Friedrich Nietzsche

“ Alas for the cheap glory of “genius.” How quickly has its throne been raised, its worship grown into a custom! We are still on our knees before power—according to the old slave-custom —and yet, when the degree of venerability will have to be fixed, only the degree of rationality in power will be decisive; we have to investigate to what extent power has indeed been overcome by something higher, of which it is now the tool and instrument. But as yet there is an absolute lack of eyes for such investigations ; nay, in most cases the estimation of genius is even considered a crime. ”

“ That better knowledge whose representatives they are, and whose voice you hear but too distinctly in your own hearts, how it questions your belief, how you try to denounce it as a bad habit, as the disease of the age, as the neglect and infection of your own intellectual health. You go so far as to hate criticism, science, reason! You have to falsify history to make it bear witness in your favour; you have to deny virtues lest they obscure those of your idols and ideals. ”

“ Am I always to watch the same comedy, act in the same comedy, without ever being able to see the things with other eyes than these? And yet there may be innumerable species of beings whose organs are better fitted for knowledge than ours. What will mankind have come to discern at the end of all their discernment ?—their organs! Which means, perhaps, the impossibility of knowledge! Misery and disgust !—-B: This is a severe attack—reason is attacking you! But to-morrow you will again be in the midst of knowledge and, at the same time, of irrationality; I mean, of the delight in things human. ”

“ As if you could treat creations of fancy in any way differently from men. In this intercourse we find the same morality, the same honesty of purpose, the same secret thought, the same slackness, the same timidity, your whole lovable and hateful self! Your bodily exhaustion will give pale colours to the things, your fever-heat will shape them into monsters! Does not your morning light up the things otherwise than your evening? Are you not afraid of finding in the care of every knowledge your own phantom as the veil which hides truth from your sight ? ”

“ How you long for these moments when your passion will give to you full, unlimited rights and, as it were, innocence ; when in battle, ecstasy, courage, hope, you will be beside yourselves and beyond all doubts; when you decree “he who is not beside himself as we are cannot in the least know what and where truth is," How you long to find all sharers of your belief in this state—which is that of intellectual viciousness —and to light your flames by their conflagration! ”

“ Not only does he not want any praise; he would like to shun gratitude as well, for it is obtrusive and does not stand in awe of solitude and silence. To live without a name or slightly sneered at; too humble to arouse envy or enmity ; with a head free from fever, a handful of knowledge and a bagful of experience; a physician, so to speak, of the poor in intellect, helping one or the other whose head is bewildered by opinions, without this one really noticing who has helped him! ”

“ Study.— Michelangelo looked upon Raphael's genius as acquired by study, upon his own as a gift of nature: learning as opposed to talent. Which, with all due deference to the great pedant, is pedantic. What else is talent but a name for an older piece of learning, experience, practice, appropriation, incorporation, from the times of our forefathers or even an earlier stage? And again; he who learns endows himself, only learning is not quite easy and not merely depends on our readiness; we must be able to learn. ”

“ A cheap mode of life.—The cheapest aid most unsophisticated mode of life is certainly that of the thinker; for, to begin by mentioning the most important feature, he first and foremost stands in need of those very things which others slight and abandon. Secondly: he is easily pleased and does not ask for any expensive spices of pleasure; his task is not arduous, but as it were southern; his days and nights are not wasted by remorse; he moves, eats, drinks and sleeps in proportion as his intellect grows calmer, stronger and clearer ; he rejoices in his body and has no reason to fear it ”

“ At the harvest-festival of the intellect—There is a daily accumulation and increase of experiences, events, opinions and dreams on these opinions,—a boundless, delightful wealth! Its aspect dazzles our eyes; I no longer understand how the poor in intellect can he called blessed! But sometimes I envy them when I am tired: for the administration of such a wealth is a difficult thing, and its weight frequently crushes all happiness.— Yes, if the mere sight sufficed! ”

“ But knowledge would be in a sorry plight if it were doled out to every thinker only in proportion as it happens to suit his person. And thinkers would be in a sorry plight if their vanity were so great that they could only endure this. For the noblest virtue of the great thinker is resplendent in his generosity which urges him, the discerner, to sacrifice himself and his life unshrinkingly, often blushingly, often with sublime scorn and smiling. ”

“ To reconcile.—Should it be the task of philosophy to reconcile that which the child has learnt to that which the man has recognised? Should philosophy be indeed the tusk of youths because they stand midway between the child and the man and have the intermediate inclinations ? It almost appears to be so if we consider at what stages of life the philosophers nowadays usually draw their conceptions: when it is too late for faith and too early for knowledge. ”

“ In fact, every evil craving has in the fall swing of society and social life to put itself under such great restraint, to put on so many masks, so often to rest on the Procrustean-bed of virtue, that we have every reason to speak of a martyrdom of evil. All this disappears in solitude. The evil man is more so in solitude:—hence he is also most beautiful in the eye of him who sees everywhere nothing but a play. ”

“ Like an obscure inn which never refuses admittance to a person in need, but which is afterwards forgotten and laughed at! He has no advantage, neither better food, nor purer air, nor a readier intellect —but gives up, returns, imparts, grows poorer! He can be humble in order to be accessible to many and humiliating to none! He has much wrong resting on himself, and has crept through the worm-holes of all sorts of errors, in order to be able to reach many obscene souls on their secret paths. ”

