The Joyful Wisdom (La Gaya Scienza)
Friedrich Nietzsche
1,346 passages indexed from The Joyful Wisdom (La Gaya Scienza) (Friedrich Nietzsche) — Page 11 of 27
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The Joyful Wisdom (La Gaya Scienza), passage 893
We understand very well how to pour sweetness on our bitterness, especially on the bitterness of our soul; we find a remedy in our bravery and sublimity, as well as in the nobler delirium of submission and resignation. A loss scarcely remains a loss for an hour: in some way or other a gift from heaven has always fallen into our lap at the same moment—a new form of strength, for example: be it but a new opportunity for the exercise of strength!
The Joyful Wisdom (La Gaya Scienza), passage 435
_Precaution._—Alfieri, as is well known, told a great many falsehoods when he narrated the history of his life to his astonished contemporaries. He told falsehoods owing to the despotism toward himself which he exhibited, for example, in the way in which he created his own language, and tyrannised himself into a poet:—he finally found a rigid form of sublimity into which he _forced_ his life and his memory; he must have suffered much in the process.—I would also give no credit to a history of Plato's life written by himself, as little as to Rousseau's, or to the _Vita nuova_ of Dante.
The Joyful Wisdom (La Gaya Scienza), passage 449
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.
The Joyful Wisdom (La Gaya Scienza), passage 804
Anywhere else it is not pure and airy enough for him: he suspects that _there_ his best art would neither be properly advantageous to anyone else, nor a delight to himself, that through misunderstandings half of his life would slip through his fingers, that much foresight, much concealment, and reticence would constantly be necessary,—nothing but great and useless losses of power! In _this_ keen and clear element, however, he has his entire power: here he can fly!
The Joyful Wisdom (La Gaya Scienza), passage 909
_What does Knowing Mean?_—_Non ridere, non lugere, neque detestari, sed intelligere!_ says Spinoza, so simply and sublimely, as is his wont. Nevertheless, what else is this _intelligere_ ultimately, but just the form in which the three other things become perceptible to us all at once? A result of the diverging and opposite impulses of desiring to deride, lament and execrate?
The Joyful Wisdom (La Gaya Scienza), passage 1048
The European disguises himself _in morality_ because he has become a sick, sickly, crippled animal, who has good reasons for being "tame," because he is almost an abortion, an imperfect, weak and clumsy thing.... It is not the fierceness of the beast of prey that finds moral disguise necessary, but the gregarious animal, with its profound mediocrity, anxiety and ennui.
The Joyful Wisdom (La Gaya Scienza), passage 984
"At all costs": alas, we understand that sufficiently well, after having sacrificed and slaughtered one belief after another at this altar!—Consequently, "Will to truth" does _not_ imply, "I will not allow myself to be deceived," but—there is no other alternative—"I will not deceive, not even myself": _and thus we have reached the realm of morality_.
The Joyful Wisdom (La Gaya Scienza), passage 978
One sees that science also rests on a belief: there is no science at all "without premises." The question whether _truth_ is necessary, must not merely be affirmed beforehand, but must be affirmed to such an extent that the principle, belief, or conviction finds expression, that "there is _nothing more necessary_ than truth, and in comparison with it everything else has only a secondary value."—This absolute will to truth: what is it? Is it the will _not to allow ourselves to be deceived_?
The Joyful Wisdom (La Gaya Scienza), passage 251
And people do so in every prevailing morality and religion, and have always done so: the reasons and intentions behind the habit, are only added surreptitiously when people begin to combat the habit, and _ask_ for reasons and intentions. It is here that the great dishonesty of the conservatives of all times hides:—they are adventitious liars.
The Joyful Wisdom (La Gaya Scienza), passage 870
_The Last Hour._—Storms are my danger. Shall I have my storm in which I shall perish, just as Oliver Cromwell perished in his storm? Or shall I go out as a light does, not first blown out by the wind, but grown tired and weary of itself—a burnt-out light? Or finally, shall I blow myself out, so as _not to burn out_!
The Joyful Wisdom (La Gaya Scienza), passage 166
It is accepted as the "unity of the organism"!—This ludicrous overvaluation and misconception of consciousness, has as its result the great utility, that a too rapid maturing of it has thereby been _hindered_. Because men believed that they already possessed consciousness, they gave themselves very little trouble to acquire it—and even now it is not otherwise!
