The Joyful Wisdom (La Gaya Scienza)
Friedrich Nietzsche
1,346 passages indexed from The Joyful Wisdom (La Gaya Scienza) (Friedrich Nietzsche) — Page 13 of 27
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The Joyful Wisdom (La Gaya Scienza), passage 559
_Life no Argument._—We have arranged for ourselves a world in which we can live—by the postulating of bodies, lines, surfaces, causes and effects, motion and rest, form and content: without these articles of faith no one could manage to live at present! But for all that they are still unproved. Life is no argument; error might be among the conditions of life.
The Joyful Wisdom (La Gaya Scienza), passage 1005
For man is a venerating animal! But he is also a distrustful animal: and that the world is _not_ worth what we have believed it to be worth is about the surest thing our distrust has at last managed to grasp. So much distrust, so much philosophy!
The Joyful Wisdom (La Gaya Scienza), passage 1199
Conversely, the greatest sufferer, the man poorest in vitality, would have most need of mildness, peace and kindliness in thought and action: he would need, if possible, a God who is specially the God of the sick, a "Saviour"; similarly he would have need of logic, the abstract intelligibility of existence—for logic soothes and gives confidence;—in short he would need a certain warm, fear-dispelling narrowness and imprisonment within optimistic horizons.
The Joyful Wisdom (La Gaya Scienza), passage 879
_As Interpreters of our Experiences._—One form of honesty has always been lacking among founders of religions and their kin:—they have never made their experiences a matter of the intellectual conscience. "What did I really experience? What then took place in me and around me? Was my understanding clear enough?
The Joyful Wisdom (La Gaya Scienza), passage 1258
_The Question of Intelligibility._—One not only wants to be understood when one writes, but also—quite as certainly—_not_ to be understood.
The Joyful Wisdom (La Gaya Scienza), passage 658
_The Perverter of Taste._—A: "You are a perverter of taste—they say so everywhere!" B: "Certainly! I pervert every one's taste for his party:—no party forgives me for that."
The Joyful Wisdom (La Gaya Scienza), passage 1204
It may also, however, be the tyrannical will of a sorely-suffering, struggling or tortured being, who would like to stamp his most personal, individual and narrow characteristics, the very idiosyncrasy of his suffering, as an obligatory law and constraint on others; who, as it were, takes revenge on all things, in that he imprints, enforces and brands _his_ image, the image of _his_ torture, upon them.
The Joyful Wisdom (La Gaya Scienza), passage 1179
_The Cynic Speaks._—My objections to Wagner's music are physiological objections. Why should I therefore begin by disguising them under æsthetic formulæ? My "point" is that I can no longer breathe freely when this music begins to operate on me; my _foot_ immediately becomes indignant at it and rebels: for what it needs is time, dance and march; it demands first of all from music the ecstasies which are in _good_ walking, striding, leaping and dancing.
The Joyful Wisdom (La Gaya Scienza), passage 469
For example, Wagner's indignation about the corruption of the German language is Schopenhauerian; and if one should commend his imitation in this respect, it is nevertheless not to be denied that Wagner's style itself suffers in no small degree from all the tumours and turgidities, the sight of which made Schopenhauer so furious; and that, in respect to the German-writing Wagnerians, Wagneromania is beginning to be as dangerous as only some kinds of Hegelomania have been.
The Joyful Wisdom (La Gaya Scienza), passage 483
_A Word for Philologists._—It is thought that there are books so valuable and royal that whole generations of scholars are well employed when through their efforts these books are kept genuine and intelligible,—to confirm this belief again and again is the purpose of philology. It presupposes that the rare men are not lacking (though they may not be visible), who actually know how to use such valuable books:—those men perhaps who write such books themselves, or could write them. I mean to say that philology presupposes a noble belief,—that for the benefit of some few who are always "to come," and are not there, a very great amount of painful, and even dirty labour has to be done beforehand: it is all labour _in usum Delphinorum_.
The Joyful Wisdom (La Gaya Scienza), passage 502
And thus their convulsions are often merely indications that they would like to _dance_: these poor bears in whom hidden nymphs and satyrs, and sometimes still higher divinities, carry on their game!
The Joyful Wisdom (La Gaya Scienza), passage 521
Those erroneous articles of faith which were successively transmitted by inheritance, and have finally become almost the property and stock of the human species, are, for example, the following:—that there are enduring things, that there are equal things, that there are things, substances, and bodies, that a thing is what it appears, that our will is free, that what is good for me is also good absolutely.
