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.
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!
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.
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.
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.
You must be ready to burn yourself in your own flame; how could you rise anew if you have not first become ashes?
Friedrich Nietzsche
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.
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.
346 Being misunderstood -When we are wholly misunderstood, it is impossible to completely root out any individual point of misunderstanding. We must realize this in order not to waste excessive energy in defending ourselves.
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.
44 Formula for my happiness: a yes, a no, a straight line, a goal . . .
Friedrich Nietzsche
Thus Spake Zarathustra
The lonely one offers his hand too quickly to whomever he encounters.
Friedrich Nietzsche
Thus Spoke Zarathustra
I am a forest, and a night of dark trees: but he who is not afraid of my darkness, will find banks full of roses under my cypresses.
279 Not mistrusting our feelings. -The womanly saying that we should not mistrust our feelings means nothing more than: we should eat what tastes good to us. This may even be a good everyday rule, especially for moderate natures. Different natures, however, must live according to a different principle: “you must eat not only with your mouth, but also with your head, so that your mouth’s sweet tooth does not destroy you.”
251 In parting.- Not in how one soul draws near to another, but in how it distances itself from the other, do I recognize its relation to and affinity with the other.
Of three metamorphoses of the spirit I tell you: how the spirit becomes a camel; and the camel, a lion; and the lion, finally, a child.
There is much that is difficult for the spirit, the strong reverent spirit that would bear much: but the difficult and the most difficult are what its strength demands. What is difficult? asks the spirit that would bear much, and kneels down like a camel wanting to be well loaded. What is most difficult, 0 heroes, asks the spirit that would bear much, that I may take it upon myself and exult in my strength? Is it not humbling oneself to wound one’s haughtiness? Letting one’s folly shine to mock one’s wisdom?
Or is it this: parting from our cause when it triumphs? Climbing high mountains to tempt the tempter?
Or is it this: feeding on the acorns and grass of knowledge and, for the sake of the truth, suffering hunger in one’s soul?
Or is it this: being sick and sending home the comforters and making friends with the deaf, who never hear what you want?
Or is it this: stepping into filthy waters when they are the waters of truth, and not repulsing cold frogs and hot toads?
Or is it this: loving those who despise us and offering a hand to the ghost that would frighten us?
All these most difficult things the spirit that would bear much takes upon itself: like the camel that, burdened, speeds into the desert, thus the spirit speeds into its desert.
Nochrisis 