The Joyful Wisdom (La Gaya Scienza)
Friedrich Nietzsche
1,346 passages indexed from The Joyful Wisdom (La Gaya Scienza) (Friedrich Nietzsche) — Page 25 of 27
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The Joyful Wisdom (La Gaya Scienza), passage 522
It was only very late that the deniers and doubters of such propositions came forward,—it was only very late that truth made its appearance as the most impotent form of knowledge. It seemed as if it were impossible to get along with truth, our organism was adapted for the very opposite; all its higher functions, the perceptions of the senses, and in general every kind of sensation co-operated with those primevally embodied, fundamental errors.
The Joyful Wisdom (La Gaya Scienza), passage 699
_The Ideal and the Material._—You have a noble ideal before your eyes: but are you also such a noble stone that such a divine image could be formed out of you? And without that—is not all your labour barbaric sculpturing? A blasphemy of your ideal!
The Joyful Wisdom (La Gaya Scienza), passage 152
Supposing all these labours to be accomplished, the most critical of all questions would then come into the foreground: whether science is in a position to _furnish_ goals for human action, after it has proved that it can take them away and annihilate them—and then would be the time for a process of experimenting in which every kind of heroism could satisfy itself, an experimenting for centuries, which would put into the shade all the great labours and sacrifices of previous history.
The Joyful Wisdom (La Gaya Scienza), passage 572
Backwards, sideways, forwards, in all directions? Is there still an above and below? Do we not stray, as through infinite nothingness? Does not empty space breathe upon us? Has it not become colder? Does not night come on continually, darker and darker? Shall we not have to light lanterns in the morning? Do we not hear the noise of the grave-diggers who are burying God? Do we not smell the divine putrefaction?—for even Gods putrefy! God is dead! God remains dead! And we have killed him!
The Joyful Wisdom (La Gaya Scienza), passage 411
To make a prophecy—that means originally (according to what seems to me the probable derivation of the Greek word) to determine something; people thought they could determine the future by winning Apollo over to their side: he who, according to the most ancient idea, is far more than a foreseeing deity.
The Joyful Wisdom (La Gaya Scienza), passage 232
In these times bribery and treason are at their height: for the love of the _ego_, then first discovered, is much more powerful than the love of the old, used-up, hackneyed "fatherland"; and the need to be secure in one way or other against the frightful fluctuations of fortune, opens even the nobler hands, as soon as a richer and more powerful person shows himself ready to put gold into them.
The Joyful Wisdom (La Gaya Scienza), passage 519
There are no eternally enduring substances; matter is just another such error as the God of the Eleatics. But when shall we be at an end with our foresight and precaution! When will all these shadows of God cease to obscure us? When shall we have nature entirely undeified! When shall we be permitted to _naturalise_ ourselves by means of the pure, newly discovered, newly redeemed nature?
The Joyful Wisdom (La Gaya Scienza), passage 432
It is thus possible that a person may, just by his pathos of earnestness, betray how superficially and sparingly his intellect has hitherto operated in the domain of knowledge.—And is not everything that we consider _important_ our betrayer? It shows where our motives lie, and where our motives are altogether lacking.
The Joyful Wisdom (La Gaya Scienza), passage 733
_Misunderstood Sufferers._—Great natures suffer otherwise than their worshippers imagine; they suffer most severely from the ignoble, petty emotions of certain evil moments; in short, from doubt of their own greatness;—not however from the sacrifices and martyrdoms which their tasks require of them. As long as Prometheus sympathises with men and sacrifices himself for them, he is happy and proud in himself; but on becoming envious of Zeus and of the homage which mortals pay him—then Prometheus suffers!
The Joyful Wisdom (La Gaya Scienza), passage 601
Contrition, degradation, rolling-in-the-dust,—these are the first and last conditions on which his favour depends: the restoration, therefore, of his divine honour!
The Joyful Wisdom (La Gaya Scienza), passage 821
_A Sigh._—I caught this notion on the way, and rapidly took the readiest, poor words to hold it fast, so that it might not again fly away. And now it has died in these dry words, and hangs and flaps about in them—and I hardly know now, when I look upon it, how I could have had such happiness when I caught this bird.
The Joyful Wisdom (La Gaya Scienza), passage 477
_Learning to do Homage._—One must learn the art of homage, as well as the art of contempt. Whoever goes in new paths and has led many persons therein, discovers with astonishment how awkward and incompetent all of them are in the expression of their gratitude, and indeed how rarely gratitude _is able_ even to express itself. It is always as if something comes into people's throats when their gratitude wants to speak, so that it only hems and haws, and becomes silent again.
