The Joyful Wisdom (La Gaya Scienza)
Friedrich Nietzsche
1,346 passages indexed from The Joyful Wisdom (La Gaya Scienza) (Friedrich Nietzsche) — Page 19 of 27
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The Joyful Wisdom (La Gaya Scienza), passage 145
Formerly it was perceived in a person that on some occasion he wanted to think—it was perhaps the exception!—that he now wanted to become wiser and collected his mind on a thought: he put on a long face for it, as for a prayer, and arrested his step—nay, stood still for hours on the street when the thought "came"—on one or on two legs. It was thus "worthy of the affair"!
The Joyful Wisdom (La Gaya Scienza), passage 1018
And in truth it has been so: both religions lighted upon a longing, monstrously exaggerated by malady of the will, for an imperative, a "Thou-shalt," a longing going the length of despair; both religions were teachers of fanaticism in times of slackness of will-power, and thereby offered to innumerable persons a support, a new possibility of exercising will, an enjoyment in willing.
The Joyful Wisdom (La Gaya Scienza), passage 1329
To joy, now by dark shadows—all was leisure, All lake, all noon, all time sans aim, sans measure.
The Joyful Wisdom (La Gaya Scienza), passage 687
_Hic niger est._—Usually he has no thoughts,—but in exceptional cases bad thoughts come to him.
The Joyful Wisdom (La Gaya Scienza), passage 561
When, trained in this Christian school of scepticism, we now read the moral books of the ancients, for example those of Seneca and Epictetus, we feel a pleasurable superiority, and are full of secret insight and penetration,—it seems to us as if a child talked before an old man, or a pretty, gushing girl before La Rochefoucauld:—we know better what virtue is!
The Joyful Wisdom (La Gaya Scienza), passage 419
_The Theatre._—This day has given me once more strong and elevated sentiments, and if I could have music and art in the evening, I know well what music and art I should _not_ like to have; namely, none of that which would fain intoxicate its hearers and _excite_ them to a crisis of strong and high feeling,—those men with commonplace souls, who in the evening are not like victors on triumphal cars, but like tired mules to whom life has rather too often applied the whip.
The Joyful Wisdom (La Gaya Scienza), passage 378
His work never expresses altogether what he would really like to express, what he _would like to have seen_: he appears to have had the foretaste of a vision and never the vision itself:—but an extraordinary longing for this vision has remained in his soul; and from this he derives his equally extraordinary eloquence of longing and craving.
The Joyful Wisdom (La Gaya Scienza), passage 1001
_Our Note of Interrogation._—But you don't understand it? As a matter of fact, an effort will be necessary in order to understand us. We seek for words; we seek perhaps also for ears. Who are we after all?
The Joyful Wisdom (La Gaya Scienza), passage 711
_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 Joyful Wisdom (La Gaya Scienza), passage 264
_Last Words._—It will be recollected that the Emperor Augustus, that terrible man, who had himself as much in his own power, and who could be silent as well as any wise Socrates, became indiscreet about himself in his last words; for the first time he let his mask fall, when he gave to understand that he had carried a mask and played a comedy,—he had played the father of his country and wisdom on the throne well, even to the point of illusion!
The Joyful Wisdom (La Gaya Scienza), passage 693
_A Mode of Asking for Reasons._—There is a mode of asking for our reasons which not only makes us forget our best reasons, but also arouses in us a spite and repugnance against reason generally:—a very stupefying mode of questioning, and properly an artifice of tyrannical men!
The Joyful Wisdom (La Gaya Scienza), passage 117
Without the belief in _reason in life_! And always from time to time will the human race decree anew that "there is something which really may not be laughed at." And the most clairvoyant philanthropist will add that "not only laughing and joyful wisdom, but also the tragic, with all its sublime irrationality, counts among the means and necessities for the conservation of the race!"—And consequently! Consequently! Consequently! Do you understand me, oh my brothers?
