Light In A Mad World
Can’t focus on anything in particular this morning. Thus, I offer for consideration a selection of aphorisms from Nietzsche in section 4, Epigrams and Interludes, found in Beyond Good and Evil. This is a playlist, some of Nietzsche’s Greatest Hits.
69. One has watched life badly, if one has failed to see the hand that considerately– kills.
107. A sign of strong character, when once the decision has been made, to shut the ear even to the best counter-arguments. Occasionally, therefore, a will to stupidity.
130. What a person IS begins to betray itself when his talent decreases,–when he ceases to show what he CAN do. Talent is also an adornment; an adornment is also a concealment.
134. All credibility, all good conscience, all evidence of truth, come only from the senses.
137. In intercourse with scholars and artists one readily makes mistakes of opposite kinds: in a remarkable scholar one not infrequently finds a mediocre man; and often, even in a mediocre artist, one finds a very remarkable man.
152. “Where there is the tree of knowledge, there is always Paradise”: so say the most ancient and the most modern serpents.
153. What is done out of love always takes place beyond good and evil.
156. Madness in individuals is something rare–but in groups, parties, nations, and epochs it is the rule.
158. Not only our reason, but also our conscience, truckles to our strongest impulse–the tyrant in us.
159. One MUST repay good and ill; but why just to the person who did us good or ill?
164. Jesus said to his Jews: “The law was for servants;–love God as I love him, as his Son! What have we Sons of God to do with morals!”
168. Christianity gave Eros poison to drink; he did not die of it, certainly, but degenerated to Vice.
183. “I am shaken, not because you have deceived me, but because I can no longer believe in you.”
……….And there ends the lesson.
