Nietzscheisms

Charlotttesville, Virginia

April 11, 2020

“A good writer possesses not only his own spirit but also the spirit of his friends.”

“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.”

“A thought comes when it will, not when I will.”

“A thought, even a possibility, can shatter and transform us.”

“Ah, women. They make the highs higher and the lows more frequent.”

“All I need is a sheet of paper and something to write with, and then I can turn the world upside down.”

“All things are subject to interpretation. Whichever interpretation prevails at a given time is a function of power and not truth.”

“All truly great thoughts are conceived while walking.”

“Amor Fati – “Love Your Fate”, which is in fact your life.”

“And once you are awake, you shall remain awake eternally. ”

“And those who were seen dancing were thought to be insane by those who could not hear the music.”

“Art is the proper task of life. ”

“At bottom every man knows well enough that he is a unique being, only once on this earth; and by no extraordinary chance will such a marvelously picturesque piece of diversity in unity as he is, ever be put together a second time.”

“Be careful when you cast out your demons that you don’t throw away the best of yourself.”

“Become who you are!”

“Blessed are the forgetful, for they get the better even of their blunders.”

“But it is the same with man as with the tree. The more he seeks to rise into the height and light, the more vigorously do his roots struggle earthword, downword, into the dark, the deep - into evil.”

“But the worst enemy you can meet will always be yourself; you lie in wait for yourself in caverns and forests. Lonely one, you are going the way to yourself! And your way goes past yourself, and past your seven devils! You will be a heretic to yourself and witch and soothsayer and fool and doubter and unholy one and villain. You must be ready to burn yourself in your own flame: how could you become new, if you had not first become ashes?”

“Convictions are more dangerous foes of truth than lies.”

“Distrust all in whom the impulse to punish is powerful.”

“Every deep thinker is more afraid of being understood than of being misunderstood.”

“He who cannot put his thoughts on ice should not enter into the heat of dispute.”

“He who has a why to live for can bear almost any how.”

“He who would learn to fly one day must first learn to walk and run and climb and dance; one cannot fly into flying. ”

“I assess the power of a will by how much resistance, pain, torture it endures and knows how to turn to its advantage”

“I know of no better life purpose than to perish in attempting the great and the impossible.”

“I'm not upset that you lied to me, I'm upset that from now on I can't believe you.”

“If you know the why, you can live any how.”

“In heaven, all the interesting people are missing.”

“In individuals, insanity is rare; but in groups, parties, nations and epochs, it is the rule.”

“Invisible threads are the strongest ties.”

“Is life not a thousand times too short for us to bore ourselves?”

“It is hard enough to remember my opinions, without also remembering my reasons for them!”

“It is my ambition to say in ten sentences what others say in a whole book.”

“It is not a lack of love, but a lack of friendship that makes unhappy marriages.”

“Love brings to light a lover's noble and hidden qualities-his rare and exceptional traits: it is thus liable to be deceptive of his normal qualities.”

“Love is a state in which a man sees things most decidedly as they are not.”

“Love is blind. Friendship closes its eyes.”

“Love, too, has to be learned.”

“Man is something that shall be overcome. Man is a rope, tied between beast and overman — a rope over an abyss. What is great in man is that he is a bridge and not an end.” “Meaning and morality of One's life come from within oneself. Healthy, strong individuals seek self expansion by experimenting and by living dangerously. Life consists of an infinite number of possibilities and the healthy person explores as many of them as possible. The good life is ever changing, challenging, devoid of regret, intense, creative and risky.”

“My dear friend, what is this our life? A boat that swims in the sea, and all one knows for certain about it is that one day it will capsize. Here we are, two good old boats that have been faithful neighbors, and above all your hand has done its best to keep me from "capsizing"! Let us then continue our voyage—each for the other's sake, for a long time yet, a long time! We should miss each other so much! Tolerably calm seas and good winds and above all sun—what I wish for myself, I wish for you, too, and am sorry that my gratitude can find expression only in such a wish and has no influence at all on wind or weather!”

“My solitude doesn’t depend on the presence or absence of people; on the contrary, I hate who steals my solitude without, in exchange, offering me true company.”

“No one can construct for you the bridge upon which precisely you must cross the stream of life, no one but you yourself alone.”

“Nothing on earth consumes a man more quickly than the passion of resentment.”

“One loves ultimately one's desires, not the thing desired.”

“One must be a sea, to receive a polluted stream without becoming impure.”

“One must give value to their existence by behaving as if ones very existence were a work of art.”