The Joyful Wisdom (La Gaya Scienza), passage 126
In comparison with the ignoble nature the higher nature is _more irrational_:—for the noble, magnanimous, and self-sacrificing person succumbs in fact to his impulses, and in his best moments his reason _lapses_ altogether.
The Joyful Wisdom (La Gaya Scienza), passage 255
_Commerce and Nobility._—Buying and selling is now regarded as something ordinary, like the art of reading and writing; everyone is now trained to it even when he is not a tradesman, exercising himself daily in the art; precisely as formerly in the period of uncivilised humanity, everyone was a hunter and exercised himself day by day in the art of hunting.
The Joyful Wisdom (La Gaya Scienza), passage 25
A philosopher who has made the tour of many states of health, and always makes it anew, has also gone through just as many philosophies: he really _cannot_ do otherwise than transform his condition on every occasion into the most ingenious posture and position,—this art of transfiguration _is_ just philosophy. We philosophers are not at liberty to separate soul and body, as the people separate them; and we are still less at liberty to separate soul and spirit.
The Joyful Wisdom (La Gaya Scienza), passage 872
But it never occurs to us that it is their _sufferings_—that are their prophets!
The Joyful Wisdom (La Gaya Scienza), passage 1132
It is always _morality_ that he requires, one may wager on it; always the big moral words, always the high-sounding words: justice, wisdom, holiness, virtue; always the stoicism of gestures (how well stoicism hides what one does _not_ possess!); always the mantle of wise silence, of affability, of gentleness, and whatever else the idealist-mantle is called in which the incurable self-despisers and also the incurably conceited walk about.
The Joyful Wisdom (La Gaya Scienza), passage 991
It makes the most material difference whether a thinker stands personally related to his problems, having his fate, his need, and even his highest happiness therein; or merely impersonally, that is to say, if he can only feel and grasp them with the tentacles of cold, prying thought.
The Joyful Wisdom (La Gaya Scienza), passage 99
A and O, suggestive of Ah! and Oh! refer of course to Alpha and Omega, the first and last letters of the Greek alphabet.—TR.
The Joyful Wisdom (La Gaya Scienza), passage 617
The inventing of Gods, heroes and supermen of all kinds, as well as co-ordinate men and undermen—dwarfs, fairies, centaurs, satyrs, demons, devils—was the inestimable preliminary to the justification of the selfishness and sovereignty of the individual: the freedom which was granted to one God in respect to other Gods, was at last given to the individual himself in respect to laws, customs and neighbours.
The Joyful Wisdom (La Gaya Scienza), passage 956
But perhaps this is the greatest charm of life: it puts a gold-embroidered veil of lovely potentialities over itself, promising, resisting, modest, mocking, sympathetic, seductive. Yes, life is a woman!
The Joyful Wisdom (La Gaya Scienza), passage 621
_Danger of Vegetarians._—The immense prevalence of rice-eating impels to the use of opium and narcotics, in like manner as the immense prevalence of potato-eating impels to the use of brandy:—it also impels, however, in its more subtle after-effects to modes of thought and feeling which operate narcotically. This is in accord with the fact that those who promote narcotic modes of thought and feeling, like those Indian teachers, praise a purely vegetable diet, and would like to make it a law for the masses: they want thereby to call forth and augment the need which _they_ are in a position to satisfy.
The Joyful Wisdom (La Gaya Scienza), passage 388
Perhaps they have only lacked courage to express fully their extreme contempt for words: a little additional insolence in Rossini, and he would have allowed la-la-la-la to be sung throughout—and it might have been the rational course! The personages of the opera are _not_ meant to be believed "in their words," but in their tones! That is the difference, that is the fine _unnaturalness_ on account of which people go to the opera!
The Joyful Wisdom (La Gaya Scienza), passage 414
Such a fundamental feeling no longer allows itself to be fully eradicated,—and even now, after millenniums of long labour in combating such superstition, the very wisest of us occasionally becomes the fool of rhythm, be it only that one _perceives_ a thought to be _truer_ when it has a metrical form and approaches with a divine hopping.
The Joyful Wisdom (La Gaya Scienza), passage 466
"All that still smacks more of Spinoza than of me,"—Schopenhauer would probably have said.
The Joyful Wisdom (La Gaya Scienza), passage 1298
Passed an hour or two perchance, Or a year? then thought and sense Vanished in the engulfing trance Of a vast Indifference. Fathomless, abysses dread Opened—then the vision fled.
