The Joyful Wisdom (La Gaya Scienza)
Friedrich Nietzsche
1,346 passages indexed from The Joyful Wisdom (La Gaya Scienza) (Friedrich Nietzsche) — Page 24 of 27
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The Joyful Wisdom (La Gaya Scienza), passage 1317
From thy moist lips, O Time, thou witch, beslavering me, Hour upon hour too slowly drips In vain—I cry, in frenzy's fit, "A curse upon that yawning pit, A curse upon Eternity!"
The Joyful Wisdom (La Gaya Scienza), passage 1307
Waiting long, the lovelorn wight Is filled with rage and poison: Even so on sultry night Toadstools grow in foison.
The Joyful Wisdom (La Gaya Scienza), passage 1209
We grow like trees—that is difficult to understand, like all life!—not in one place, but everywhere, not in one direction only, but upwards and outwards, as well as inwards and downwards. At the same time our force shoots forth in stem, branches, and roots; we are really no longer free to do anything separately, or to _be_ anything separately....
The Joyful Wisdom (La Gaya Scienza), passage 178
Perhaps only those most susceptible to the sense of power, and eager for it, will prefer to impress the seal of power on the resisting individual,—those to whom the sight of the already subjugated person as the object of benevolence is a burden and a tedium.
The Joyful Wisdom (La Gaya Scienza), passage 1340
Off with those who spoil earth's gladness, Blow away all clouds of sadness, Till our heaven clear we see; Let me hold thy hand, best fellow, Till my joy like tempest bellow! Freest thou of spirits free!
The Joyful Wisdom (La Gaya Scienza), passage 108
What does the ever new appearing of founders of morals and religions, of instigators of struggles for moral valuations, of teachers of remorse of conscience and religious war, imply? What do these heroes on this stage imply? For they have hitherto been the heroes of it, and all else, though solely visible for the time being, and too close to one, has served only as preparation for these heroes, whether as machinery and coulisse, or in the rôle of confidants and valets.
The Joyful Wisdom (La Gaya Scienza), passage 1078
_In what Manner Europe will always become "more Artistic."_—Providing a living still enforces even in the present day (in our transition period when so much ceases to enforce) a definite _rôle_ on almost all male Europeans, their so-called callings; some have the liberty, an apparent liberty, to choose this rôle themselves, but most have it chosen for them. The result is strange enough.
The Joyful Wisdom (La Gaya Scienza), passage 490
Perhaps nothing quite similar has ever happened elsewhere:—the predominance of the literary style over the talk, and the formality and affectation of an entire people, becoming the basis of a common and no longer dialectical language.
The Joyful Wisdom (La Gaya Scienza), passage 452
_In Honour of Shakespeare._—The best thing I could say in honour of Shakespeare, _the man_, is that he believed in Brutus and cast not a shadow of suspicion on the kind of virtue which Brutus represents! It is to him that Shakespeare consecrated his best tragedy—it is at present still called by a wrong name,—to him and to the most terrible essence of lofty morality. Independence of soul!—that is the question at issue!
The Joyful Wisdom (La Gaya Scienza), passage 134
By means of arms, by upsetting boundary-stones, by violations of piety most of all: but also by new religions and morals! The same kind of "wickedness" is in every teacher and preacher of the _new_—which makes a conqueror infamous, although it expresses itself more refinedly, and does not immediately set the muscles in motion (and just on that account does not make so infamous!).
The Joyful Wisdom (La Gaya Scienza), passage 1063
The very fact that our actions, thoughts, feelings and motions come within the range of our consciousness—at least a part of them—is the result of a terrible, prolonged "must" ruling man's destiny: as the most endangered animal he _needed_ help and protection; he needed his fellows, he was obliged to express his distress, he had to know how to make himself understood—and for all this he needed "consciousness" first of all, consequently, to "know" himself what he lacked, to "know" how he felt and to "know" what he thought.
The Joyful Wisdom (La Gaya Scienza), passage 171
If ye decide for the former, if ye therefore want to depress and minimise man's capacity for pain, well, ye must also depress and minimise his _capacity for enjoyment_. In fact, one can further the one as well as the other goal _by science_! Perhaps science is as yet best known by its capacity for depriving man of enjoyment, and making him colder, more statuesque, and more Stoical.
The Joyful Wisdom (La Gaya Scienza), passage 343
_Devotedness._—There are noble women with a certain poverty of spirit, who, in order to _express_ their profoundest devotedness, have no other alternative but to offer their virtue and modesty: it is the highest thing they have. And this present is often accepted without putting the recipient under such deep obligation as the giver supposed,—a very melancholy story!