The Joyful Wisdom (La Gaya Scienza), passage 691
_The Envious Man._—That is an envious man—it is not desirable that he should have children; he would be envious of them, because he can no longer be a child.
The Joyful Wisdom (La Gaya Scienza), passage 437
For prose is an uninterrupted, polite warfare with poetry; all its charm consists in the fact that poetry is constantly avoided, and contradicted; every abstraction wants to have a gibe at poetry, and wishes to be uttered with a mocking voice; all dryness and coolness is meant to bring the amiable goddess into an amiable despair; there are often approximations and reconciliations for the moment, and then a sudden recoil and a burst of laughter; the curtain is often drawn up and dazzling light let in just while the goddess is enjoying her twilights and dull colours; the word is often taken out of her mouth and chanted to a melody while she holds her fine hands before her delicate little ears—and so there are a thousand enjoyments of the warfare, the defeats included, of which the unpoetic, the so-called prose-men know nothing at all:—they consequently write and speak only bad prose!
The Joyful Wisdom (La Gaya Scienza), passage 302
_Magnanimity and allied Qualities._—Those paradoxical phenomena, such as the sudden coldness in the demeanour of good-natured men, the humour of the melancholy, and above all _magnanimity_, as a sudden renunciation of revenge or of the gratification of envy—appear in men in whom there is a powerful inner impulsiveness, in men of sudden satiety and sudden disgust.
The Joyful Wisdom (La Gaya Scienza), passage 144
We think too hastily and on the way and while walking and in the midst of business of all kinds, even when we think on the most serious matters; we require little preparation, even little quiet:—it is as if each of us carried about an unceasingly revolving machine in his head, which still works, even under the most unfavourable circumstances.
The Joyful Wisdom (La Gaya Scienza), passage 583
But in the primitive period of the human race, the latter and the former propositions were identical, the first were not generalisations of the second, but the second were explanations of the first.—Schopenhauer, with his assumption that all that exists is something _volitional_, has set a primitive mythology on the throne; he seems never to have attempted an analysis of the Will, because he _believed_ like everybody in the simplicity and immediateness of all volition:—while volition is in fact such a cleverly practised mechanical process that it almost escapes the observing eye.
The Joyful Wisdom (La Gaya Scienza), passage 40
This means literally to put the numeral X instead of the numeral V (formerly U); hence it means to double a number unfairly, to exaggerate, humbug, cheat.—TR.
The Joyful Wisdom (La Gaya Scienza), passage 64
Did I not turn, a rolling cask, Ever about myself, I ask, How could I without burning run Close on the track of the hot sun?
The Joyful Wisdom (La Gaya Scienza), passage 464
But let us speak of the most celebrated of the living Schopenhauerians, Richard Wagner.—It has happened to him as it has already happened to many an artist: he made a mistake in the interpretation of the characters he created, and misunderstood the unexpressed philosophy of the art peculiarly his own.
The Joyful Wisdom (La Gaya Scienza), passage 292
To be mad!—that belonged to the paradise and the revelry of earlier times; while our felicity is like that of the shipwrecked man who has gone ashore, and places himself with both feet on the old, firm ground—in astonishment that it does not rock.
The Joyful Wisdom (La Gaya Scienza), passage 154
_Unconscious Virtues._—All qualities in a man of which he is conscious—and especially when he presumes that they are visible and evident to his environment also—are subject to quite other laws of development than those qualities which are unknown to him, or imperfectly known, which by their subtlety can also conceal themselves from the subtlest observer, and hide as it were behind nothing,—as in the case of the delicate sculptures on the scales of reptiles (it would be an error to suppose them an adornment or a defence—for one sees them only with the microscope; consequently, with an eye artificially strengthened to an extent of vision which similar animals, to which they might perhaps have meant adornment or defence, do not possess!) Our visible moral qualities, and especially our moral qualities _believed to be_ visible, follow their own course,—and our invisible qualities of similar name, which in relation to others neither serve for adornment nor defence, _also follow their own course_: quite a different course probably, and with lines and refinements, and sculptures, which might perhaps give pleasure to a God with a divine microscope.
The Joyful Wisdom (La Gaya Scienza), passage 514
Let us now be on our guard against believing that the universe is a machine; it is assuredly not constructed with a view to _one_ end; we invest it with far too high an honour with the word "machine." Let us be on our guard against supposing that anything so methodical as the cyclic motions of our neighbouring stars obtains generally and throughout the universe; indeed a glance at the Milky Way induces doubt as to whether there are not many cruder and more contradictory motions there, and even stars with continuous, rectilinearly gravitating orbits, and the like.
