Human All Too Human
From the souls of artists and writers

1 46 The artist’s sense of truth. – In regard to knowledge of truths, the artist possesses a weaker morality than the thinker; he does not wish to be deprived of the glittering, profound interpretations of life and guards  against simple and sober methods and results. He appears to be fighting on behalf of the greater dignity and significance of man; in reality he refuses to give up the presuppositions which are most efficacious for his art, that is to say the fantastic, mythical, uncertain, extreme, the sense for the symbolical, the over-estimation of the person, the belief in something miraculous in genius: he thus considers the perpetuation of his mode o reaction more important than scientific devotion to the truth in any form, however plainly this may appear.

Day 2738, fidelity.

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Friedrich Nietzsche

Human, All Too Human II
The Wanderer and His Shadow

329 The right time to swear fidelity. -We sometimes proceed in a spiritual direction that is contrary to our talents; for a time, we struggle heroically against the tide and the wind, basically against ourselves: we become tired, pant; whatever we accomplish brings no real joy, for we think we have paid too great a price for this success. Indeed, we despair about our fertility, our future, perhaps in the midst of victory. Finally, finally, we turn around- and now the wind blows in our sail and drives us into our channel. What happiness! How certain of victory we feel! Now, for the first time, we know what we are and what we want; now we swear fidelity to ourselves and are permitted to do so -as those who know.

Day 2716, knot.

Daily picture, Quotes

Friedrich Nietzsche

Human, All Too Human II
Mixed Opinions and Maxims

203 In the moment before the solution. -In science, it happens all the time that someone remains standing directly in front of the solution, convinced now that his effort has been wholly in vain -like someone who, untying a bow, hesitates in the moment when it has practically been undone: for that is precisely when it looks most like a knot.