Nothung

“ But if one ask oneself what the conditions to such an attitude are, one will realise immediately how utterly different Nietzsche was from his ideal. The man who insatiably cries da capo to himself and to the whole of his mise-en-scene, must be in a position to desire every incident in his life to be repeated, not once, but again and again eternally. Now, Nietzsche’s life had been too full of disappointments, illness, unsuccessful struggles, and snubs, to allow of his thinking of the Eternal Recurrence without loathing—hence probably the words of the last verse. ”

“ If this be true—and the mention of the name of Nott gives a colour to the transaction—the 'cherubim' must have slept, the 'flaming sword' have been sheathed, and another Eden has been lost: and, what is worse than all, that native simplicity of manners, that purity of morals, and that singleness of heart, which so peculiarly distinguished this little interesting society, are all lost. ”

“ Is it possible that Nietzsche, with his idea of the revaluation of values, has contributed to the spread of this spirit? I do not know. We wait; we aspire; we hope. To us to-morrow is sacred. Every one is striving towards forms of life and art which shall be more ample, more truthful, more expressive, more beautiful. ”

“ The very arranging, classifying, interpreting, valuing of the world and of things in it, about the objective validity of which Nietzsche is in doubt, is an incident to this end. The most wonderful of all things is not the world in its mystery, or the truths of values about which we dispute, but what is immediate and best proved, our own willing, valuing, creative selves. ”

“ As soon as any idea whatsoever springs up in Nietzsche’s mind, it immediately draws with it into consciousness all presentations related to it, and thus with flying hand he throws five, six, often eight, synonyms on paper, without noticing how overladen and turgid his literary style is thereby rendered: ‘The force of a mind measures itself ... ”

“ He feels, quite in the spirit of evolution, in the spirit of Nietzsche, that our generation is raised high above all the past, that it is the summit of all that is past, and the turning-point towards the future. ”

“ The sort of life which made Nietzsche wish to live again we have just seen. Life was welcome, would be ad infinitum, when lit up with a thought like that described—when a vision of the Divine opened out to it. ”

“ With the same exalted spirit in which Jesus preached the kingdom of heaven, so did Nietzsche preach the kingdom of this earth, while it may be noted incidentally that both kingdoms were the perquisites of a select few; and as the spurned god of Israel taught self-abasement to the weak with an intensity that, rightly or wrongly, seems a little extravagant to our modern taste, so does Nietzsche, and with every whit as honest a fanaticism, thunder forth to the strong the sublime dogma of self-expression and self-glorification. ”

“ On the "soul" as an inner quantity in general, see Genealogy etc., II, § 16.
l Compare a similar view, worked out with convincing thoroughness, by the late Edmund Montgomery in his Philosophical Problems in the Light of Vital Organization. Nietzsche has interesting comments on dreams as interpretations of bodily, particularly nervous states (Human, etc., § 13; Dawn of Day, § 119; Will to Power, § 479) ; if the dreams change, the conditions being the same, it is because varying impulses are in turn dominant in us (Joyful Science, § 119) . ”

“ There is not only an Eternal Return, but an Infinite Reduplication. And if thought, as Nietzsche assumed, is only the phosphorescence accompanying certain arrangements of matter, the same conscious life must also repeat itself. ”

“ From Noot, the son of Noot, the high-priest, the guardian of Secrets, to Ayesha, Child of Isis, Wisdom’s Daughter, the Instructed, the Oracle: Thus saith Noot.
“I live, I do not sleep in my eternal house. My spirit shows me that which passes upon the Nile. I know that you have obeyed my commands which I gave to you before we parted in the bygone years, O my begotten in the goddess. I know that you have waited patiently in faith through many tribulations. ”

“ For Nietzsche was inspired with as supreme a consciousness of the infallibility and paramount necessity of his message, as rigid a belief in exclusive salvation through his own teachings, as has overwhelmed the brain of any prophet or Messiah known to human history. "I have given mankind the deepest book it possesses," writes Nietzsche to Brandes, and means it quite deliberately and quite literally. ”

