Awakening from a dream
Wise and noble men once believed in the music of the spheres: wise and noble men still believe in the ‘moral significance of existence’. But one day this music of the spheres too will no longer be audible to them! They will awaken and perceive that their ears had been dreaming.
Daybreak Book II, Aphorism # 100.
What is living?
Living — that is to continually eliminate from ourselves what is about to die; Living — that is to be cruel and inexorable towards all that becomes weak and old in ourselves and not only in ourselves. Living — that means, therefore to be without piety toward the dying, the wretched and the old? To be continually a murderer? — And yet old Moses said: “Thou shalt not kill!”
The Gay Science
Book I - Aphorism # 26
Poet and bird
The phoenix showed the poet a scroll which was burning to ashes. ‘Do not be dismayed!’ it said, ‘it is your work! It does not have the spirit of the age and even less the spirit of those who are against the age: consequently it must be burned. But this is a good sign. There are many kinds of daybreaks.’
Daybreak
Book V - Aphorism # 568
At the crossroads
Disgusting! You want to be part of a system in which one must either be a wheel and nothing else, or get run over by the other wheels! In which it goes without saying that everyone is what he has been made by decree from above! In which the hunt for ‘connections’ is among the natural duties! In which no one feels insulted if a man is drawn to his attention with the words ‘he could be of use to you some day’! In which one is not ashamed to visit somebody in order to obtain his recommendation! In which one has not the faintest idea how with this easy conformity to such customs one has designated oneself a common piece of nature’s pottery which others may use and smash without feeling very much compunction about it; as if one said: ‘there will never be a shortage of things like me: take me! Don’t stand on ceremony!’
Daybreak
Book III - Aphorism # 166
145
In comparing man and woman in general we can say that woman would not have the genius for finery if she did not have the instinct for the secondary role.
Beyond Good and Evil
Part IV - Aphorism # 145
On easing life
One principal means to ease life is to idealize all its processes; but from painting one should be well aware what idealization means. The painter requires that the viewer not look too hard or too close; he forces him back to a certain distance to view from there; he is obliged to presuppose that a viewer is at a fixed distance from his picture; indeed, he must even assume an equally fixed amount of visual acuity in his viewer; he may on no account waver about such things. So anyone who wants to idealize his life must not desire to see it too closely, and must keep his sight back at a certain distance. Goethe, for example, knew this trick well.
Human, All Too Human
Section Five: Signs of Higher and Lower Culture - Aphorism # 279
Two Happy Ones
Certainly this man, notwithstanding his youth, understands the improvisation of life, and astonishes even the acutest observers. For it seems that he never makes a mistake, although he constantly plays the most hazardous games. One is reminded of the improvising masters of the musical art, to whom even the listeners would fain ascribe a divine infallibility of the hand, notwithstanding that they now and then make a mistake, as every mortal is liable to do. But they are skilled and inventive, and always ready in a moment to arrange into the structure of the score the most accidental tone (where the jerk of a finger or a humour brings it about), and to animate the accident with a fine meaning and soul. - Here is quite a different man: everything that he intends and plans fails with him in the long run. That on which he has now and again set his heart has already brought him several times to the abyss, and to the very verge of ruin; and if he has as yet got out of the scrape, it certainly has not been merely with a “black eye.” Do you think he is unhappy over it? He resolved long ago not to regard his own wishes and plans as of so much importance. “ If this does not succeed with me,” he says to himself, “perhaps that will succeed; and on the whole I do not know but that I am under more obligation to thank my failures than any of my successes. Am I made to be headstrong, and to wear the bull’s horns? That which constitutes the worth and the sum of life for me, lies somewhere else; I know more of life, because I have been so often on the point of losing it; and just on that account I have more of life than any of you!”
The Gay Science
Book IV - Aphorism # 303
Making them wait
A sure way to provoke people and to put evil thoughts into their heads is to make them wait a long time. This gives rise to immorality.