The Joyful Wisdom (La Gaya Scienza), passage 968
The distinction between ethos and pathos in Aristotle is, broadly, that between internal character and external circumstance.—P. V. C.
The Joyful Wisdom (La Gaya Scienza), passage 1279
The World-sport, all-ruling, Mingles false with true: The Eternally Fooling Makes us play, too!
The Joyful Wisdom (La Gaya Scienza), passage 1315
Well, I will help you, as I can, For sponge and broom are my vocation, As critic and as waterman.
The Joyful Wisdom (La Gaya Scienza), passage 896
_Taking Things Seriously._—The intellect is with most people an awkward, obscure and creaking machine, which is difficult to set in motion: they call it "_taking a thing seriously_" when they work with this machine, and want to think well—oh, how burdensome must good thinking be to them! That delightful animal, man, seems to lose his good-humour whenever he thinks well; he becomes "serious"! And "where there is laughing and gaiety, thinking cannot be worth anything:"—so speaks the prejudice of this serious animal against all "Joyful Wisdom."—Well, then! Let us show that it is prejudice!
The Joyful Wisdom (La Gaya Scienza), passage 66
Lest we for thy bliss should slay thee, In devil's wiles thou dost array thee, Devil's wit and devil's dress. But in vain! Thy looks betray thee And proclaim thy holiness.
The Joyful Wisdom (La Gaya Scienza), passage 758
_The Thought of Death._—It gives me a melancholy happiness to live in the midst of this confusion of streets, of necessities, of voices: how much enjoyment, impatience and desire, how much thirsty life and drunkenness of life comes to light here every moment! And yet it will soon be so still for all these shouting, lively, life-loving people! How everyone's shadow, his gloomy travelling-companion stands behind him!
The Joyful Wisdom (La Gaya Scienza), passage 272
_The Lack of a noble Presence._—Soldiers and their leaders have always a much higher mode of comportment toward one another than workmen and their employers. At present at least, all militarily established civilisation still stands high above all so-called industrial civilisation; the latter, in its present form, is in general the meanest mode of existence that has ever been.
The Joyful Wisdom (La Gaya Scienza), passage 63
See the infant, helpless creeping— Swine around it grunt swine-talk— Weeping always, naught but weeping, Will it ever learn to walk? Never fear! Just wait, I swear it Soon to dance will be inclined, And this babe, when two legs bear it, Standing on its head you'll find.
The Joyful Wisdom (La Gaya Scienza), passage 461
Or the strength of his intellectual conscience, which _endured_ a life-long contradiction of "being" and "willing," and compelled him to contradict himself constantly even in his writings on almost every point?
The Joyful Wisdom (La Gaya Scienza), passage 80
"To-day is meet for me, I come to-day," Such is the speech of men foredoomed to stay. "Thou art too soon," they cry, "thou art too late," What care the Immortals what the rabble say?
The Joyful Wisdom (La Gaya Scienza), passage 339
My noble enthusiast, there is also in the most beautiful sailing-ship so much noise and bustling, and alas, so much petty, pitiable bustling! The enchantment and the most powerful effect of women is, to use the language of philosophers, an effect at a distance, an _actio in distans_; there belongs thereto, however, primarily and above all,—_distance_!
The Joyful Wisdom (La Gaya Scienza), passage 611
_Too Jewish._—If God had wanted to become an object of love, he would first of all have had to forgo judging and justice:—a judge, and even a gracious judge, is no object of love. The founder of Christianity showed too little of the finer feelings in this respect—being a Jew.
The Joyful Wisdom (La Gaya Scienza), passage 581
Because, however, man for immense periods of time believed only in persons (and not in matter, forces, things, &c.), the belief in cause and effect has become a fundamental belief with him, which he applies everywhere when anything happens,—and even still uses instinctively as a piece of atavism of remotest origin.
The Joyful Wisdom (La Gaya Scienza), passage 1245
We homeless ones are too diverse and mixed in race and descent as "modern men," and are consequently little tempted to participate in the falsified racial self-admiration and lewdness which at present display themselves in Germany, as signs of German sentiment, and which strike one as doubly false and unbecoming in the people with the "historical sense." We are, in a word—and it shall be our word of honour!—_good Europeans_, the heirs of Europe, the rich, over-wealthy heirs, also the too deeply pledged heirs of millenniums of European thought.