“ He does not know, then, that animals without the power of speech also have a consciousness; that it is possible also to think in images, in representations of movement, without the help of a word, and that speech is not added to consciousness until very late in the course of development. The drollest thing is that Nietzsche very much fancies himself as a psychologist, and wishes most particularly to be esteemed as such! ”

“ Nietzsche did not shrink from any of the inferential conclusions logically to be drawn from the biologic argument. If growth is in the purpose of nature, then once we have accepted our chief office in life, it becomes our task to pave the way for a higher genus of man. And the only force that makes with directness for that object is the Will to Power. To foreshadow the resultant human type, Nietzsche resurrected from Goethe's vocabulary the convenient word Übermensch—“Overman.” ”

“ Friends like yourself must help me to sustain my belief in myself, and this you do when you confide in me about your highest aims and hopes. Beneath these words does there lurk the request for a letter from you? Well, yes, dearest friend, I should rejoice at receiving something really personal from you once more if only not always to have the Rohde of the past in my heart, but also the Rohde of the present and, what is more, the Rohde who is developing and willing—yes, the Rohde of the future.
Affectionately yours, N. Nietzsche To Peter Gast - April, 1881 Genoa, 10-4-81. ”

“ When you want to catch some one napping, you keep your eye eagerly upon him, and turn neither to the right nor to the left. Nietzsche, it must be remembered, was at this stage treading softly towards Europe whom he believed to be "napping." ”

“ This polyphony of different talents, all coming to utterance together and producing the richest and boldest of harmonies, is the fundamental feature not only of Nietzsche's early days, but of his whole development. It is once again the artist, philosopher, and man of science, who as one man in later years, after many wanderings, recantations, and revulsions of feeling, produces that other and rarer Centaur of highest rank—Zarathustra. ”

“ It has not the time to be obscure. Nietzsche had this perfection of utterance, but a far richer range and volume. He was a poet by grace divine, and a true Romantic for all the acid he dropped on Romanticism; the life of his soul was an incessant creative surge of images, metaphors, symbolisms, mythologies. These two tendencies produced as their natural issue that gnomic and aphoristic tongue which sneers, preaches, prophesies, chants, intoxicates and dances through the pages of Also Sprach Zarathustra. ”

“ Goethe has shown a similar riddle in man's nature, in his remarkable study of Newton: he finds a "troubled feeling of his own error" at the base—or rather on the height—of his being, just as if he was conscious at times of having a deeper insight into things, that vanished the moment after. ”

“ The aged man had summed up his experience of life by saying, "As children, we are sensualists; as lovers, we are idealists, who attach to the loved object qualities which are not really there; then love wavers, and before we are aware of it, we are skeptics; the remainder of life is indifferent, we let it go as it will, and end as quietists, as the Hindu philosophers did also." Nietzsche quotes the passage and adds, "So speaks Goethe: was he right? ”

“ This seems to me to give an account of the great struggle which must have taken place in Nietzsche’s soul before he finally resolved to make known the more esoteric portions of his teaching. Our deepest feelings crave silence. There is a certain self-respect in the serious man which makes him hold his profoundest feelings sacred. Before they are uttered they are full of the modesty of a virgin, and often the oldest sage will blush like a girl when this virginity is violated by an indiscretion which forces him to reveal his deepest thoughts. ”

“ I have spoken of Nietzsche's instinct for the perfect—how real it was comes out in a variety of minor indirect ways. Zarathustra gives comfort to his guest-disciples in the thought of the little good perfect things already in the world—put them around you, he says, their golden ripeness heals the heart; the perfect teaches hope. ”

“ In a sense, the aim might be called cosmical, i.e., the world is apparently thought of as pressing to a higher realization of its potencies through us in this way. Nietzsche says, "We are buds on one tree—what do we know of what can come out of us in the interests of the tree! ”

