Friedrich Nietzsche

Day 2649, choices.

Daily picture, Philosophy

For the last twenty-five years, I have been at a crossroad. After a while, I realized I better sit down, realizing it would be a long wait. It took even longer to learn where the different roads would lead to but to be honest, I am still not sure.

Somewhere during that time, I wrote down that I was pretty lucky. I at least realized there was a crossroad where I was; so many people only find this out when they are a long way in one or another direction. Looking back, they only see the decisions they could have made, waving at me from a distance. But maybe there is something to say for hindsight instead of unclear foresight. I let life decide a lot of directions; I am pretty sure I even believe that I choose most of them willingly and freely; they are mostly related to the mundane parts of life, like where to live and what job to take to pay the bills. The crossroad I am sitting on, waiting, decides the direction…it determines how you deal with your own consciousness in a corrupt(ting) society and maybe even a corrupt human nature.

Many people pass me where I sit and tell me that they know that there is nothing to know, and they go on to live for their own till an empty end where they take their contradictions with them into their oblivion. Others are certain of the direction to take, joining all the others on that path as individuals in a traffic jam. The certainty that leads you on this path is the other side of the first one; they both have the same value, but only for the believer.

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Day 2644, protection.

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Friedrich Nietzsche

Beyond good and evil
Our virtues

226 We immoralists! – This world as it concerns us, in which we need to love and be afraid, this almost invisible, inaudible world of subtle command, subtle obedience, a world of the “almost” in every respect, twisted, tricky, barbed, and loving: yes, it is well defended against clumsy spectators and friendly curiosity! We have been woven into a strong net and shirt of duties, and cannot get out of it –, in this sense we are “people of duty,” – even us! It is true that we sometimes dance quite well in our “chains” and between our “swords”; it is no less true that more often we grind our teeth and feel impatient at all the secret harshness of our fate. But we can do as we please: fools and appearances will speak up against us, claiming “those are people without duties” – fools and appearances are always against us

Day 2640, necessary.

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Friedrich Nietzsche

Human, all too human
Of first and last things

31 The illogical necessary. – Among the things that can reduce a thinker to despair is the knowledge that the illogical is a necessity for mankind, and that much good proceeds from the illogical. It is implanted so firmly in the passions, in language, in art, in religion, and in general in everything that lends value to life, that one cannot pull it out of these fair things without mortally injuring them. Only very naive people are capable of believing that the nature of man could be transformed into a purely logical one; but if there should be degrees of approximation to this objective, what would not have to be lost if this course were taken! Even the most rational man from time to time needs to recover nature, that is to say his illogical original relationship with all things.

Day 2367, suspend.

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Friedrich Nietzsche

Human, all too human II
Mixed opinions and maxims

75 Love and duality. -What then is love besides understanding and rejoicing in the fact that someone else lives, acts, and feels in a different and opposite way than we do? If love is to use joy to bridge over oppositions, it must not suspend or deny them. -Even love of self assumes an unalloyable duality (or multiplicity) within a single person as its precondition.

Day 2636, fairy tales.

Daily picture, Poetry

Friedrich Nietzsche

Human, all too human II
Mixed opinions and maxims

270 The eternal child. -We believe that fairy tales and games belong to childhood: shortsighted as we are! As if we would like to live without fairy tales and games at any age! Admittedly, we call it something else and experience it differently, but this is precisely what speaks for it being exactly the same thing-for the child, too, feels that games are his work and fairy tales his truth. The brevity of life should preserve us from pedantically separating the ages oflife-as if each one brought something new-and a poet should sometime present to us a human being two hundred years old who really does live without fairy tales and games.

Day 2618, synchronizing in the past.

Daily picture, Poetry

Friedrich Nietzsche

Selected letters
To
Rohde.
Genoa, March 24, 1881.

Thus the sands of life run out and the best of friends hear and see nothing of each other! Aye, the trick is no easy one-to live and .Yet not to be discontented. How often do I not feel as if I should like to beg a loan from my robust, flourishing and brave old friend Rohde, when I am in sore need of a “transfusion” of strength, not of lamb’s but of lion’s blood. But there he dwells away in Tubingen, immersed in books and married life, and in every respect i accessible to me. Ah, dear friend, to live for ever on my own fat seems to be my lot, or, as every one knows who has tried it, to drink my own blood! Life then becomes a matter of not losing one’s thirst for oneself and also of not drinking oneself dry.

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Day 2613, don’t let go.

Daily picture, Poetry

Friedrich Nietzsche

Human, All Too Human
On the history of the moral sensations

62 Revelling in revenge. – Uncultivated people who feel insulted are accustomed to set the degree of insultingness as high as possible and to recount the cause of the insult in strongly exaggerated terms, so as to be able really to revel in the feeling of hatred and revengefulness thus engendered

Day 2611, whither.