The Joyful Wisdom (La Gaya Scienza), passage 1215
Do you not imagine some long-concealed blood-sucker in the background, which makes its beginning with the senses, and in the end retains or leaves behind nothing but bones and their rattling?—I mean categories, formulæ, and _words_ (for you will pardon me in saying that what _remains_ of Spinoza, _amor intellectualis dei_, is rattling and nothing more!
The Joyful Wisdom (La Gaya Scienza), passage 740
_One times One._—One only is always in the wrong, but with two truth begins.—One only cannot prove himself right; but two are already beyond refutation.
The Joyful Wisdom (La Gaya Scienza), passage 1183
And let it be said in passing that if Wagner's theory was that "drama is the object, and music is only the means to it,"—his _practice_ on the contrary from beginning to end has been to the effect that "attitude is the object, drama and even music can never be anything else but means to _that_." Music as a means of elucidating, strengthening and intensifying dramatic poses and the actor's appeal to the senses, and Wagnerian drama only an opportunity for a number of dramatic attitudes!
The Joyful Wisdom (La Gaya Scienza), passage 844
From him who so lives there fall off one after the other the things that do not pertain to such a life: without hatred or antipathy, he sees _this_ take leave of him to-day, and _that_ to-morrow, like the yellow leaves which every livelier breeze strips from the tree: or he does not see at all that they take leave of him, so firmly is his eye fixed upon his goal, and generally forward, not sideways, backward, nor downward.
The Joyful Wisdom (La Gaya Scienza), passage 1165
("What?" said such a one once impatiently, "do you think we should delight in enduring this strangeness, coldness, death-stillness about us, all this subterranean, hidden, dim, undiscovered solitude, which is called life with us, and might just as well be called death, if we were not conscious of what _will arise_ out of us,—and that only after our death shall we attain to _our_ life and become living, ah! very living! we posthumous men!"—)
The Joyful Wisdom (La Gaya Scienza), passage 842
"If this does not succeed with me,"—he says to himself, "perhaps that will succeed; and on the whole I do not know but that I am under more obligation to thank my failures than any of my successes. Am I made to be headstrong, and to wear the bull's horns? That which constitutes the worth and the sum of life _for me_, lies somewhere else; I know more of life, because I have been so often on the point of losing it; and just on that account I _have_ more of life than any of you!"
The Joyful Wisdom (La Gaya Scienza), passage 943
He wishes _to succour_, and does not reflect that there is a personal necessity for misfortune; that terror, want, impoverishment, midnight watches, adventures, hazards and mistakes are as necessary to me and to you as their opposites, yea, that, to speak mystically, the path to one's own heaven always leads through the voluptuousness of one's own hell. No, he knows nothing thereof.
The Joyful Wisdom (La Gaya Scienza), passage 1217
_"Science" as Prejudice._—It follows from the laws of class distinction that the learned, in so far as they belong to the intellectual middle-class, are debarred from getting even a sight of the really _great_ problems and notes of interrogation.
The Joyful Wisdom (La Gaya Scienza), passage 114
However foolish and fanatical his inventions and valuations may be, however much he may misunderstand the course of nature and deny its conditions—and all systems of ethics hitherto have been foolish and anti-natural to such a degree that mankind would have been ruined by any one of them had it got the upper hand,—at any rate, every time that "the hero" came upon the stage something new was attained: the frightful counterpart of laughter, the profound convulsion of many individuals at the thought, "Yes, it is worth while to live!
The Joyful Wisdom (La Gaya Scienza), passage 712
_Against Mediators._—He who attempts to mediate between two decided thinkers is rightly called mediocre: he has not an eye for seeing the unique; similarising and equalising are signs of weak eyes.
The Joyful Wisdom (La Gaya Scienza), passage 1190
A constant producer, a man who is a "mother" in the grand sense of the term, one who no longer knows or hears of anything except pregnancies and child-beds of his spirit, who has no time at all to reflect and make comparisons with regard to himself and his work, who is also no longer inclined to exercise his taste, but simply forgets it, letting it take its chance of standing, lying or falling,—perhaps such a man at last produces works _on which he is then not at all fit to pass a judgment_: so that he speaks and thinks foolishly about them and about himself.
The Joyful Wisdom (La Gaya Scienza), passage 846
_Self-control._—Those moral teachers who first and foremost order man to get himself into his own power, induce thereby a curious infirmity in him,—namely, a constant sensitiveness with reference to all natural strivings and inclinations, and as it were, a sort of itching.