“ The unbounded ambition and delight of being the “unraveller of the world” filled the dreams of the thinker, nothing seemed to him worth any trouble but the means of bringing everything to a satisfactory conclusion. Hence philosophy was a kind of last struggle for the tyrannical sway of the intellect. The fact that such a sway was reserved for some very happy, noble, ingenious, bold, powerful person—a peerless one—was doubted by nobody, and several, at last even Schopenhauer, fancied them selves to be this one peerless person. ”

“ Against the tyranny of truth—Even if we were mad enough to consider all our opinions to be true, we should not wish only them to exist. I do not know why we should ask for an autocracy and omnipotence of truth ; enough, that it has a great power. But truth must be able to fight and face opponents, and we must be able periodically to rest from it in untruth ; else truth will grow uninteresting, powerless and stale, and end by making us thus. ”

“ The institution, on the other hand, is a temple, as he well knows— indeed, a temple of stone and duration will keep its god alive more surely than the sacrificial offerings of tender and rare souls. Perhaps, at this period, he meets for the first time with that love which is more suited to a god than a human being, and his whole character is softened and sweetened in the rays of such a sun, like a fruit in autumn. ”

“ The more highly, therefore, an age, a people value the individuals, and the more we concede to them both right and ascendency, the more will actions like these venture to light—and so, in the end, a lustre of honesty, of genuineness in good and evil, will spread over whole ages and nations, so that they—is the Greeks, for illstance—like some stars, continue to shed light for thousand of years after their fall. ”

“ At that time there still lingered on the tongues of Greece that other, older and formerly omnipotent taste wherefrom the new taste detached itself so magically that the “divine art” of dialectics was praised by faltering voices as though In a frenzy of love. But that old-world system was speculation within the bonds of morality, with nothing but established opinions and established facts, and no reasons but those of authority, so that thinking was copying, and all enjoyment of speech and dialogue consisted in the form. ”

“ Perhaps there may be a future when this bold mode of thinking will have reached such a pitch that it feels itself as the summit of pride above men and. things—when the wise man, being at the same time the boldest, sees himself, and, above all, existence furthest below himself? Mankind has hitherto been wanting in this kind of courage which is akin to extravagant generosity. ”

“ But we understand so little and are so inadequately taught, wherefore we rarely happen to embrace the thing which is apt to make us lovable ; on the contrary, we stiffly and indifferently pass by the eities, mature and history, at the same time thinking very highly of this stiff aid indifferent bearing, as though it evinced superiority. Nay, our ignorance and intellectual love of knowledge have altogether acquired the habit of flaunting about as dignity and character. ”

“ Even in our days hostile voices begin to clamour against philosophy, exclaiming. “Return to science, to Nature, and naturalness of science !” and thus all age may dawn which will discover the most powerful beauty in the "uncultivated, ugly" branches of science, just as since Rousseau we have discovered the sense for the beauty of mountains and deserts. ”

“ We grow lonelier for the very reason that the whole flood of humanity is surging round us. The fire within us, which is glowing for all that is human, is ever on the increase—wherefore we look upon all that surrounds us as though it had become more indifferent, more shadowy. ”

“ Always full of secret predetermination of what nature truth should be, so that you, indeed you, may accept it! Or do you think that to-day because you are frozen and dry as a bright winter morning, and nothing weighs on your mind, you have a keener sight? Does it not require ardour and enthusiasm to do justice to a creation of fancy? ”

“ You may pass through the deepest revolutions of mind and knowledge, and at last, with the melancholy smile of the reconvalescent, step out into freedom and bright stillness—some one will yet say: ‘his person looks upon his illness us upon an argument, on his impotence as on a proof for the impotence of all; he is vain enough to fall ill in order to feel the superiority of the sufferer. ”

“ Truth needs power.—Truth is, in itself, no power at all, despite all that the flattering enlighteners will say to the contrary. On the contrary, it has to draw power over to its side, or to side with power, else it will again and again go to ruin. ”

“ You know well how to illuminate and to darken— indeed, to darken by means of light! And indeed when your passion wallows up, a moment will arrive when you will say to yourselves, Now I have conquered a good conscience, now I am generous, courageous, self-denying, noble ”

“ And again—how intensely must their pride have suffered when they did not succeed in imposing truth upon life!—truth as each of them understood it—when their lives coursed alongside their knowledge like an uncouth bass which is not in tune with the melody. ”

“ Thus that inconceivably timid, vain, odious, envious, tight-laced and tight-lacing nature which suddenly springs forth in them, that too personal and strained element in characters like Rousseau and Schopenhauer may well be the outcome of a periodical heart-disease ; and this, in its turn, the consequence of a nervous complaint which again may ultimately be the outcome of—. As long as genius dwells within us, we are bold, nay, frantic and heedless of life, health and honor; we fly swiftly through the day, freer than an eagle, and safer in darkness than an owl. ”

“ So much antique humanness is exemplified in this ideal. But the most beautiful feature of it is that it is altogether free from the fear of God, that it strictly believes in reason, that it is no preacher of penitence. Epictetus was a slave; his ideal man is without vocation, and may exist in any vocation, but he will first and foremost be found in the lowest social strata as the silent, self-sufficient man in the midst of a general enslavement who practises self-defence against the outside world and is constantly living in a state of supreme fortitude. ”