The Joyful Wisdom (La Gaya Scienza), passage 1272
_Epilogue._—But while I slowly, slowly finish the painting of this sombre interrogation-mark, and am still inclined to remind my readers of the virtues of right reading—oh, what forgotten and unknown virtues—it comes to pass that the wickedest, merriest, gnome-like laughter resounds around me: the spirits of my book themselves pounce upon me, pull me by the ears, and call me to order. "We cannot endure it any longer," they shout to me, "away, away with this raven-black music.
The Joyful Wisdom (La Gaya Scienza), passage 749
Thou who with cleaving fiery lances The stream of my soul from its ice dost free, Till with a rush and a roar it advances To enter with glorious hoping the sea: Brighter to see and purer ever, Free in the bonds of thy sweet constraint,— So it praises thy wondrous endeavour, January, thou beauteous saint!
The Joyful Wisdom (La Gaya Scienza), passage 856
_The History of each Day._—What is it that constitutes the history of each day for thee? Look at thy habits of which it consists: are they the product of numberless little acts of cowardice and laziness, or of thy bravery and inventive reason? Although the two cases are so different, it is possible that men might bestow the same praise upon thee, and that thou mightst also be equally useful to them in the one case as in the other. But praise and utility and respectability may suffice for him whose only desire is to have a good conscience,—not however for thee, the "trier of the reins," who hast a _consciousness of the conscience_!
The Joyful Wisdom (La Gaya Scienza), passage 1286
I swing on a bough, and rest My tired limbs in a nest, In the rocking home of a bird, Wherein I perch as his guest, In the South!
The Joyful Wisdom (La Gaya Scienza), passage 619
In polytheism man's free-thinking and many-sided thinking had a prototype set up: the power to create for himself new and individual eyes, always newer and more individualised: so that it is for man alone, of all the animals, that there are no _eternal_ horizons and perspectives.
The Joyful Wisdom (La Gaya Scienza), passage 934
_Future "Humanity."_—When I look at this age with the eye of a distant future, I find nothing so remarkable in the man of the present day as his peculiar virtue and sickness called "the historical sense." It is a tendency to something quite new and foreign in history: if this embryo were given several centuries and more, there might finally evolve out of it a marvellous plant, with a smell equally marvellous, on account of which our old earth might be more pleasant to live in than it has been hitherto.
The Joyful Wisdom (La Gaya Scienza), passage 353
It is really here only that all the "honour" of woman is at stake; what would one not forgive them in other respects! But here they are intended to remain ignorant to the very backbone:—they are intended to have neither eyes, ears, words, nor thoughts for this, their "wickedness"; indeed knowledge here is already evil. And then!
The Joyful Wisdom (La Gaya Scienza), passage 404
It was intended that a human entreaty should be more profoundly impressed upon the Gods by virtue of rhythm, after it had been observed that men could remember a verse better than an unmetrical speech. It was likewise thought that people could make themselves audible at greater distances by the rhythmical beat; the rhythmical prayer seemed to come nearer to the ear of the Gods.
The Joyful Wisdom (La Gaya Scienza), passage 1154
In this absence of conditions her love is precisely a _faith_: woman has no other.—Man, when he loves a woman, _wants_ precisely this love from her; he is consequently, as regards himself, furthest removed from the prerequisites of feminine love; granted, however, that there should also be men to whom on their side the demand for complete devotion is not unfamiliar,—well, they are really—not men.
The Joyful Wisdom (La Gaya Scienza), passage 1218
Besides, their courage, and similarly their outlook, does not reach so far,—and above all, their need, which makes them investigators, their innate anticipation and desire that things should be constituted _in such and such a way_, their fears and hopes are too soon quieted and set at rest.
The Joyful Wisdom (La Gaya Scienza), passage 1200
In this manner I gradually began to understand Epicurus, the opposite of a Dionysian pessimist;—in a similar manner also the "Christian," who in fact is only a type of Epicurean, and like him essentially a romanticist:—and my vision has always become keener in tracing that most difficult and insidious of all forms of _retrospective inference_, which most mistakes have been made—the inference from the work to its author, from the deed to its doer, from the ideal to him who _needs_ it, from every mode of thinking and valuing to the imperative _want_ behind it.—In regard to all æsthetic values I now avail myself of this radical distinction: I ask in every single case, "Has hunger or superfluity become creative here?" At the outset another distinction might seem to recommend itself more—it is far more conspicuous,—namely, to have in view whether the desire for rigidity, for perpetuation, for _being_ is the cause of the creating, or the desire for destruction, for change, for the new, for the future—for _becoming_.
The Joyful Wisdom (La Gaya Scienza), passage 1303
Here I lie, my bowels sore, Hosts of bugs advancing, Yonder lights and romp and roar! What's that sound? They're dancing!