The Joyful Wisdom (La Gaya Scienza), passage 153
Science has not hitherto built its Cyclopic structures; for that also the time will come.
The Joyful Wisdom (La Gaya Scienza), passage 765
There is probably some immense, invisible curve and stellar orbit in which our courses and goals, so widely different, may be _comprehended_ as small stages of the way,—let us raise ourselves to this thought! But our life is too short, and our power of vision too limited for us to be more than friends in the sense of that sublime possibility.—And so we will _believe_ in our stellar friendship, though we should have to be terrestrial enemies to one another.
The Joyful Wisdom (La Gaya Scienza), passage 1035
The entire Roman Church rests on a Southern suspicion of the nature of man (always misunderstood in the North), a suspicion whereby the European South has succeeded to the inheritance of the profound Orient—the mysterious, venerable Asia—and its contemplative spirit.
The Joyful Wisdom (La Gaya Scienza), passage 1306
Whence your silken gown, my maid? Ah, you'd fain be haughty, Yet perchance you've proved a jade With some satyr naughty!
The Joyful Wisdom (La Gaya Scienza), passage 1300
Oh marvel! there he flies Cleaving the sky with wings unmoved—what force Impels him, bids him rise, What curb restrains him? Where's his goal, his course?
The Joyful Wisdom (La Gaya Scienza), passage 662
_Compassion._—The poor, ruling princes! All their rights now change unexpectedly into claims, and all these claims immediately sound like pretensions! And if they but say "we," or "my people," wicked old Europe begins laughing. Verily, a chief-master-of-ceremonies of the modern world would make little ceremony with them; perhaps he would decree that "_les souverains rangent aux parvenus_."
The Joyful Wisdom (La Gaya Scienza), passage 1263
For as immoralist, one has to take care lest one ruins innocence, I mean the asses and old maids of both sexes, who get nothing from life but their innocence; moreover my writings are meant to fill them with enthusiasm, to elevate them, to encourage them in virtue. I should be at a loss to know of anything more amusing than to see enthusiastic old asses and maids moved by the sweet feelings of virtue: and "that have I seen"—spake Zarathustra.
The Joyful Wisdom (La Gaya Scienza), passage 443
But then the course of his life, his genius, and alas! most of all, perhaps, the paternal blood in his veins, had seduced him to rank and consider himself equal to the _noblesse_—for many, many years! In the end, however, he could not endure the sight of himself, the "old man" under the old _régime_, any longer; he got into a violent, penitential passion, and _in this state_ he put on the raiment of the populace as _his_ special kind of hair-shirt!
The Joyful Wisdom (La Gaya Scienza), passage 1104
One sees what has really gained the victory over the Christian God—, Christian morality itself, the conception of veracity, taken ever more strictly, the confessional subtlety of the Christian conscience, translated and sublimated to the scientific conscience, to intellectual purity at any price.
The Joyful Wisdom (La Gaya Scienza), passage 118
_The Intellectual Conscience._—I have always the same experience over again, and always make a new effort against it; for although it is evident to me I do not want to believe it: _in the greater number of men the intellectual conscience is lacking_; indeed, it would often seem to me that in demanding such a thing, one is as solitary in the largest cities as in the desert.
The Joyful Wisdom (La Gaya Scienza), passage 1254
"Thoughts concerning moral prejudices," if they are not to be prejudices concerning prejudices, presuppose a position _outside of_ morality, some sort of world beyond good and evil, to which one must ascend, climb, or fly—and in the given case at any rate, a position beyond _our_ good and evil, an emancipation from all "Europe," understood as a sum of inviolable valuations which have become part and parcel of our flesh and blood.
The Joyful Wisdom (La Gaya Scienza), passage 1162
To fix one's eye on the object of one's intercourse, as on a glass knob, until, ceasing to feel pleasure or pain thereat, one falls asleep unobserved, becomes rigid, and acquires a fixed pose: a household recipe used in married life and in friendship, well tested and prized as indispensable, but not yet scientifically formulated. Its proper name is—patience.—
The Joyful Wisdom (La Gaya Scienza), passage 70
Yes! I manufacture ice: Ice may help you to digest: If you _had_ much to digest, How you would enjoy my ice!
