To love humanity for the sake of God – that has been the noblest and most bizarre feeling people have attained so far. That the love of humanity, in the absence of any sanctifying ulterior motive, is one more stupidity and abomination; that the tendency to love humanity like this can only get its…
How inevitable every detail of my life has been, how channeled by prior events, some partially understood, most just opaque happenings that appear dumb, still no less impactful upon my life. Fortune and misfortune are how I would label the entire saga. I know that with some effort I could construct a list of…
Man is a rope, tied between beast and overman —a rope over an abyss. A dangerous across, a dangerous on-the-way, a dangerous looking-back, a dangerous shuddering and stopping. What is great in man is that he is a bridge and not an end: what can be loved in man is…
A question without an answer; the will for man and the earth is lacking; behind every great human destiny there resounded as a refrain an even greater ‘in vain!’ The meaninglessness of suffering, not suffering itself, was the curse which hitherto lay over mankind… Any meaning is better than no meaning at all. From…
The ear, the organ of fear, could not have evolved so greatly as it has only in the night and twilight of obscure caves and woods, in accordance with the mode of life of the age of timidity, that is to say the longest human age there has ever been: in bright daylight the…
Nothing is so conditional that is so circumscribed, as our feeling for the beautiful. Anyone who has tried to divorce it from man’s pleasure would be to find the ground give way beneath him. the ‘beautiful in itself’ is not even a concept, merely a phrase. In the beautiful man sets himself up as…
Every art, every philosophy may be viewed as a remedy and an aid in the service of growing and struggling life; they always presuppose suffering and sufferers. But there are two kinds of sufferers: first those who suffer from the over-fullness of life -they want a Dionysian art and likewise a tragic view of…
In some remote corner of the universe, effused into innumerable solar-systems, there was once a star upon which clever animals invented cognition. It was the haughtiest, most mendacious moment in the history of this world, but yet only a moment. After Nature had taken breath awhile the star congealed and the clever animals had…
These days I seldom dream. There have been periods of my life when dreams came often, sometimes with such intensity that when waking, the dream was so vivid, to be as persuasive as my mentally aware life. I remember when my mother died many years ago, sadness descended to ebb and flow for months….
Shearing ice crystals, sound with each step in the predawn gray. The friction of each footfall on this “bitter” morning announces winter’s presence. Friction and heat. Heat in January. Heat as concept, a marker of life remains in my memory. Can you imagine the feel of warmth, to move about in a verdant landscape? …