The Joyful Wisdom (La Gaya Scienza), passage 1108
But he _raised_ the question—as a good European, as we have said, and _not_ as a German.—Or did the Germans prove at least by the way in which they seized on the Schopenhauerian question, their inner connection and relationship to him, their preparation for his problem, and their _need_ of it?
The Joyful Wisdom (La Gaya Scienza), passage 1344
Translated by Miss M. D. Petre. Inserted by permission of the editor of the _Nation_, in which it appeared on April 17, 1909.
The Joyful Wisdom (La Gaya Scienza), passage 225
Let us learn that it is a symptom of _enlightenment_.—Secondly, a society in which corruption takes a hold is blamed for _effeminacy_: for the appreciation of war, and the delight in war perceptibly diminish in such a society, and the conveniences of life are now just as eagerly sought after as were military and gymnastic honours formerly.
The Joyful Wisdom (La Gaya Scienza), passage 379
With this he raises those who listen to him above his work and above all "works," and gives them wings to rise higher than hearers have ever risen before, thus making them poets and seers themselves; they then show an admiration for the originator of their happiness, as if he had led them immediately to the vision of his holiest and ultimate verities, as if he had reached his goal, and had actually _seen_ and communicated his vision.
The Joyful Wisdom (La Gaya Scienza), passage 903
The way people write their _letters_ nowadays is quite in keeping with the age; their style and spirit will always be the true "sign of the times." If there be still enjoyment in society and in art, it is enjoyment such as over-worked slaves provide for themselves. Oh, this moderation in "joy" of our cultured and uncultured classes! Oh, this increasing suspiciousness of all enjoyment!
The Joyful Wisdom (La Gaya Scienza), passage 19
Every philosophy which puts peace higher than war, every ethic with a negative grasp of the idea of happiness, every metaphysic and physic that knows a _finale_, an ultimate condition of any kind whatever, every predominating, æsthetic or religious longing for an aside, a beyond, an outside, an above—all these permit one to ask whether sickness has not been the motive which inspired the philosopher.
The Joyful Wisdom (La Gaya Scienza), passage 81
The weary shun the glaring sun, afraid, And only care for trees to gain the shade.
The Joyful Wisdom (La Gaya Scienza), passage 73
God loves us, _for_ he made us, sent us here!— "Man hath made God!" ye subtle ones reply. His handiwork he must hold dear, And _what he made_ shall he deny? There sounds the devil's halting hoof, I fear.
The Joyful Wisdom (La Gaya Scienza), passage 1037
_In Honour of Priestly Natures._—I think that philosophers have always felt themselves furthest removed from that which the people (in all classes of society nowadays) take for wisdom: the prudent, bovine placidity, piety, and country-parson meekness, which lies in the meadow and _gazes at_ life seriously and ruminatingly:—this is probably because philosophers have not had sufficiently the taste of the "people," or of the country-parson for that kind of wisdom.
The Joyful Wisdom (La Gaya Scienza), passage 392
_Esprit Un-Grecian._—The Greeks were exceedingly logical and plain in all their thinking; they did not get tired of it, at least during their long flourishing period, as is so often the case with the French; who too willingly made a little excursion into the opposite, and in fact endure the spirit of logic only when it betrays its _sociable_ courtesy, its sociable self-renunciation, by a multitude of such little excursions into its opposite.
The Joyful Wisdom (La Gaya Scienza), passage 84
Strange to the crowd, yet useful to the crowd, I still pursue my path, now sun, now cloud, But always pass above the crowd!
The Joyful Wisdom (La Gaya Scienza), passage 798
Put them at the head of your morality, and speak from morning till night of the happiness of virtue, of repose of soul, of righteousness, and of reward and punishment in the nature of things: according as you go on in this manner, all these good things will finally acquire a popularity and a street-cry for themselves: but then all the gold on them will also be worn off, and more besides: all the gold _in them_ will have changed into lead.
The Joyful Wisdom (La Gaya Scienza), passage 187
When one considers that this means precisely to _exclude_ all the world from a precious possession, a happiness, and an enjoyment; when one considers that the lover has in view the impoverishment and privation of all other rivals, and would like to become the dragon of his golden hoard, as the most inconsiderate and selfish of all "conquerors" and exploiters; when one considers finally that to the lover himself, the whole world besides appears indifferent, colourless, and worthless, and that he is ready to make every sacrifice, disturb every arrangement, and put every other interest behind his own,—one is verily surprised that this ferocious lust of property and injustice of sexual love should have been glorified and deified to such an extent at all times; yea, that out of this love the conception of love as the antithesis of egoism should have been derived, when it is perhaps precisely the most unqualified expression of egoism.
