The Joyful Wisdom (La Gaya Scienza), passage 823

To withdraw from things until one no longer sees much of them, until one has even to see things into them, _in order to see them at all_—or to view them from the side, and as in a frame—or to place them so that they partly disguise themselves and only permit of perspective views—or to look at them through coloured glasses, or in the light of the sunset—or to furnish them with a surface or skin which is not fully transparent: we should learn all that from artists, and moreover be wiser than they.

The Joyful Wisdom (La Gaya Scienza), passage 484

_German Music._—German music, more than any other, has now become European music; because the changes which Europe experienced through the Revolution have therein alone found expression: it is only German music that knows how to express the agitation of popular masses, the tremendous artificial uproar, which does not even need to be very noisy,—while Italian opera, for example, knows only the choruses of domestics or soldiers, but not "the people." There is the additional fact that in all German music a profound _bourgeois_ jealousy of the _noblesse_ can be traced, especially a jealousy of _esprit_ and _élégance_, as the expressions of a courtly, chivalrous, ancient, and self-confident society.

The Joyful Wisdom (La Gaya Scienza), passage 431

Just the same opinions, and modes of demonstration and testing which a thinker regards as a frivolity in himself, to which he has succumbed with shame at one time or other,—just the same opinions may give to an artist, who comes in contact with them and accepts them temporarily, the consciousness that the profoundest earnestness for the truth has now taken hold of him, and that it is worthy of admiration that, although an artist, he at the same time exhibits the most ardent desire for the antithesis of the apparent.

The Joyful Wisdom (La Gaya Scienza), passage 135

The new, however, is under all circumstances the _evil_, as that which wants to conquer, which tries to upset the old boundary-stones and the old piety; only the old is the good! The good men of every age are those who go to the roots of the old thoughts and bear fruit with them, the agriculturists of the spirit.

The Joyful Wisdom (La Gaya Scienza), passage 771

_Pioneers._—I greet all the signs indicating that a more manly and warlike age is commencing, which will, above all, bring heroism again into honour! For it has to prepare the way for a yet higher age, and gather the force which the latter will one day require,—the age which will carry heroism into knowledge, and _wage war_ for the sake of ideas and their consequences.

The Joyful Wisdom (La Gaya Scienza), passage 656

_With the Multitude._—He has hitherto gone with the multitude and is its panegyrist; but one day he will be its opponent! For he follows it in the belief that his laziness will find its advantage thereby; he has not yet learned that the multitude is not lazy enough for him! that it always presses forward! that it does not allow any one to stand still!—And he likes so well to stand still!

The Joyful Wisdom (La Gaya Scienza), passage 263

_Heresy and Witchcraft._—To think otherwise than is customary—that is by no means so much the activity of a better intellect, as the activity of strong, wicked inclinations,—severing, isolating, refractory, mischief-loving, malicious inclinations. Heresy is the counterpart of witchcraft, and is certainly just as little a merely harmless affair, or a thing worthy of honour in itself. Heretics and sorcerers are two kinds of bad men; they have it in common that they also feel themselves wicked; their unconquerable delight is to attack and injure whatever rules,—whether it be men or opinions. The Reformation, a kind of duplication of the spirit of the Middle Ages at a time when it had no longer a good conscience, produced both of these kinds of people in the greatest profusion.

The Joyful Wisdom (La Gaya Scienza), passage 790

He who is dissatisfied with himself is ever ready to avenge himself on that account: we others will be his victims, if only in having always to endure his ugly aspect. For the aspect of the ugly makes one mean and sad.

The Joyful Wisdom (La Gaya Scienza), passage 115

yes, I am worthy to live!"—life, and thou, and I, and all of us together became for a while _interesting_ to ourselves once more.—It is not to be denied that hitherto laughter and reason and nature have _in the long run_ got the upper hand of all the great teachers of design: in the end the short tragedy always passed over once more into the eternal comedy of existence; and the "waves of innumerable laughters"—to use the expression of Æschylus—must also in the end beat over the greatest of these tragedies.

The Joyful Wisdom (La Gaya Scienza), passage 803

He, however, who is accustomed to it, does not like to live anywhere but in this clear, transparent, powerful, and highly electrified atmosphere, this _manly_ atmosphere.

The Joyful Wisdom (La Gaya Scienza), passage 497

For habituation to definite tones extends deeply into the character:—people soon have the words and modes of expression, and finally also the thoughts which just suit these tones! Perhaps they already write in the officers' style; perhaps I only read too little of what is at present written in Germany to know this. But one thing I know all the surer: the German public declarations which also reach places abroad, are not inspired by German music, but just by that new tone of tasteless arrogance.

The Joyful Wisdom (La Gaya Scienza), passage 1247

The hidden _Yea_ in you is stronger than all the Nays and Perhapses, of which you and your age are sick; and when you are obliged to put out to sea, you emigrants, it is—once more a _faith_ which urges you thereto!...

The Joyful Wisdom (La Gaya Scienza), passage 973

Even we, the born riddle-readers, who wait as it were on the mountains posted 'twixt to-day and to-morrow, and engirt by their contradiction, we, the firstlings and premature children of the coming century, into whose sight especially the shadows which must forthwith envelop Europe _should_ already have come—how is it that even we, without genuine sympathy for this period of gloom, contemplate its advent without any _personal_ solicitude or fear?