The Joyful Wisdom (La Gaya Scienza), passage 1158
For love, regarded as complete, great, and full, is nature, and as nature, is to all eternity something "unmoral."—_Fidelity_ is accordingly included in woman's love, it follows from the definition thereof; with man fidelity _may_ readily result in consequence of his love, perhaps as gratitude or idiosyncrasy of taste, and so-called elective affinity, but it does not belong to the _essence_ of his love—and indeed so little, that one might almost be entitled to speak of a natural opposition between love and fidelity in man, whose love is just a desire to possess, and _not_ a renunciation and giving away; the desire to possess, however, comes to an end every time with the possession....
The Joyful Wisdom (La Gaya Scienza), passage 513
_Let us be on our Guard._—Let us be on our guard against thinking that the world is a living being. Where could it extend itself? What could it nourish itself with? How could it grow and increase? We know tolerably well what the organic is; and we are to reinterpret the emphatically derivative, tardy, rare and accidental, which we only perceive on the crust of the earth, into the essential, universal and eternal, as those do who call the universe an organism? That disgusts me.
The Joyful Wisdom (La Gaya Scienza), passage 491
I believe that the sound of the German language in the Middle Ages, and especially after the Middle Ages, was extremely rustic and vulgar; it has ennobled itself somewhat during the last centuries, principally because it was found necessary to imitate so many French, Italian, and Spanish sounds, and particularly on the part of the German (and Austrian) nobility, who could not at all content themselves with their mother-tongue.
The Joyful Wisdom (La Gaya Scienza), passage 1013
Some have still need of metaphysics; but also the impatient _longing for certainty_ which at present discharges itself in scientific, positivist fashion among large numbers of the people, the longing by all means to get at something stable (while on account of the warmth of the longing the establishing of the certainty is more leisurely and negligently undertaken): even this is still the longing for a hold, a support; in short, the _instinct of weakness_, which, while not actually creating religions, metaphysics, and convictions of all kinds, nevertheless—preserves them.
The Joyful Wisdom (La Gaya Scienza), passage 209
Education proceeds in this manner throughout: it endeavours, by a series of enticements and advantages, to determine the individual to a certain mode of thinking and acting, which, when it has become habit, impulse and passion, rules in him and over him, _in opposition to his ultimate advantage_, but "for the general good." How often do I see that blindly furious diligence does indeed create riches and honours, but at the same time deprives the organs of the refinement by virtue of which alone an enjoyment of riches and honours is possible; so that really the main expedient for combating tedium and passion, simultaneously blunts the senses and makes the spirit refractory towards new stimuli!
The Joyful Wisdom (La Gaya Scienza), passage 1058
The whole of life would be possible without its seeing itself as it were in a mirror: as in fact even at present the far greater part of our life still goes on without this mirroring,—and even our thinking, feeling, volitional life as well, however painful this statement may sound to an older philosopher.
The Joyful Wisdom (La Gaya Scienza), passage 48
My skin bursts, breaks for fresh rebirth, And new desires come thronging: Much I've devoured, yet for more earth The serpent in me's longing. 'Twixt stone and grass I crawl once more, Hungry, by crooked ways, To eat the food I ate before, Earth-fare all serpents praise!
The Joyful Wisdom (La Gaya Scienza), passage 940
Everywhere, however, where we are _noticed_ as sufferers, our suffering is interpreted in a shallow way; it belongs to the nature of the emotion of pity to _divest_ unfamiliar suffering of its properly personal character:—our "benefactors" lower our value and volition more than our enemies.
The Joyful Wisdom (La Gaya Scienza), passage 501
The perception of the _height at which_ beauty begins to shed its charm even over Germans, raises German artists to the height, to the supreme height, and to the extravagances of passion: they have an actual, profound longing, therefore, to get beyond, or at least to look beyond the ugliness and awkwardness—into a better, easier, more southern, more sunny world.
The Joyful Wisdom (La Gaya Scienza), passage 615
but _a God_, through my instrumentality!" It was in the marvellous art and capacity for creating Gods—in polytheism—that this impulse was permitted to discharge itself, it was here that it became purified, perfected, and ennobled; for it was originally a commonplace and unimportant impulse, akin to stubbornness, disobedience and envy. To be _hostile_ to this impulse towards the individual ideal,—that was formerly the law of every morality.
The Joyful Wisdom (La Gaya Scienza), passage 54
Rust's needed: keenness will not satisfy! "He is too young!" the rabble loves to cry.