The Joyful Wisdom (La Gaya Scienza), passage 1237
We "preserve" nothing, nor would we return to any past age; we are not at all "liberal," we do not labour for "progress," we do not need first to stop our ears to the song of the market-place and the sirens of the future—their song of "equal rights," "free society," "no longer either lords or slaves," does not allure us!
The Joyful Wisdom (La Gaya Scienza), passage 308
_What others Know of us._—That which we know of ourselves and have in our memory is not so decisive for the happiness of our life as is generally believed. One day it flashes upon our mind what _others_ know of us (or think they know)—and then we acknowledge that it is the more powerful. We get on with our bad conscience more easily than with our bad reputation.
The Joyful Wisdom (La Gaya Scienza), passage 524
The exceptional thinkers like the Eleatics, who, in spite of this, advanced and maintained the antitheses of the natural errors, believed that it was possible also _to live_ these counterparts: it was they who devised the sage as the man of immutability, impersonality and universality of intuition, as one and all at the same time, with a special faculty for that reverse kind of knowledge; they were of the belief that their knowledge was at the same time the principle of _life_.
The Joyful Wisdom (La Gaya Scienza), passage 1175
Because your sole desire is to become masters of your craft; because you reverence every kind of mastership and ability, and repudiate with the most relentless scorn everything of a make-believe, half-genuine, dressed-up, virtuoso, demagogic, histrionic nature in _litteris et artibus_—all that which does not convince you by its absolute _genuineness_ of discipline and preparatory training, or cannot stand your test!
The Joyful Wisdom (La Gaya Scienza), passage 874
_Retrospect._—We seldom become conscious of the real pathos of any period of life as such, as long as we continue in it, but always think it is the only possible and reasonable thing for us henceforth, and that it is altogether _ethos_ and not _pathos_[10]—to speak and distinguish like the Greeks. A few notes of music to-day recalled a winter and a house, and a life of utter solitude to my mind, and at the same time the sentiments in which I then lived: I thought I should be able to live in such a state always. But now I understand that it was entirely pathos and passion, something comparable to this painfully bold and truly comforting music,—it is not one's lot to have these sensations for years, still less for eternities: otherwise one would become too "ethereal" for this planet.
The Joyful Wisdom (La Gaya Scienza), passage 670
_Justice._—Better allow oneself to be robbed than have scarecrows around one—that is my taste. And under all circumstances it is just a matter of taste—and nothing more!
The Joyful Wisdom (La Gaya Scienza), passage 188
Here, evidently, the non-possessors and desirers have determined the usage of language,—there were, of course, always too many of them.
The Joyful Wisdom (La Gaya Scienza), passage 371
Bad taste has its rights like good taste, and even a prerogative over the latter when it is the great requisite, the sure satisfaction, and as it were a universal language, an immediately intelligible mask and attitude; the excellent, select taste on the other hand has always something of a seeking, tentative character, not fully certain that it understands,—it is never, and has never been popular! The _masque_ is and remains popular!
The Joyful Wisdom (La Gaya Scienza), passage 541
In their isolation, however, they have very often had quite a different effect than at present, when they are confined within the limits of scientific thinking and kept mutually in check:—they have operated as poisons; for example, the doubting impulse, the denying impulse, the waiting impulse, the collecting impulse, the disintegrating impulse.
The Joyful Wisdom (La Gaya Scienza), passage 1314
Yet say you, "Fools' abomination! Both board and wall require purgation, And let no trace our eyes appal!"
The Joyful Wisdom (La Gaya Scienza), passage 729
_Praise in Choice._—The artist chooses his subjects; that is his mode of praising.
The Joyful Wisdom (La Gaya Scienza), passage 328
What a fool he would be who would think it enough to refer here to this origin and this nebulous veil of illusion, in order to _annihilate_ that which virtually passes for the world—namely, so-called "reality"! It is only as creators that we can annihilate!—But let us not forget this: it suffices to create new names and valuations and probabilities, in order in the long run to create new "things."
The Joyful Wisdom (La Gaya Scienza), passage 1139
Among those insignificant hazards and lucifer-matches I count all the so-called "aims," and similarly the still more so-called "occupations" of people: they are relatively optional, arbitrary, and almost indifferent in relation to the immense quantum of force which presses on, as we have said, to be used up in any way whatever.
