Various

“ Where pride grows, no pity can thrive. And at last pity itself becomes a kind of pride, a sorry self-reflection as in a mirror. The most subtle and dangerous way for men to free themselves from the pain of pity, when they cannot stave it off completely, is to make it a thing of pride and praise: “I thank Thee, God, that I am not like the hard-hearted!” Then they revel and riot in their pity, then they rejoice that they are so good-hearted, so tender-hearted, because they can see no suffering without being touched and melted to tears. ”

“ To spare a friend the disillusion which he would suffer if he felt an antagonism, an opposition, in the friendship, they have pity on him, they learn to keep silent, and silence soon becomes a lie. Since they dare not cause the friend the grief of discovering to him these lies, they lie more, lie life-long,—all out of pity, out of their weak tender love. How much nobler and greater that friendship whose ideal Nietzsche sketches for us, in which we are gripped from the outset in a friend’s contradiction and hostility! ”

“ There can be no doubt that the pain of our pity for others may be more painful than the pain of our own lives. In the throes of such pity, the woes of our own lives may seem small indeed, and finally fade away. To behold a human being that is deeply dear to us suffer is worse than it would be to suffer in his place. And if the man of moral elevation of soul feels equal in the end to all that brings pain to his own life, all the more defenseless does he feel with regard to the great all-prevailing misery which, in pity, celebrates its triumphal entry into his heart. ”

“ The White Rose, dying by the Jester’s bed, spoke once more to the Fool.
“Cast self pity out of thine heart. Learn to live as I have learned to die, and then learn to die as I have learned to live. For thee absence seems death, but trace the meaning of the soul of the woman thou lovest. Her soul is also absent from the Oversoul as her body is absent from a Lover. Only through absence can the Oversoul draw its own to itself, and only through loneliness can the Great Lover and the Lesser Lover understand one another. ”

“ Love is pain but over-love is peace. Turn thy tears into help and pity for those who weep without thy hope and for those who dwell in dungeons and are not yet registered in heaven as wise or foolish. Let thy longings for one break into prayer for the weal of the world. Thou wert not sent here only for thy pleasure or thy peace, nor was the body of thy Lady sent for thy delight, or her soul for thy strength alone. Pain is ordained for the bringers of good tidings and love lent for the redemption of the many through the loneliness of the one. ”

“ The tears of emotion that gush generously forth at the spectacle of suffering humanity—even of frail and faulty humanity—taste so good! Many is the time they have felt the weary weight of this unintelligible world on listening to a sad story or seeing a play, and screwed up melancholy and doleful countenances—maybe pity can be put among the things that can make life, always requiring to be braced up a bit, a trifle more interesting. ”

“ You are charged, first, with being a woman. And as a woman you are the living incarnation of the past. You represent conservatism and the anti-military virtues; you clog the wheels of progress; you sap men’s energies and misdirect them from the triumphs of achievement to the service of material things—or immaterial things. Your effeminate beauty poisons art and furnishes countless photographic realists with the means of selling paintings. The love of you has vitiated poetry and music. Masquerading in the garments of caprice, you have deceived man into accepting the traditional. ”

“ It is not for thee to choose thy way of love. God’s jester is neither man nor woman nor child, but a singer of joys and woes to ease men’s souls and dry the eyes of women. Play thy part, then, and laugh thy laugh. Men win her lips, women crave her help, the world takes her service, and thou her smiles. Wouldst thou have more, thou poet lover in the guise of a fool? ”

“ If no lover comes, then hearten and hasten even thine own enemy into her service, if so be she gets strength and comfort from the strange enterprise. Then make thine own soul white as the rose she has given thee. On with thy cap and bells! Grow nimble and dance. Dance and sing in thy jester’s way, for the homesickness of the heaven thou hast seen will teach thee strange melodies. When death claims thee, and the cap and bells are laid aside, God’s Jester shall sleep with a white rose on his breast. ”

“ To force her mouth, so much desired, into an open well for slaking thine own thirst is love’s delicious robbery. To hurtle to her breast, as if to rob and forestall the child who may one day drink there, is to have found a shrine for prayer and peace. Yes! even to rest in the hallowed forests of her body ere thou storm the citadel where thy weapon shall break into the silent house of life, is easy and has always been the way of men with woman. Woman the abandoned, man the triumphant, woman the flower, man the gatherer, woman the luscious wine and man the thirsty drinker. ”

“ Consider the whole conception of life of the so-called favorites of fortune. To what lengths do they go that they may be spared the sight of misfortune, that they may not be agitated by a touch of pity! How they avoid, if at all possible, every place that would remind them that there are want and misery, hunger and sorrow, in the world—as the Parisians did, until Zola, the most calumniated author of the nineteenth century, dragged these things, with their ensuing vices, out into the light of day and made the French people look at them! ”

