Friedrich Nietzsche

Human, All Too Human

In Relations With Others

370 Discharging ill humor.-Any person who fails at something prefers to attribute this failure to the ill will of someone else, rather than to chance. His stimulated sensibility is relieved by thinking of a person and not of a thing as the reason for his failure; for we can revenge ourselves on people, but we have to choke down the injuries of chance. Therefore, when a prince has failed at something, his circle tends to designate some individual as the ostensible cause and to sacrifice that person in the interest of all the courtiers; for otherwise, the ill humor of the
prince would be vented on all of them, since he cannot take any revenge on the goddess of fate herself.

Friedrich Nietzsche

Human, All Too Human

In Relations With Others

351 Pangs of conscience after social gatherings. -Why do we have pangs of conscience after ordinary social gatherings? Because we have taken important things lightly, because in speaking of other people we have not spoken with complete truthfulness, or because we have kept silent where we ought to have said something, because we did not take an occasion to spring to our feet and run away, in short, because we have behaved in society as if we belonged to it.

Friedrich Nietzsche

Human, All Too Human

By Oneself Alone

627 Living and experiencing. -If we consider how some individuals know how to manage their experiences – their insignificant daily experiences – so that these become a field that bears fruit three times a year; while others – and how many they are ! – though driven through the pounding waves of the most stimulating destinies and the most varied currents of ages and peoples, still remain like a cork, ever buoyant, ever on the surface: we are finally tempted to divide humanity into a minority (a minimality) of those who understand how to make a great deal out of very little and a majority of those who understand how to make very little out of a great deal; indeed, we encounter those reverse wizards who, instead of creating the world out of nothing, create a nothing out of the world.

Friedrich Nietzsche

Human, All Too Human

By Oneself Alone

621 Love as a trick. -Anyone who really wants to get to know something new (be it a person, an event, a book) does well to take up this new thing with all possible love, to quickly avert his eye from and even to forget everything in it that appears hostile, offensive, or false to him: so that, for example, we give the author of a book the greatest possible head start and, as at a race, actually yearn with a pounding heart for him to reach his goal. By proceeding in this way, we press into the heart of the new thing, to the point that gives it motion: and this is precisely what getting to know it means. If we have gotten this far, the understanding can set its restrictions afterward; that overestimation, that temporary staying of the critical pendulum, was simply a trick for enticing the soul of the thing to come forth.

Friedrich Nietzsche

Human, All Too Human

By Oneself Alone

586 Of the hour hand of life. – Life consists of rare individual moments of the highest significance and countless intervals of time in which at best the shadowy images of those moments hover around us. Love, spring, every beautiful melody, mountains, the moon, the sea- only once do all those things speak fully to the heart: if in fact they ever do find their way completely into words. For many people do not have any such moments and are themselves intervals and pauses in the symphony of real life.

 

Friedrich Nietzsche

By Oneself Human, All Too Human

By Oneself Alone

488
Equanimity in action. -As a waterfall moves more slowly and floats more leisurely as it plunges downward, so a great man of action tends to act with more equanimity than his tempestuous desire prior to acting would have led us to expect.

489
Not too deep. -Those persons who grasp a thing in all its depth rarely remain true to it forever. For they have brought its depths into the light: where there is always much that is terrible to see.

490
Delusion of idealists.– idealists.-All idealists imagine that the causes they serve are essentially better than everything else in the world and do not want to believe that if their cause is to flourish, it will require exactly the same foul-smelling manure as is necessary for every other human undertaking.