Friedrich Nietzsche
1844-1900
What does not destroy me, makes me strong.
Wisdom sets bounds even to knowledge.
The errors of great men are venerable because they are more fruitful than the truths of
little men.
Reasonable thinking boils down to the interpretation on the basis of a concept we
cannot fling off.
How should explanation be at all possible when we make everything into an image, our
image! . . . Cause and effect: such a duality probably never occurs ¾ in reality there lies before us a continuum out of which we
isolate a couple of pieces . . .
(The Gay Science)
. . . a thought comes when ‘it’ wishes, and not when ‘I’ wish, so
that it is a falsification of the facts of the case to say the subject ‘I’ is
the condition of the predicate ‘think’. It thinks: but that this
‘it’ is precisely the famous old ‘ego’ is, to put it mildly, only a
superstition, an assertion, and assuredly not an ‘immediate certainty’. . . .
Even the ‘it’ contains an interpretation of the process, and does not
belong to the process itself. One infers here according to the grammatical habit:
‘thinking is an activity; every activity requires an agent; consequently ¾’.
(Beyond Good and Evil)
‘Truth’ is therefore not something there, that might be found or discovered ¾ but something that must be created and that gives a name to a process, or
rather to a will to overcome that has in itself no end ¾
introducing truth, as a processus in infinitum, an active determining ¾ not a becoming-conscious of something that is in itself firm and
determined.
(The Will to Power)
Moral sensibilities are nowadays at such cross-purposes that to one man a morality is
proved by its utility, while to another its utility refutes it.
(Daybreak)
I mistrust all systematizers and I avoid them. The will to a system is a lack of
integrity.
(Twilight of the Idols)
Art makes the sight of life bearable by laying over it the veil of unclear thinking.
(Human, All Too Human)
Whoever despises himself still respects himself as one who despises.
(Beyond Good and Evil)
To live alone one must be a beast or a god, says Aristotle. Leaving out the third case:
one must be both – a philosopher.
(Twilight of the Idols)
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