The Joyful Wisdom (La Gaya Scienza), passage 724
_On the Sea-Shore._—I would not build myself a house (it is an element of my happiness not to be a house-owner!). If I had to do so, however, I should build it, like many of the Romans, right into the sea,—I should like to have some secrets in common with that beautiful monster.
The Joyful Wisdom (La Gaya Scienza), passage 961
The eternal sand-glass of existence will ever be turned once more, and thou with it, thou speck of dust!"—Wouldst thou not throw thyself down and gnash thy teeth, and curse the demon that so spake?
The Joyful Wisdom (La Gaya Scienza), passage 659
_To be Profound and to Appear Profound._—He who knows that he is profound strives for clearness; he who would like to appear profound to the multitude strives for obscurity. The multitude thinks everything profound of which it cannot see the bottom; it is so timid and goes so unwillingly into the water.
The Joyful Wisdom (La Gaya Scienza), passage 607
As in accordance with this privilege they raised themselves to the elevation of the court, and from that elevation saw everything under them,—saw everything contemptible,—they got beyond all uneasiness of conscience. They thus elevated intentionally the tower of the royal power more and more into the clouds, and set the final coping-stone of their own power thereon.
The Joyful Wisdom (La Gaya Scienza), passage 647
_To the Admirers of the Age._—The runaway priest and the liberated criminal are continually making grimaces; what they want is a look without a past.—But have you ever seen men who know that their looks reflect the future, and who are so courteous to you, the admirers of the "age," that they assume a look without a future.
The Joyful Wisdom (La Gaya Scienza), passage 923
But _that_ you hear this or that judgment as the voice of conscience, consequently, _that_ you feel a thing to be right—may have its cause in the fact that you have never reflected about yourself, and have blindly accepted from your childhood what has been designated to you as _right_: or in the fact that hitherto bread and honours have fallen to your share with that which you call your duty,—it is "right" to you, because it seems to be _your_ "condition of existence" (that you, however, have a _right_ to existence appears to you as irrefutable!).
The Joyful Wisdom (La Gaya Scienza), passage 734
_Better to be in Debt._—"Better to remain in debt than to pay with money which does not bear our stamp!"—that is what our sovereignty prefers.
The Joyful Wisdom (La Gaya Scienza), passage 137
But in reality the evil impulses are just in as high a degree expedient, indispensable, and conservative of the species as the good:—only, their function is different.
The Joyful Wisdom (La Gaya Scienza), passage 17
And as the traveller knows that something _does not_ sleep, that something counts the hours and will awake him, we also know that the critical moment will find us awake—that then something will spring forward and surprise the spirit _in the very act_, I mean in weakness, or reversion, or submission, or obduracy, or obscurity, or whatever the morbid conditions are called, which in times of good health have the _pride_ of the spirit opposed to them (for it is as in the old rhyme: "The spirit proud, peacock and horse are the three proudest things of earthly source").
The Joyful Wisdom (La Gaya Scienza), passage 1328
Here sat I waiting, waiting, but for naught! Beyond all good and evil—now by light wrought
The Joyful Wisdom (La Gaya Scienza), passage 100
_The Teachers of the Object of Existence._—Whether I look with a good or an evil eye upon men, I find them always at one problem, each and all of them: to do that which conduces to the conservation of the human species. And certainly not out of any sentiment of love for this species, but simply because nothing in them is older, stronger, more inexorable, and more unconquerable than that instinct,—because it is precisely _the essence_ of our race and herd.
The Joyful Wisdom (La Gaya Scienza), passage 1316
But when the finished work I scan, I'm glad to see each learned owl With "wisdom" board and wall defoul.
The Joyful Wisdom (La Gaya Scienza), passage 768
I know not how we could content ourselves with their structures, even if they should be divested of their ecclesiastical purposes: these structures speak a far too pathetic and too biassed speech, as houses of God and places of splendour for supernatural intercourse, for us godless ones to be able to think _our thoughts_ in them. We want to have _ourselves_ translated into stone and plant, we want to go for a walk in _ourselves_ when we wander in these halls and gardens.
The Joyful Wisdom (La Gaya Scienza), passage 320
If these distress-seekers felt the power to benefit themselves, to do something for themselves from internal sources, they would also understand how to create a distress of their own, specially their own, from internal sources. Their inventions might then be more refined, and their gratifications might sound like good music: while at present they fill the world with their cries of distress, and consequently too often with the _feeling of distress_ in the first place!
The Joyful Wisdom (La Gaya Scienza), passage 916
_Cheers for Physics!_—How many men are there who know how to observe? And among the few who do know,—how many observe themselves? "Everyone is furthest from himself"—all the "triers of the reins" know that to their discomfort; and the saying, "Know thyself," in the mouth of a God and spoken to man, is almost a mockery.