The Joyful Wisdom (La Gaya Scienza), passage 1004
We have become saturated with the conviction (and have grown cold and hard in it) that things are not at all divinely ordered in this world, nor even according to human standards do they go on rationally, mercifully, or justly: we know the fact that the world in which we live is ungodly, immoral, and "inhuman,"—we have far too long interpreted it to ourselves falsely and mendaciously, according to the wish and will of our veneration, that is to say, according to our _need_.
The Joyful Wisdom (La Gaya Scienza), passage 558
In the end the great question might still remain open: whether we could _do without_ sickness, even for the development of our virtue, and whether our thirst for knowledge and self-knowledge would not especially need the sickly soul as well as the sound one; in short, whether the mere will to health is not a prejudice, a cowardice, and perhaps an instance of the subtlest barbarism and unprogressiveness.
The Joyful Wisdom (La Gaya Scienza), passage 1097
We Germans should still have been Hegelians, even though there had never been a Hegel, inasmuch as we (in contradistinction to all Latin peoples) instinctively attribute to becoming, to evolution, a profounder significance and higher value than to that which "is"—we hardly believe at all in the validity of the concept "being." This is all the more the case because we are not inclined to concede to our human logic that it is logic in itself, that it is the only kind of logic (we should rather like, on the contrary, to convince ourselves that it is only a special case, and perhaps one of the strangest and most stupid).
The Joyful Wisdom (La Gaya Scienza), passage 747
_What makes Heroic?_—To face simultaneously one's greatest suffering and one's highest hope.
The Joyful Wisdom (La Gaya Scienza), passage 317
To become the advocate of the rule—that may perhaps be the ultimate form and refinement in which nobility of character will reveal itself on earth.
The Joyful Wisdom (La Gaya Scienza), passage 1164
An example: a person grasps at us, and is unable to seize us. That frightens him. Or we enter by a closed door. Or when the lights are extinguished. Or after we are dead. The latter is the artifice of _posthumous_ men _par excellence_.
The Joyful Wisdom (La Gaya Scienza), passage 1295
Praise be this man-God's guerdon, Who loves all maidens fair, And his own heart can pardon The sin he planted there. While beauty in my face is, With piety I'll stand, When age has killed my graces, Let Satan claim my hand!
The Joyful Wisdom (La Gaya Scienza), passage 1124
After Luther had given a wife to the priest, he had _to take from him_ auricular confession; that was psychologically right: but thereby he practically did away with the Christian priest himself, whose profoundest utility has ever consisted in his being a sacred ear, a silent well, and a grave for secrets.
The Joyful Wisdom (La Gaya Scienza), passage 1088
It seems to me a matter of indifference that meanwhile the most short-sighted, perhaps the most honest, and at any rate the noisiest species of men of the present day, our friends the Socialists, believe, hope, dream, and above all scream and scribble almost the opposite; in fact one already reads their watchword of the future: "free society," on all tables and walls. Free society? Indeed! Indeed! But you know, gentlemen, sure enough whereof one builds it? Out of wooden iron!
The Joyful Wisdom (La Gaya Scienza), passage 1304
At this instant, so she prated, Stealthily she'd meet me: Like a faithful dog I've waited, Not a sign to greet me!
The Joyful Wisdom (La Gaya Scienza), passage 884
_A Simile._—Those thinkers in whom all the stars move in cyclic orbits, are not the most profound. He who looks into himself, as into an immense universe, and carries Milky Ways in himself, knows also how irregular all Milky Ways are; they lead into the very chaos and labyrinth of existence.
The Joyful Wisdom (La Gaya Scienza), passage 1071
It is still less the antithesis of "thing in itself" and phenomenon, for we do not "know" enough to be entitled even _to make such a distinction_. Indeed, we have not any organ at all for _knowing_ or for "truth"; we "know" (or believe, or fancy) just as much as may be _of use_ in the interest of the human herd, the species; and even what is here called "usefulness" is ultimately only a belief, a fancy, and perhaps precisely the most fatal stupidity by which we shall one day be ruined.