“ Shall we, then, hate life? Shall we say that it were better not to be than to be? We might, did we not find strength and comfort in and with every suffering,—did we not allow every item or event of experience the democratic right to a trial by a jury of its peers and to our trust that it is worth while until it shall prove that it is not,—did we not experience that up from the abyss of every suffering, painful as it seems, a path leads to a summit where all sufferings are only shadows of a blinding flood and fullness of light ”

“ Prayer, because the paths of earth are hard for the feet of her whose tread awakens a longing for wings in the Fool standing near. Joy, because her eyes are mirrors of a time to come when love and peace will renew earth into heaven, and men and women will become as wise as eagles and children. Through her body, I love the soul of my lady, and through her soul I love her body. Neither her soul nor her body may help and comfort the Jester even though God leads and helps him by both grace and mercy. ”

“ Brothers, can we kill the woman and spare the feminist?
White Heart. If you kill the woman you will make the feminist.
Yellow Hat. No; the feminist is more female than the woman. The feminist would inflict domesticity on the world. She wants all men for her husband. She wants to tie pink ribbons on siege guns and abolish the mountains to make room for the nursery. If we let the feminist live, man can no longer find a place in which to be alone with his adventure. If we let the feminist live we shall make the woman a giant. If we kill the woman we shall kill them both at the same time. ”

“ If by chance, for there is no hope in this message of the dawn, there is a resurrection day for thee, if by chance or God’s pure will, she turns to thee as God allows one spirit to turn to another spirit, when Love has prepared the altar, then clash thy cymbals, blow thy trumpet, shout till the sleepy world rejoices, shake thy bells and fling thy Jester’s cap and cloak aside, for to eat the sacramental bread and drink the wine of thy love’s pure body thou wilt not need raiment, and as thou wert born and as thou wilt die thou wilt enter into thy Holy of Holies. ”

“ Now, may love be good, and pity bad? What a problem is here! May we war a two-fold warfare, one against suffering and one against pity? Ought we? War upon pity—would not that be in contradiction to all that our own generation especially calls good and great? Our generation has done its best to develop in the human heart an ever-enlarging capacity for pity—what would it say to a warrior who pitilessly took up arms against pity?
Friedrich Nietzsche was such a warrior, single-handed and alone! ”

“ And how entirely different a service of friendship do we render a friend if we show a hard love to him, if he break a tooth on us, as Nietzsche says, because we do not flatter and fit him, but compel him, out of love compel him, to assert himself against us, and to withstand our defense of our rights against him! Foolish men seek their friends among the Jasagern, most preferably, among those who are of their own opinion in everything. They then call this an ideal friendship: two souls and one thought, two hearts and one beat! ”

“ The essential thing is that you have this sense of a third person to which genius appeals. Dostoevsky is a stronger as well as a truer one than even Nietzsche himself.
Nietzsche is as a skater upon the ice, a dancer upon a tight rope who remains a white, balanced figure on the surface. Dostoevsky plunges—into a darkness full of voices. You must get there by a form of perversion. Every one of his characters is incurably hurt. Nietzscheans harden their hearts and live on the surface. All Dostoevsky people are weak. He thinks that only out of weakness will redemption come ”

“ Our next renaissance will be concerned with changing that perspective; the genius of the future must be directed toward that end. And that is why I think it is not enough to say that there will come a time when men will think of nothing but education. There will come a time when men will think of nothing but education in imagination! And since there is no such thing as education in imagination, but only procreation of it,—well, the time will come when men will think of nothing but art. ”

“ It is the Mother-Spirit of the world who has hidden thy love from thy sight, and taken thine head from the touch of her hands and torn thy lips from her kisses. Is it not always so that the mothers of the smaller world wean their children into growth and knowledge? Thou art still hers even if her body is out of sight and touch, for pure love is the simple miracle of thine heritage as a son of man and of God. ”

“ If the powers of Olympus would lend to men some creature of infinite wisdom and taste, some creature versed in the weary evolutions of the past, and pregnant with the unformulated tendencies of the future through which an increasing happiness may be attained by men, then well might that creature assume a censorship of human thought and speech. But salvation cannot be won so lightly, for the seed of happiness is with men. No one lives, or has lived, with the power to say what idea was valuable to the world and what idea was baneful. ”

“ Yet in any case the point of view, the impelling instinct that leads toward beauty, is the same for any person, any race, any civilization. Let us be honest and admit this. Let us sincerely seek and discover the philosophy that guides every new movement, whether in fashion or food or poetry.
Yet it seems to me that we are too prone to accept poetry and to judge it from a too utilitarian point of view. We would make it stand the same test that we apply to religion, to household furnaces, and other things that have been long tried. ”

“ Zarathustra-Nietzsche loves everything which steels the will and augments life’s force. Therefore he loves his foe, for, thanks to his foe, he never comes to a standstill and stagnates. Therefore his true friend is the one who has become his best foe, who makes him sweat, who summons him to risk hot war with him, to break a lance with him in an intellectual passage at arms in which the soul struggles for its own yea and nay. So, similarly, this Zarathustra-Nietzsche hates pity. ”