“ With love, Your F. Nietzsche To His Sister - April, 1887 Cannobio, Lago Maggiore, Villa Badia, April 20, 1887. MY DEAR LAMA:
Here I am in a magnificent spot, and every morning I marvel at the glory of the colouring. The noble cloisterly nature of the situation and the arrangements also pleases me—and yet I am so out of sorts that I feel as if I could no longer be heartily glad about anything. Nothing comes to me from the outside world to give me courage or strength. My fellow-boarders are incomparably tedious! In that respect I was better off in Nice this winter. ”

“ This explanation of the source of his ‘original’ moral [447] philosophy comprehends in itself a diagnosis, which at once obtrudes on the most short-sighted eye. Nietzsche’s system is the product of the mania of contradiction, the delirious form of that mental derangement, of which the melancholic form is the mania of doubt and negation, treated of in the earlier chapters of this work. His folie des négations betrays itself also in his peculiarities of language. There is ever in his consciousness a questioning impulse like a mark of interrogation. ”

“ If we picture to ourselves Nietzsche’s mood at the time when “Zarathustra” was composed, [1] and think of the ecstasy that at more than one point approached the pathological, we shall comprehend the abnormal reminiscence. The second of the two possibilities mentioned, the acceptance of some object, not itself uninteresting, in a state of dispersion or half interest from lack of understanding, and its cryptomnesic reproduction we find chiefly in somnambulists; it is also found in the literary chronicles dealing with dying celebrities. ”

“ What do you suppose great men, the so-called great thinkers, are? Fortunate folk who know how to express themselves! Nietzsche, for instance. Don't you think I and a hundred others have all Nietzsche's ideas, without ever having read them? Only he knew how to set them down, and we don't. I say Nietzsche, but I might just as well say the author of the Imitation."
"You should have married an author," said Antonio, secretly jealous of the man whom Regina had perhaps dreamed of but never met. ”

“ In turning away from metaphysics proper, Nietzsche developes interesting, if not absolutely novel, views of the sensible world itself. [12] They look in the direction of an extreme phenomenalism—one might almost call them, in contrast with our common-sense realistic views, illusionism.
What is the relation of a sensation, say a color sensation, to the object that calls it forth? Nietzsche occupies himself much with the question. ”

“ While the first two classes represent the higher ranges of human life, the attaining of which is the supreme end to Nietzsche, they are marked off from each other—the theory of the first class being specially developed and being that part of his general view which Nietzsche had most at heart. (2) The lowest class—the great average mass—has in his eyes an important, yes indispensable place in the social structure: this in contrast with the attitude of depreciation and contempt often exclusively attributed to him. ”

“ The unpractised eye is so utterly confounded by the immensity of this awful chasm of the Notch, yawning in all its extent and all its grandeur far down beneath, that, powerless to grasp the fulness and the vastness thus suddenly encountered, it stupidly stares into those far-retreating depths. ”

“ So singular a character arrests the poet's attention. He had laid down his theory of colors; he must add to it a theory of Newton. The great German is here at home, and Newton could probably no more have gone into these disquisitions regarding character than Goethe could have developed the physical theories of Newton. He prefaces his sketch of his rival's character by reflections and considerations regarding character in general. Every living thing, down to the worm that wriggles when trod upon, has a character of its own. ”

“ There, in Naumburg, a life replete with good deeds had at last been consummated, and despite a weakly constitution had at least lasted well into old age. We all had the feeling that the strength both of her mind and her body was exhausted, and that only for our love had death come too soon. ”

“ Comprehending, explaining, understanding—that alone fills out Nietzsche's idea of knowing; and classifying, not to say mathematizing, only touches the borders of the subject. m That a belief is convenient, practical, even necessary, proves nothing as to its standing in foro scientiæ. The law of causality, for example, may, like other so-called a priori truths, be so much a part of us that unbelief in it would cause our undoing—is it therefore true? As if truth were proved by our remaining alive! [36] The idea of an "ego" may be indispensable, and for all that be a fiction. ”