The Joyful Wisdom (La Gaya Scienza), passage 660
_Apart._—Parliamentarism, that is to say, the public permission to choose between five main political opinions, insinuates itself into the favour of the numerous class who would fain _appear_ independent and individual, and like to fight for their opinions. After all, however, it is a matter of indifference whether one opinion is imposed upon the herd, or five opinions are permitted to it.—He who diverges from the five public opinions and goes apart, has always the whole herd against him.
The Joyful Wisdom (La Gaya Scienza), passage 836
_The Danger of the Happiest Ones._—To have fine senses and a fine taste; to be accustomed to the select and the intellectually best as our proper and readiest fare; to be blessed with a strong, bold, and daring soul; to go through life with a quiet eye and a firm step, ever ready for the worst as for a festival, and full of longing for undiscovered worlds and seas, men and Gods; to listen to all joyous music, as if there, perhaps, brave men, soldiers and seafarers, took a brief repose and enjoyment, and in the profoundest pleasure of the moment were overcome with tears and the whole purple melancholy of happiness: who would not like all this to be _his_ possession, his condition!
The Joyful Wisdom (La Gaya Scienza), passage 163
_Consciousness._—Consciousness is the last and latest development of the organic, and consequently also the most unfinished and least powerful of these developments. Innumerable mistakes originate out of consciousness, which, "in spite of fate," as Homer says, cause an animal or a man to break down earlier than might be necessary.
The Joyful Wisdom (La Gaya Scienza), passage 1189
The reverse, however, can also to some extent take place,—and it is to this especially that I should like to direct the attention of artists.
The Joyful Wisdom (La Gaya Scienza), passage 507
We do not always restrain our eyes from rounding off and perfecting in imagination: and then it is no longer the eternal imperfection that we carry over the river of Becoming—for we think we carry a _goddess_, and are proud and artless in rendering this service. As an æsthetic phenomenon existence is still _endurable_ to us; and by Art, eye and hand and above all the good conscience are given to us, _to be able_ to make such a phenomenon out of ourselves.
The Joyful Wisdom (La Gaya Scienza), passage 574
There never was a greater event,—and on account of it, all who are born after us belong to a higher history than any history hitherto!"—Here the madman was silent and looked again at his hearers; they also were silent and looked at him in surprise. At last he threw his lantern on the ground, so that it broke in pieces and was extinguished. "I come too early," he then said, "I am not yet at the right time.
The Joyful Wisdom (La Gaya Scienza), passage 732
_Guilt._—Although the most intelligent judges of the witches, and even the witches themselves, were convinced of the guilt of witchcraft, the guilt, nevertheless, was not there. So it is with all guilt.
The Joyful Wisdom (La Gaya Scienza), passage 857
_Out of the Seventh Solitude._—One day the wanderer shut a door behind him, stood still, and wept. Then he said: "Oh, this inclination and impulse towards the true, the real, the non-apparent, the certain! How I detest it! Why does this gloomy and passionate taskmaster follow just _me_? I should like to rest, but it does not permit me to do so. Are there not a host of things seducing me to tarry! Everywhere there are gardens of Armida for me, and therefore there will always be fresh separations and fresh bitterness of heart! I must set my foot forward, my weary wounded foot: and because I feel I must do this, I often cast grim glances back at the most beautiful things which could not detain me—_because_ they could not detain me!"
The Joyful Wisdom (La Gaya Scienza), passage 451
_The Loquacity of Authors._—There is a loquacity of anger—frequent in Luther, also in Schopenhauer. A loquacity which comes from too great a store of conceptual formulæ, as in Kant. A loquacity which comes from delight in ever new modifications of the same idea: one finds it in Montaigne. A loquacity of malicious natures: whoever reads writings of our period will recollect two authors in this connection. A loquacity which comes from delight in fine words and forms of speech: by no means rare in Goethe's prose. A loquacity which comes from pure satisfaction in noise and confusion of feelings: for example in Carlyle.
The Joyful Wisdom (La Gaya Scienza), passage 1346
Italicized words and phrases in the text version are presented by surrounding the text with underscores.
The Joyful Wisdom (La Gaya Scienza), passage 623
"_Deutschen_" (Germans) means originally "heathen": it is thus that the Goths after their conversion named the great mass of their unbaptized fellow-tribes, according to the indication in their translation of the Septuagint, in which the heathen are designated by the word which in Greek signifies "the nations." (See Ulfilas.)—It might still be possible for the Germans to make an honourable name ultimately out of their old name of reproach, by becoming the first _non-Christian_ nation of Europe; for which purpose Schopenhauer, to their honour, regarded them as highly qualified.