Human, All Too Human SECTION SIX, Aphorism # 310
In Media Vita
No! Life has not deceived me! On the contrary, from year to year I find it richer, more desirable and more mysterious - from the day on which the great liberator broke my fetters, the thought that life may be an experiment of the thinker - and not a duty, not a fatality, not a deceit! — And knowledge itself may be for others something different; for example, a bed of ease, or the path to a bed of ease, or an entertainment, or a course of idling, — for me it is a world of dangers and victories, in which even the heroic sentiments have their arena and dancing-floor. “Life as a means to knowledge” - with this principle in one’s heart, one can not only be brave, but can even live joyfully and laugh joyfully! And who could know how to laugh well and live well, who did not first understand the full significance of war and victory?
The Gay Science
Book IV - Aphorism # 324
Finally.
There are many kinds of hemlock, and fate usually finds an opportunity to set a cup of this poison to the lips of the free spirit — to “punish” him, as everyone then says. What do the women around him do then? They will cry and lament and perhaps disturb the thinker’s twilight peace, as they did in the prison of Athens. “O Crito, have someone take these women away!” said Socrates at last1.
Human, All Too Human
Section Seven: Woman and Child - Aphorism # 437
Books that teach us to dance.
There are writers who, by portraying the impossible as possible, and by speaking of morality and genius as if both were merely a mood or a whim, elicit a feeling of high-spirited freedom, as if man were rising up on tiptoe and simply had to dance out of inner pleasure2.
Human, All Too Human
Section Four: From the Soul of Artists and Writers - Aphorism # 206
147
From an old Florentine novella, and in addition from life: buona femmina e mala femmina vuol bastone (the good and the bad woman wants a dick). Sacchetti, Nov. 86.
Beyond Good and Evil
Part IV - Aphorism # 147
Our teachers.
In our youth we take our teachers and guides from the time in which we happen to live and the circle in which we happen to move: we are thoughtlessly confident that the times we live in are bound to have teachers better suited to us than to anyone else and that we are bound to find them without much trouble. For this childishness we have in later years to pay a heavy price: we have to expiate our teachers in ourself. We then perhaps go in search of our true guides throughout the whole world, the world of the past included but perhaps it is too late. And in the worst case we discover that they were living when we were young and that we missed them.
Daybreak
Book V - Aphorism # 495
The Dying Socrates.
I admire the courage and wisdom of Socrates in all that he did, said - and did not say. This mocking and amorous demon and rat-catcher of Athens, who made the most insolent youths tremble and sob, was not only the wisest babbler that has ever lived, but was just as great in his silence. I would that he had also been silent in the last moment of his life, - perhaps he might then have belonged to a still higher order of intellects. Whether it was death, or the poison, or piety, or wickedness - something or other loosened his tongue at that moment, and he said : “O Crito, I owe a cock to Asclepios.” For him who has ears, this ludicrous and terrible “last word” implies: “O Crito, life is a long sickness!” Is it possible! A man like him, who had lived cheerfully and to all appearance as a soldier, - was a pessimist! He had merely put on a good demeanour towards life, and had all along concealed his ultimate judgment, his profoundest sentiment! Socrates, Socrates had suffered from life! And he also took his revenge for it - with that veiled, fearful, pious, and blasphemous phrase! Had even a Socrates to revenge himself? Was there a grain too little of magnanimity in his superabundant virtue? Ah, my friends! We must surpass even the Greeks!
The Gay Science
Book IV - Aphorism # 340
101
Today a man with knowledge might easily feel like god transformed into an animal.
Beyond Good and Evil
Part IV - Aphorism # 101
Executions.
How is it that every execution offends us more than a murder? It is the coldness of the judges, the painful preparations, the understanding that a man is here being used as a means to deter others. For guilt is not being punished, even if there were guilt; guilt lies in the educators, the parents, the environment, in us, not in the murderer—I am talking about the motivating circumstances.