The Joyful Wisdom (La Gaya Scienza), passage 356
_Mothers._—Animals think differently from men with respect to females; with them the female is regarded as the productive being. There is no paternal love among them, but there is such a thing as love of the children of a beloved, and habituation to them.
The Joyful Wisdom (La Gaya Scienza), passage 752
_Personal Providence._—There is a certain climax in life, at which, notwithstanding all our freedom, and however much we may have denied all directing reason and goodness in the beautiful chaos of existence, we are once more in great danger of intellectual bondage, and have to face our hardest test.
The Joyful Wisdom (La Gaya Scienza), passage 957
_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.
The Joyful Wisdom (La Gaya Scienza), passage 303
Their satisfactions are so rapid and violent that satiety, aversion, and flight into the antithetical taste, immediately follow upon them: in this contrast the convulsion of feeling liberates itself, in one person by sudden coldness, in another by laughter, and in a third by tears and self-sacrifice.
The Joyful Wisdom (La Gaya Scienza), passage 1070
Finally, the growing consciousness is a danger, and whoever lives among the most conscious Europeans knows even that it is a disease. As may be conjectured, it is not the antithesis of subject and object with which I am here concerned: I leave that distinction to the epistemologists who have remained entangled in the toils of grammar (popular metaphysics).
The Joyful Wisdom (La Gaya Scienza), passage 1020
When a man arrives at the fundamental conviction that he _requires_ to be commanded, he becomes "a believer." Reversely, one could imagine a delight and a power of self-determining, and a _freedom_ of will whereby a spirit could bid farewell to every belief, to every wish for certainty, accustomed as it would be to support itself on slender cords and possibilities, and to dance even on the verge of abysses. Such a spirit would be the _free spirit par excellence_.
The Joyful Wisdom (La Gaya Scienza), passage 628
Pythagoras and Plato, perhaps also Empedocles, and already much earlier the Orphic enthusiasts, aimed at founding new religions; and the two first-named were so endowed with the qualifications for founding religions, that one cannot be sufficiently astonished at their failure: they just reached the point of founding sects.
The Joyful Wisdom (La Gaya Scienza), passage 1080
There were ages in which people believed with unshaken confidence, yea, with piety, in their predestination for this very business, for that very mode of livelihood, and would not at all acknowledge chance, or the fortuitous rôle, or arbitrariness therein.
The Joyful Wisdom (La Gaya Scienza), passage 837
It was the _happiness of Homer_! The condition of him who invented the Gods for the Greeks,—nay, who invented _his_ Gods for himself! But let us not conceal the fact that with this happiness of Homer in one's soul, one is more liable to suffering than any other creature under the sun! And only at this price do we purchase the most precious pearl that the waves of existence have hitherto washed ashore!
The Joyful Wisdom (La Gaya Scienza), passage 805
Why should he again go down into those muddy waters where he has to swim and wade and soil his wings!—No! There it is too hard for us to live! we cannot help it that we are born for the atmosphere, the pure atmosphere, we rivals of the ray of light; and that we should like best to ride like it on the atoms of ether, not away from the sun, but _towards the sun_!
The Joyful Wisdom (La Gaya Scienza), passage 737
_Imitators._—A: "What? You don't want to have imitators?" B: "I don't want people to do anything _after_ me; I want every one to do something _before_ himself (as a pattern to himself)—just as _I_ do." A: "Consequently—?"
The Joyful Wisdom (La Gaya Scienza), passage 1091
Or as Bismarck's Macchiavelism was with a good conscience, his so-called "practical politics" in Germany? Did our philosophers perhaps even go counter to the _need_ of the "German soul"? In short, were the German philosophers really philosophical _Germans_?—I call to mind three cases.
The Joyful Wisdom (La Gaya Scienza), passage 683
_Caution therefore!_—There is nothing we are fonder of communicating to others than the seal of secrecy—together with what is under it.
The Joyful Wisdom (La Gaya Scienza), passage 1057
For we could in fact think, feel, will, and recollect, we could likewise "act" in every sense of the term, and nevertheless nothing of it all would require to "come into consciousness" (as one says metaphorically).
