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…
“How could anything originate out of its opposite?Truth from error, for instance?Or the will to truth from the will to deception?Or selfless action from self-interest?Or the pure, sun-bright gaze of wisdom from a covetous leer? Such origins are impossible,and people who dream about such thingsare fools – at best. Things of the highest valuemust…
Supposing truth is a woman-what then? Is there not reason to suspect that all philosophers, in so far as they were dogmatists, have known very little about women? That if their aim was to charm a female, they have been especially inept and inapt in making advances to truth with such awful seriousness and…
I, the last disciple and initiate of the god Dionysus: and can I, at last, start to give you, my friends, a small taste of this philosophy, as far as I am permitted? In undertones, which would be best, since it concerns many things that are secret, new, foreign, strange, uncanny. Even the fact…
The genius of the heart, as it is possessed by that great hidden one, the tempter god and born pied piper of consciences, whose voice knows how to descend into the underworld of every soul, whose every word and every glance conveys both consideration and a wrinkle of temptation, whose mastery includes an understanding…
There is a way of asking for our reasons which makes us forget our best reasons but awakens in us a defiance of and a repugnance for reasons in general -a way of asking which makes us very stupid and a typical trick of tyrannical people! The Gay Science by Friedrich Nietzsche, trans. by…
The strongest knowledge (that of the unfreedom of the human will) is nonetheless the poorest in successes: For it always has the strongest opponent, human vanity. Human, All Too Human by Nietzsche, trans. R. J. Hollingdale, Assorted Opinions and Maxims, aphorism 50 I entertain many opinions. The most durable opinion that possesses me lately…
In an exchange, the only just and honest course would be for either party to demand only so much as he considers his commodity to be worth, allowance being made for trouble in acquisition, scarcity, time spent and so forth, besides the subjective value. As soon as you make your price bear a relation…
I shall be asked why really I have narrated all these little and, according to traditional judgment, insignificant things… Answer: these little things -food, place, climate, recreation, the whole casuistry of egoism -are beyond all comparison more serious things than anything that has been taken seriously hitherto. It is precisely here that one must…
Living in the midst of this jumble of little lanes, needs, and voices gives me a melancholy happiness: how much enjoyment, impatience, and desire, how much thirsty life and drunkenness of life comes to light every moment! And yet silence will soon ascend on all these noisy, living, life-thirsty people. How his shadow stands…
