Acquaintances express surprise when they learn about my interest in philosophy, and my taste for Friedrich Nietzsche’s books. I’ve heard, “that sounds deep,” more than once. How many experiences, areas of life, strike us as “deep” from a distance? I say to myself, “why not come closer and have a better look?” Many aspects…
One has to get rid of the bad taste of wanting to be in agreement with many. ‘Good’ is no longer good when your neighbor takes it into his mouth. and how could there exist a ‘common good!’ The expression is a self-contradiction: what can be common has ever little value. in the end…
For in the realm of thought, power and fame are hard to maintain if erected on the basis of error or lies; the feeling that such a building could at some time or other fall down is humiliating to the self-conceit of its architect; he is ashamed of the fragility of his material and,…
But my truth is dreadful: for hitherto the lie has been called truth. –revaluation of all values; that is my formula for an act of supreme coming-to-oneself on the part of mankind which in me has become flesh and genius. It is my fate to have to be the first decent human being, to…
…The Stoic, taught by experience and ruling himself by ideas! He who otherwise only looks for uprightness, truth, freedom from deceptions and shelter from ensnaring and sudden attack, in his misfortune performs the masterpiece of dissimilation; he shows no twitching mobile face but as it were a mask with dignified, harmonious features; he does…
There are ages, when the rational and the intuitive man stand side by side, the one full of fear of the intuition and the other full of fear of the abstraction; the latter just as irrational as the former is inartistic. Both desire to rule over life; the one knowing how to meet the…
That enormous framework and hoarding of ideas, by clinging to which the needy man saves himself through life, is to the freed intellect only a scaffolding and a toy for Its most daring feats, and when it smashes It to pieces, throws it into confusion, and then puts it together ironically, paring the strangest,…
The wide-awake day of a people mystically excitable, let us say the earlier Greeks, is in fact through the continually-working wonder which mythos presupposes, more akin to a dream than to the day of the thinker sobered by science. If every tree may at some time talk as a nymph, or a god under…
…waking man per se is only clear about his being awake through the rigid and orderly woof of ideas, and it is for this very reason that he sometimes comes to believe that he was dreaming when the woof of his ideas has for a moment been torn by Art. Pascal is quite right,…
It is language which has worked originally in the construction of ideas; in later times it is science. Just as the bee works at the same time at the cells and fills them with honey, thus science works irresistibly at that great columbarium of ideas, the cemetery of perceptions, builds ever newer and higher…