Human, All Too Human
Section Two: On the History of Moral Feelings - Aphorism # 70
Fallacy, Fallacy
He cannot rule himself; therefore that woman concludes that it will be easy to rule him, and throws out her lines to catch him; — the poor creature, who in a short time will be his slave.
The Gay Science
Book III - Aphorism # 227
114
The immense expectation concerning sexual love and the shame in this expectation ruin all perspective in women from the beginning.
Beyond Good and Evil
Part IV - Aphorism # 114
In Solitude
When one lives alone one does not speak too loudly, and one does not write too loudly either, for one fears the hollow reverberation — the criticism of the nymph Echo — and all voices sound differently in solitude!
Beyond Good and Evil
Part IV - Aphorism # 114
157
The thought of suicide is a strong consolation: with it people get through many an evil night.
Beyond Good and Evil
Part IV - Aphorism # 157
The purifying eye
‘Genius’ is most readily to be ascribed to those men in whom, as with Plato, Spinoza and Goethe, the spirit seems to be only loosely attached to the character and temperament, as a winged being who can easily detach itself from these and then raise itself high above them. On the other hand, it is precisely those who could never get free from their temperament and knew how to endow it with the most spiritual, expansive, universal, indeed sometimes cosmic expression (Schopenhauer, for example) who have been given to speaking most freely of their ‘genius’. These geniuses were unable to fly above and beyond themselves, but they believed that wherever they flew they would discover and rediscover themselves that is their ‘greatness’, and it can be greatness! The others, who better deserve the name, possess the pure, purifying eye which seems not to have grown out of their temperament and character but, free from these and usually in mild opposition to them, looks down on the world as on a god and loves this god. But even they have not acquired this eye at a single stroke: seeing needs practice and preschooling, and he who is fortunate enough will also find at the proper time a teacher of pure seeing.
Daybreak
Book V - Aphorism # 497
Two Orators.
Of these two orators the one arrives at a full understanding of his case only when he yields himself to emotion; it is only this that pumps sufficient blood and heat into his brain to compel his high intellectuality to reveal itself. The other attempts, indeed, now and then to do the same: to state his case sonorously, vehemently, and spiritedly with the aid of emotion, - but usually with bad success. He then very soon speaks obscurely and confusedly; he exaggerates, makes omissions, and excites suspicion of the justice of his case: indeed, he himself feels this suspicion, and the sudden changes into the coldest and most repulsive tones (which raise a doubt in the hearer as to his passionateness being genuine) are thereby explicable. With him emotion always drowns the spirit; perhaps because it is stronger than in the former. But he is at the height of his power when he resists the impetuous storm of his feeling, and as it were scorns it; it is then only that his spirit emerges fully from its concealment, a spirit logical, mocking and playful, but nevertheless awe-inspiring.
The Gay Science
Book II - Aphorism # 96
We beginners!
How much an actor sees and divines when he watches another act! He knows when a muscle employed in some gesture fails in its duty; he segregates those little, artificial things which have been practised one by one cold-bloodedly before the mirror and then refuse to integrate themselves into the whole; he feels it when the actor is surprised by his own inventiveness on the stage and then spoils it through being surprised. Again, how differently a painter observes a person moving before him! For he at once visualises many more things in addition, so as to make a complete picture of what is presently before his eyes and to realise its whole effectiveness; in his mind he illuminates the same object in several different ways; he divides the effect of the whole by adding to it an antithetical contrast. If only we possessed the eye of this actor and this painter for the domain of human souls!
Daybreak
Book V - Aphorism # 533
Hope as arrogance.
Our social order will slowly melt away, as all earlier orders have done when the suns of new ideas shone forth with new warmth over the people. One can desire this melting only in that one has hope; and one may reasonably have hope only if one credits his own heart and head, and that of his equals, with more strength than one credits to the representatives of the existing order. Usually, then, this hope will be arrogance, an overestimation.
Human, All Too Human
Section Eight: A Look At The State - Aphorism # 443