The Joyful Wisdom (La Gaya Scienza), passage 928
This "persistency" of your so-called moral judgment? This absoluteness of the feeling that "as I think on this matter, so must everyone think"? Admire rather your _selfishness_ therein! And the blindness, paltriness, and modesty of your selfishness!
The Joyful Wisdom (La Gaya Scienza), passage 139
They grasp, therefore, at philosophies of morality which preach some kind of categorical imperative, or they assimilate a good lump of religion, as, for example, Mazzini did. Because they want to be trusted unconditionally, it is first of all necessary for them to trust themselves unconditionally, on the basis of some ultimate, undebatable command, sublime in itself, as the ministers and instruments of which, they would fain feel and announce themselves.
The Joyful Wisdom (La Gaya Scienza), passage 47
Attracted by my style and talk You'd follow, in my footsteps walk? Follow yourself unswervingly, So—careful!—shall you follow me.
The Joyful Wisdom (La Gaya Scienza), passage 1045
_Why we can hardly Dispense with Morality._—The naked man is generally an ignominious spectacle—I speak of us European males (and by no means of European females!). If the most joyous company at table suddenly found themselves stripped and divested of their garments through the trick of an enchanter, I believe that not only would the joyousness be gone and the strongest appetite lost;—it seems that we Europeans cannot at all dispense with the masquerade that is called clothing.
The Joyful Wisdom (La Gaya Scienza), passage 122
But to stand in the midst of this _rerum concordia discors_ and all the marvellous uncertainty and ambiguity of existence, _and not to question_, not to tremble with desire and delight in questioning, not even to hate the questioner—perhaps even to make merry over him to the extent of weariness—that is what I regard as _contemptible_, and it is this sentiment which I first of all search for in every one:—some folly or other always persuades me anew that every man has this sentiment, as man.
The Joyful Wisdom (La Gaya Scienza), passage 642
_The most Influential Person._—The fact that a person resists the whole spirit of his age, stops it at the door, and calls it to account, _must_ exert an influence! It is indifferent whether he wishes to exert an influence; the point is that he _can_.
The Joyful Wisdom (La Gaya Scienza), passage 487
For melody has such an obvious delight in conformity to law, and such an aversion to everything evolving, unformed and arbitrary, that it sounds like a note out of the _ancient_ European regime, and as a seduction and re-duction back to it.
The Joyful Wisdom (La Gaya Scienza), passage 270
By the fact of individuals, the powerful and influential persons, expressing and tyrannically enforcing without any feeling of shame, _their_ _hoc est ridiculum, hoc est absurdum_; the decisions, therefore, of their taste and their disrelish:—they thereby lay a constraint upon many people, out of which there gradually grows a habituation for still more, and finally a _necessity for all_.
The Joyful Wisdom (La Gaya Scienza), passage 218
"I am no person," he would say, "but always the thing itself")—and the reception will last longer than is pleasant to anybody; a sufficient reason for telling about the poet who wrote over his door, "He who enters here will do me an honour; he who does not—a favour."—That is, forsooth, saying a discourteous thing in a courteous manner! And perhaps this poet is quite justified on his part in being discourteous; they say that the rhymes are better than the rhymester.
The Joyful Wisdom (La Gaya Scienza), passage 827
Indeed!—one may ask—would man have learned at all to get on the tracks of hunger and thirst for _himself_, and to extract satiety and fullness out of _himself_, without that religious schooling and preliminary history?
The Joyful Wisdom (La Gaya Scienza), passage 1321
The door opes wide, And raindrops on my bed are scattered, The light's blown out—woes multiplied! He that hath not an hundred rhymes, I'll wager, in these dolorous times We'd see him shattered!
The Joyful Wisdom (La Gaya Scienza), passage 96
Your life is half-way o'er; The clock-hand moves; your soul is thrilled with fear, It roamed to distant shore And sought and found not, yet you—linger here!
The Joyful Wisdom (La Gaya Scienza), passage 878
These are the heroic men, the great _pain-bringers_ of mankind: those few and rare ones who need just the same apology as pain generally,—and verily, it should not be denied them! They are forces of the greatest importance for preserving and advancing the species, were it only because they are opposed to smug ease, and do not conceal their disgust at this kind of happiness.