Human all too human

Day 2542, trapped.

Daily picture, Quotes

Friedrich Nietzsche

Human, All Too Human II
The Wanderer and His Shadow

8 In the night. -As soon as night falls, our feeling about the nearest of things is changed. There is the wind, which travels as if upon forbidden paths, whispering as if seeking something, annoyed because it does not find it. There is the lamplight, with a gloomy, reddish gleam, gazing wearily, striving unwillingly against the night, an impatient slave of wakeful human beings. There are the breaths of someone sleeping, their shuddering rhythm to which an ever-returning care seems to sound the melody-we do not hear it, but if the breast of the sleeper rises up, we feel our heart constricted and if the breath sinks down and almost dies into a deathly stillness, we say to ourselves, “rest a while, you poor, tormented spirit!” -we wish for an eternal peace for all living things, because they live so oppressed; night is persuasive about death. -If humans do without the sun and lead the battle against the night with moonlight and oil, what philosophy would wrap its veil around them! We already perceive how living half of their lives veiled by darkness and deprivation of sunlight casts a pall upon the whole of humans’ spiritual and psychic nature.

Day 2528, roundabout.

Daily picture, Poetry

Friedrich Nietzsche

Human all too human II
Mixed opinions and maxims

214 The discoverers of trivialities. -Subtle spirits, for whom nothing lies farther afield than a triviality, often discover one of these after following all sorts of roundabout ways and mountain trails and take great pleasure therein, to the amazement of those who are not subtle

Day 2500, to recover.

Daily picture, Quotes

Friedrich Nietzsche

Human, All Too Human II
The Wanderer and His Shadow

219 Not settled. -We are glad to live in a small town; but from time to time, it drives us out into the most solitary and unexposed parts of nature: especially when the town has become too transparent for us once again. Finally, we go to a large city in order to recover, in turn, from nature. A few gulps of the latter -and we sense the dregs of its cup -and the circle begins anew, with the small town at the beginning. -This is how modern people live: who are somewhat too thorough about everything to be as settled as people were in other times.

Day 2487, three.

Daily picture, Quotes

Friedrich Nietzsche

Human, All Too Human II
Mixed Opinions and Maxims

197 What binds and divides. -Doesn’t what binds human beings together-an understanding of their shared utility and liability-lie in the head, and in the heart what divides them -their blind selecting and fumbling in love and hate, their tendency to turn toward one at the expense of all others and their resultant contempt for general utility?

236 Two sources of goodness. -To treat all human beings with an equivalent benevolence and to be good to them without differentiating among persons can be just as much the emanation of a deep contempt for humans as of a fundamental love for humans.

281 Doors. -Like the man, the child sees doors in everything that it experiences or learns: but for the former they are entrances, for the latter always only passageways.

Day 2480, joyous.

aphorism, Daily picture

Friedrich Nietzsche

Human, All Too Human II
The Wanderer and His Shadow

173 Laughing and smiling. -The more joyous and self-assured his spirit becomes, the more a person forgets how to laugh loudly; by contrast, a spiritual smile continually wells up from within him, a sign of his astonishment at the countless concealed charms of a good existence.

Day 2465, wanderer.

Daily picture

Friedrich Nietzsche

Human, all too human II
The wanderer and his shadow

297 Do not wish to see prematurely. -As long as we are experiencing something, we must give ourselves over to the experience and close our eyes, and thus, while still in it, not make ourselves already the observer of it. That would, of course, disturb our good digestion of the experience; instead of a bit of wisdom, we would take away a bit of indigestion.

Day 2271, association.

Day's pictures

Friedrich Nietzsche

Human all too human

Of the first and last things

14 Association. —All strong feelings are associated with a variety of allied sentiments and emotions. They stir up the memory at the same time. When we are under their influence we are reminded of similar states and we feel a renewal of them within us. Thus are formed habitual successions of feelings and notions, which, at last, when they follow one another with lightning rapidity are no longer felt as complexities but as unities. In this sense we hear of moral feelings, of religious feelings, as if they were absolute unities. In reality they are streams with a hundred sources and tributaries. Here again, the unity of the word speaks nothing for the unity of the thing.

Day 2215, history today.

Day's pictures

Friedrich Nietzsche

Human all too human II

Mixed opinion and maxims

382 The final lesson of history. -“Ah, if only I had lived at that time!” -these are the words of foolish and frivolous human beings. We will instead, with regard to every bit of history that we have seriously considered, though it may be the most highly praised land of the past, cry out in the end: “anything rather than back there again! The spirit of that age would press down upon you with the weight of a hundred atmospheres, you would not enjoy what is good and beautiful about it, and you would not be able to digest what is bad.” -It is certain that the world to come will judge our age in the same way: it must have been unbearable, life in it has become unlivable. -And yet everyone puts up with his own age?-Yes, and precisely because the spirit of his age not only lies upon him, but is also within him. The spirit of the age offers its own resistance to itself and bears itself up.

Day 2145, shadows.

Day's pictures

Friedrich Nietzsche

Human all to human II, Mixed Opinions and Maxims

335 Warmth in the heights. -It is warmer upon the heights than people in the valleys believe, especially in winter. The thinker knows all that this comparison implies.

39 Why stupid people so often become malicious. -To the reproaches of an opponent, where our head feels itself too weak to respond, our heart responds by casting suspicion upon the motives behind his reproaches.

122 Good memory. -There are many who do not become thinkers only because their memories are too good.

Day 2125, peace.

Daily picture

 

Friedrich Nietzsche

Human, All Too Human II

The Wanderer and His Shadow

284 The means to a genuine peace. -No government at present concedes that it maintains an army in order to satisfy occasional desires for conquest; instead, it is supposed to serve the purpose of self-defense. The morality that justifies self-defense is called upon as its advocate. But that means: reserving morality for ourselves and immorality for our neighbor, because he must be thought to be aggressive and imperialistic, if our state has to be thinking about the means of self-defense; moreover, our explanation of why we need an army declares him, who denies his aggressiveness just as much as our state does and for his part, too, supposedly maintains an army only for reasons of self-defense,

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Day 2071, where we must travel

Day's pictures

Friedrich Nietzsche

Human all too human

223 Where we must travel. -Immediate self-observation is far from sufficient for getting to know ourselves: we need history, for the past flows on, through us, in a hundred waves; indeed, we are ourselves nothing except what we experience at every moment of this onward flow. And even here, if we want to descend into the river of what seems to be our most individual and personal nature, the saying of Heraclitus holds true: we do not step into the same river twice. This is a truth that has gradually become stale, to be sure, but that has nonetheless remained as powerful and nourishing as it ever was: just like the other one that says, in order to understand history, we must seek out the living remains of historical epochs-that we must travel, as the patriarch Herodotus traveled, to other nations-these are, in fact, only the solidified earlier stages of cultures, on which we can place ourselves-to so-called savage and half-savage peoples, especially, where human beings have removed or not yet put on the garments of Europe.

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