Nietzsche

Currently tweeting from Ecce Homo... Tweets by @AnsgarAllen author of BLACK VELLUM (Schism2)

[Nietzsche @EcceXHomo]

All those things which mankind has valued with such earnestness heretofore are not even real; they are mere creations of fancy, or, more strictly speaking, lies born of...noxious natures—all the concepts, "God," "soul," "virtue," "sin," "Beyond," "truth," "eternal life."

[Nietzsche @EcceXHomo]

Trivial matters—diet, locality, climate, and one's mode of recreation, the whole casuistry of; self-love—are inconceivably more important than, all that which has hitherto been held in high esteem!

[Nietzsche @EcceXHomo]

A man who, after his four-and-fortieth year, can say that he has never bothered himself about honours, women, or money!—not that they did not come his way.... It was thus that I became one day a University Professor.

[Nietzsche @EcceXHomo]

I have not the slightest wish that anything should be otherwise than it is: I myself would not be otherwise.... But in this matter I have always been the same. I have never had a desire.

[Nietzsche @EcceXHomo]

To "will" something, to "strive" after something, to have an "aim" or a "desire" in my mind—I know none of these things from experience. Even at this moment I look out upon my future—a broad future!—as upon a calm sea: no sigh of longing makes a ripple on its surface.

[Nietzsche @EcceXHomo]

I cannot remember ever having exerted myself, I can point to no trace of struggle in my life; I am the reverse of a heroic nature.

[Nietzsche @EcceXHomo]

An order of rank among capacities; distance; the art of separating without creating hostility; to refrain from confounding things; to keep from reconciling things... all this was the first condition, the long secret work, and the artistic mastery of my instinct.

[Nietzsche @EcceXHomo]

For the task of transvaluing values, more capacities were needful perhaps than could well be found side by side in one individual.

[Nietzsche @EcceXHomo]

The whole surface of consciousness—for consciousness is a surface—must be kept free from any one of the great imperatives. Beware even of every striking word, of every striking attitude! They are all so many risks which the instinct runs of "understanding itself" too soon.

[Nietzsche @EcceXHomo]

To love one's neighbour and to live for others and for other things may be the means of protection employed to maintain the hardest kind of egoism.

[Nietzsche @EcceXHomo]

Even the blunders of one's life have their own meaning and value, the temporary deviations and aberrations, the moments of hesitation and of modesty, the earnestness wasted upon duties which lie outside the actual life-task.

[Nietzsche @EcceXHomo]

To set to early in the morning, at the break of day, in all the fulness and dawn of one's strength, and to read a book—this I call positively vicious!

[Nietzsche @EcceXHomo]

The scholar is a decadent. With my own eyes I have seen gifted, richly endowed, and free-spirited natures already "read to ruins" at thirty, and mere wax vestas that have to be rubbed before they can give off any sparks—or "thoughts."

[Nietzsche @EcceXHomo]

The scholar who, in sooth, does little else than handle books—with the philologist of average attainments their number may amount to two hundred a day—ultimately forgets entirely and completely the capacity of thinking for himself.

[Nietzsche @EcceXHomo]

Another form of prudence and self-defence consists in trying to react as seldom as possible, and to keep one's self aloof from those circumstances and conditions wherein one would be condemned to suspend one's "liberty" and one's initiative, and become a mere reacting medium.

[Nietzsche @EcceXHomo]

To have prickles amounts to a squandering of strength.

[Nietzsche @EcceXHomo]

Suppose I were to find a large German city—that structure of vice in which nothing grows, but where every single thing, whether good or bad, is squeezed in from outside. In such circumstances should I not be compelled to become a hedgehog?

[Nietzsche @EcceXHomo]

Suppose I were to step out of my house, and, instead of the quiet city of Turin, I were to find a German provincial town, my instinct would have to brace itself together in order to repel all that which would pour in upon it from this crushed-down and cowardly world.

[Nietzsche @EcceXHomo]

Simply by being compelled to keep constantly on his guard, a man may grow so weak as to be unable any longer to defend himself.

[Nietzsche @EcceXHomo]

The act of keeping things off, of holding them at a distance, amounts to a discharge of strength,—do not deceive yourselves on this point!—and an expenditure of energy directed at purely negative ends.