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Friedrich Nietzsche

Human, All Too Human
On the history of the moral sensations

65 Whither honesty can lead. – Someone had the bad habit of occasionally examining the motives of his actions, which were as good and bad as the motives of everyone else, and honestly saying what they were. He excited at first revulsion, then suspicion, gradually became altogether proscribed and declared an outlaw in society, until finally the law took notice of this infamous being on occasions when usually it closed its eyes. Lack of ability to keep silent about the universal secret, and the irresponsible tendency to see what no one wants to see – himself – brought him to prison and a premature death.

Day 2609, not even.

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Friedrich Nietzsche

Human, All Too Human
Assorted opinions and maxims

19 The picture of life. – The task of painting the picture of life, however often poets and philosophers may pose it, is nonetheless senseless: even under the hands of the greatest of painter-thinkers all that has ever eventuated is pictures and miniatures out of one life, namely their own – and nothing else is even possible. Something in course of becoming cannot be reflected as a firm and lasting image, as a ‘the’, in something else in course of becoming

Day 2608, alone.

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Friedrich Nietzsche

Human All Too Human
Man alone with himself

625 Solitary men. – Some men are so accustomed to being alone with themselves that they do not compare themselves with others at all but spin out their life of monologue in a calm and cheerful mood, conversing and indeed laughing with themselves alone. If they are nonetheless constrained to compare themselves with others they are inclined to a brooding underestimation of themselves: so that they have to be compelled to acquire again a good and just opinion of themselves from others: and even from this acquired opinion they will tend continually to detract and trade away something. – We must therefore allow certain men their solitude and not be so stupid, as we so often are, as to pity them for it.

Day 2607, gone for nothing.

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Friedrich Nietzsche

Human, All Too Human II
On the history of the moral sensations

70 Execution. – How is it that every execution offends us more than a murder? It is the coldness of the judges, the scrupulous preparation, the insight that here a human being is being used as a means of deterring others. For it is not the guilt that is being punished, even when it exists: this lies in educators, parents, environment, in 1:1s, not in the murderer – I mean the circumstances that caused him to become one.

Day 2605, vice.

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Friedrich Nietzsche

Human, All Too Human II
The -wanderer and His Shadow

84 The prisoners. – One morning the prisoners entered the workyard: the warder was missing. Some of them started working straightaway, as was their nature, others stood idle and looked around defiantly. Then one stepped forward and said loudly: ‘Work as much as you like, or do nothing: it is all one. Your secret designs have come to light, the prison warder has been eavesdropping on you and in the next few days intends to pass a fearful judgement upon you. You know him, he is harsh and vindictive. But now pay heed: you have hitherto mistaken me: I am not what I seem but much more: I am the son of the prison warder and I mean everything to him. I can save you, I will save you: but, note well, only those of you who believe me that I am the son of the prison warder; the rest may enjoy the fruit of their unbelief.’ – ‘Well now’, said one of the older prisoners after a brief silence, ‘what can it matter to you if we believe you or do not believe you? If you really are his son and can do what you say, then put in a good word for all of us: it would be really good of you if you did so. But leave aside this talk of belief and unbelief!’ – ‘And’, a younger man interposed, ‘I don’t believe him: it’s only an idea he’s got into his head. I bet that in a week’s time we shall find ourselves here just like today, and that the prison warder knows nothing’. – ‘And if he did know something he knows it no longer’, said the last of the prisoners, who had only just come into the yard; ‘the prison warder has just suddenly died’. – ‘Holla!’ cried several together; ‘holla! Son! Son! What does the will say? Are we perhaps now your prisoners?’ – ‘I have told you’, he whom they addressed responded quietly, ‘I will set free everyone who believes in me, as surely as my father still lives’. – The prisoners did not laugh, but shrugged their shoulders and left him standing.

Day 2604, bridge.

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Friedrich Nietzsche

Human, All Too Human II
The -wanderer and His Shadow

260 Error of the respectful. -Everyone believes that he is saying something respectful and agreeable to a thinker when he shows him how he came up with exactly the same idea and even the same expression on his own; and yet the thinker is only rarely pleased at hearing such information, while often distrusting his own idea and its expression: he privately decides to revise both. -If we want to show respect to someone, we must guard against any expression of agreement: it places us upon the same level. -In many cases, it is a matter of social decorum to listen to an opinion as if it were not ours, indeed, as if it went beyond our horizon: for example, when an old man with much experience takes the exceptional step of opening up the casket containing his knowledge.

Day 2603, walls.

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Friedrich Nietzsche

Human, All Too Human II
The -wanderer and His Shadow

82 An affectation upon departure. -Someone who wants to separate himself from a party or a religion believes that it is now necessary for him to refute it. But this is sheer arrogance. It is only necessary that he clearly perceive the clamps that have been keeping him attached to this party or religion and the fact that they no longer do so, the motives that impelled him in that direction and the fact that they now impel him in a different one. We did not take sides with that party or religion on the basis of rigorously formulated reasons: we should also not affect having done so when we take our leave.