The Joyful Wisdom (La Gaya Scienza), passage 1149
_My Belief in the Virilising of Europe._—We owe it to Napoleon (and not at all to the French Revolution, which had in view the "fraternity" of the nations, and the florid interchange of good graces among people generally) that several warlike centuries, which have not had their like in past history, may now follow one another—in short, that we have entered upon _the classical age of war_, war at the same time scientific and popular, on the grandest scale (as regards means, talents and discipline), to which all coming millenniums will look back with envy and awe as a work of perfection:—for the national movement out of which this martial glory springs, is only the counter-_choc_ against Napoleon, and would not have existed without him.
The Joyful Wisdom (La Gaya Scienza), passage 786
_One Thing is Needful._—To "give style" to one's character—that is a grand and a rare art! He who surveys all that his nature presents in its strength and in its weakness, and then fashions it into an ingenious plan, until everything appears artistic and rational, and even the weaknesses enchant the eye—exercises that admirable art.
The Joyful Wisdom (La Gaya Scienza), passage 817
Be the advantage of this mode of thinking ever so great otherwise, it is in any case the mode of judging which is most injurious _to knowledge_: for precisely the good-will of the knowing one ever to declare himself unhesitatingly as _opposed_ to his former opinions, and in general to be distrustful of all that wants to be fixed in him—is here condemned and brought into disrepute.
The Joyful Wisdom (La Gaya Scienza), passage 1265
But it would be worse still if it were otherwise,—if we knew too much; our duty is and remains, first of all, not to get into confusion about ourselves. We _are_ different from the learned; although it cannot be denied that amongst other things we are also learned. We have different needs, a different growth, a different digestion: we need more, we need also less.
The Joyful Wisdom (La Gaya Scienza), passage 1138
The first kind of cause is a quantum of stored-up force, which waits to be used in some manner, for some purpose; the second kind of cause, on the contrary, is something quite unimportant in comparison with the first, an insignificant hazard for the most part, in conformity with which the quantum of force in question "discharges" itself in some unique and definite manner: the lucifer-match in relation to the barrel of gunpowder.
The Joyful Wisdom (La Gaya Scienza), passage 577
_Mystical Explanations._—Mystical explanations are regarded as profound; the truth is that they do not even go the length of being superficial.
The Joyful Wisdom (La Gaya Scienza), passage 1337
Let us snatch from every bower, As we pass, the fairest flower, With some leaves to make a crown; Then, like minstrels gaily dancing, Saint and witch together prancing, Let us foot it up and down.
The Joyful Wisdom (La Gaya Scienza), passage 1101
Hegel especially was its retarder _par excellence_, in virtue of the grandiose attempt which he made to persuade us of the divinity of existence, with the help at the very last of our sixth sense, "the historical sense." As philosopher, Schopenhauer was the _first_ avowed and inflexible atheist we Germans have had: his hostility to Hegel had here its background.
The Joyful Wisdom (La Gaya Scienza), passage 495
And unconsciously also to the good Germans, who gaze at him as the man of the foremost and most select society, and willingly let him "give them his tone." And indeed he gives it to them!—in the first place it is the sergeant-majors and non-commissioned officers that imitate his tone and coarsen it.
The Joyful Wisdom (La Gaya Scienza), passage 261
_Outside the Lecture-room._—"In order to prove that man after all belongs to the good-natured animals, I would remind you how credulous he has been for so long a time. It is now only, quite late, and after an immense self-conquest, that he has become a _distrustful_ animal,—yes! man is now more wicked than ever."—I do not understand this; why should man now be more distrustful and more wicked?—"Because he now has science,—because he needs to have it!"—
The Joyful Wisdom (La Gaya Scienza), passage 1256
That may depend on manifold conditions: in the main it is a question of how light or how heavy we are, the problem of our "specific gravity." One must be _very light_ in order to impel one's will to knowledge to such a distance, and as it were beyond one's age, in order to create eyes for oneself for the survey of millenniums, and a pure heaven in these eyes besides! One must have freed oneself from many things by which we Europeans of to-day are oppressed, hindered, held down, and made heavy.
The Joyful Wisdom (La Gaya Scienza), passage 246
Now this sacrificing, this casting away, is the very thing which becomes visible in him: on that account one calls him the self-renouncer, and as such he stands before us, enveloped in his cowl, and as the soul of a hair-shirt. With this effect, however, which he makes upon us he is well content: he wants to keep concealed from us his desire, his pride, his intention of flying _above_ us.—Yes! He is wiser than we thought, and so courteous towards us—this affirmer!