“One must learn to love.— This is what happens to us in music: first one has to learn to hear a figure and melody at all, to detect and distinguish it, to isolate it and delimit it as a separate life; then it requires some exertion and good will to tolerate it in spite of its strangeness, to be patient with its appearance and expression, and kindhearted about its oddity:—finally there comes a moment when we are used to it, when we wait for it, when we sense that we should miss it if it were missing: and now it continues to compel and enchant us relentlessly until we have become its humble and enraptured lovers who desire nothing better from the world than it and only it.— But that is what happens to us not only in music: that is how we have learned to love all things that we now love. In the end we are always rewarded for our good will, our patience, fairmindedness, and gentleness with what is strange; gradually, it sheds its veil and turns out to be a new and indescribable beauty:—that is its thanks for our hospitality. Even those who love themselves will have learned it in this way: for there is no other way. Love, too, has to be learned.”

“One must shed the bad taste of wanting to agree with many. "Good" is no longer good when one's neighbor mouths it. And how should there be a "common good"! The term contradicts itself: whatever can be common always has little value. In the end it must be as it is and always has been: great things remain for the great, abysses for the profound, nuances and shudders for the refined, and, in brief, all that is rare for the rare.”

“One must still have chaos in oneself to be able to give birth to a dancing star.”

“One ought to hold on to one's heart; for if one lets it go, one soon loses control of the head too.”

“One repays a teacher badly if one always remains nothing but a pupil.”

“Remorse -- Never yield to remorse, but at once tell yourself: remorse would simply mean adding to the first act of stupidity a second.”

“Silence is worse; all truths that are kept silent become poisonous.”

“Sometimes people don't want to hear the truth because they don't want their illusions destroyed.”

“Stupidity in a woman is unfeminine.”

“Talking much about oneself can also be a means to conceal oneself. ”

“That which does not kill us makes us stronger.”

“That which is done out of love is always beyond good and evil.”

“The advantage of a bad memory is that one enjoys several times the same good things for the first time.”

“The higher we soar the smaller we appear to those who cannot fly.”

“The individual has always had to struggle to keep from being overwhelmed by the tribe. If you try it, you will be lonely often, and sometimes frightened. But no price is too high to pay for the privilege of owning yourself.”

“The lonely one offers his hand too quickly to whomever he encounters.”

“The most perfidious way of harming a cause consists of defending it deliberately with faulty arguments.”

“The most spiritual men, as the strongest, find their happiness where others would find their destruction: in the labyrinth, in hardness against themselves and others, in experiments. Their joy is self-conquest: asceticism becomes in them nature, need, and instinct. Difficult tasks are a privilege to them; to play with burdens that crush others, a recreation. Knowledge–a form of asceticism. They are the most venerable kind of man: that does not preclude their being the most cheerful and the kindliest.”

“The snake which cannot cast its skin has to die. As well the minds which are prevented from changing their opinions; they cease to be mind.”

“The surest way to corrupt a youth is to instruct him to hold in higher esteem those who think alike than those who think differently.”

“The true man wants two things: danger and play. For that reason he wants woman, as the most dangerous plaything.”

“The visionary lies to himself, the liar only to others.”

“The voice of beauty speaks softly; it creeps only into the most fully awakened souls”

“There are no facts, only interpretations.”

“There are two different types of people in the world, those who want to know, and those who want to believe.”

“There is an innocence in admiration: it occurs in one who has not yet realized that they might one day be admired.”

“They muddy the water, to make it seem deep.”

“Thoughts are the shadows of our feelings -- always darker, emptier and simpler.”

“To live is to suffer, to survive is to find some meaning in the suffering.”

“To predict the behavior of ordinary people in advance, you only have to assume that they will always try to escape a disagreeable situation with the smallest possible expenditure of intelligence.”

“Today as always, men fall into two groups: slaves and free men. Whoever does not have two-thirds of his day for himself, is a slave, whatever he may be: a statesman, a businessman, an official, or a scholar.”

“True, we love life, not because we are used to living, but because we are used to loving. There is always some madness in love, but there is also always some reason in madness.”

“Ultimately, it is the desire, not the desired, that we love.”

“We have art in order not to die of the truth.”

“We should consider every day lost on which we have not danced at least once.”

“What does your conscience say? — 'You should become the person you are'.”

“What is the seal of liberation? Not to be ashamed in front of oneself.”

“What, if some day or night a demon were to steal after you into your loneliest loneliness and say to you: 'This life as you now live it and have lived it, you will have to live once more and innumerable times more' ... Would you not throw yourself down and gnash your teeth and curse the demon who spoke thus? Or have you once experienced a tremendous moment when you would have answered him: 'You are a god and never have I heard anything more divine.”

“When we are tired, we are attacked by ideas we conquered long ago.”

“Without forgetting it is quite impossible to live at all.”

“Without music, life would be a mistake.”

“You have your way. I have my way. As for the right way, the correct way, and the only way, it does not exist.”

“You must have chaos within you to give birth to a dancing star.”