The Joyful Wisdom (La Gaya Scienza), passage 526

The subtler development of sincerity and of scepticism finally made these men impossible; their life also and their judgments turned out to be dependent on the primeval impulses and fundamental errors of all sentient being.—The subtler sincerity and scepticism arose whenever two antithetical maxims appeared to be _applicable_ to life, because both of them were compatible with the fundamental errors; where, therefore, there could be contention concerning a higher or lower degree of _utility_ for life; and likewise where new maxims proved to be, not in fact useful, but at least not injurious, as expressions of an intellectual impulse to play a game that was, like all games, innocent and happy.

The Joyful Wisdom (La Gaya Scienza), passage 886

On the contrary, from year to year I find it richer, more desirable and more mysterious—from the day on which the great liberator broke my fetters, the thought that life may be an experiment of the thinker—and not a duty, not a fatality, not a deceit!—And knowledge itself may be for others something different; for example, a bed of ease, or the path to a bed of ease, or an entertainment, or a course of idling,—for me it is a world of dangers and victories, in which even the heroic sentiments have their arena and dancing-floor.

The Joyful Wisdom (La Gaya Scienza), passage 50

Oft mid rocks and thorns you'll linger, Hide and stoop, suck bleeding finger— Will you stop and pluck my roses?

The Joyful Wisdom (La Gaya Scienza), passage 690

_During the Rain._—It rains, and I think of the poor people who now crowd together with their many cares, which they are unaccustomed to conceal; all of them, therefore, ready and anxious to give pain to one another, and thus provide themselves with a pitiable kind of comfort, even in bad weather. This, this only, is the poverty of the poor!

The Joyful Wisdom (La Gaya Scienza), passage 1196

But there are two kinds of sufferers: on the one hand those that suffer from _overflowing vitality_, who need Dionysian art, and require a tragic view and insight into life; and on the other hand those who suffer from _reduced vitality_, who seek repose, quietness, calm seas, and deliverance from themselves through art or knowledge, or else intoxication, spasm, bewilderment and madness.

The Joyful Wisdom (La Gaya Scienza), passage 1171

Every handicraft, granting even that it has a golden floor,[13] has also a leaden ceiling above it, which presses and presses on the soul, till it is pressed into a strange and distorted shape. There is nothing to alter here. We need not think that it is at all possible to obviate this disfigurement by any educational artifice whatever.

The Joyful Wisdom (La Gaya Scienza), passage 98

Yes, I know where I'm related, Like the flame, unquenched, unsated, I consume myself and glow: All's turned to light I lay my hand on, All to coal that I abandon, Yes, I am a flame, I know!

The Joyful Wisdom (La Gaya Scienza), passage 200

_Dignity of Folly._—Several millenniums further on in the path of the last century!—and in everything that man does the highest prudence will be exhibited: but just thereby prudence will have lost all its dignity. It will then, sure enough, be necessary to be prudent, but it will also be so usual and common, that a more fastidious taste will feel this necessity as _vulgarity_. And just as a tyranny of truth and science would be in a position to raise the value of falsehood, a tyranny of prudence could force into prominence a new species of nobleness. To be noble—that might then mean, perhaps, to be capable of follies.

The Joyful Wisdom (La Gaya Scienza), passage 347

"It is men," he called out, "who corrupt women; and everything that women lack should be atoned for and improved in men,—for man creates for himself the ideal of woman, and woman moulds herself according to this ideal."—"You are too tender-hearted towards women," said one of the bystanders, "you do not know them!" The wise man answered: "Man's attribute is will, woman's attribute is willingness,—such is the law of the sexes, verily! a hard law for woman!

The Joyful Wisdom (La Gaya Scienza), passage 1160

_The Anchorite Speaks._—The art of associating with men rests essentially on one's skilfulness (which presupposes long exercise) in accepting a repast, in taking a repast in the cuisine of which one has no confidence. Provided one comes to the table with the hunger of a wolf everything is easy ("the worst society gives thee _experience_"—as Mephistopheles says); but one has not got this wolf's-hunger when one needs it! Alas! how difficult are our fellow-men to digest!

The Joyful Wisdom (La Gaya Scienza), passage 635

_The greatest Change._—The lustre and the hues of all things have changed! We no longer quite understand how earlier men conceived of the most familiar and frequent things,—for example, of the day, and the awakening in the morning: owing to their belief in dreams the waking state seemed to them differently illuminated. And similarly of the whole of life, with its reflection of death and its significance: our "death" is an entirely different death.

The Joyful Wisdom (La Gaya Scienza), passage 1322

Once more, St Mark, thy pigeons meet my gaze, The Square lies still, in slumbering morning mood: In soft, cool air I fashion idle lays, Speeding them skyward like a pigeon's brood: And then recall my minions To tie fresh rhymes upon their willing pinions. My bliss! My bliss!

The Joyful Wisdom (La Gaya Scienza), passage 210

(The busiest of all ages—our age—does not know how to make anything out of its great diligence and wealth, except always more and more wealth, and more and more diligence; there is even more genius needed for laying out wealth than for acquiring it!—Well, we shall have our "grandchildren"!) If the education succeeds, every virtue of the individual is a public utility, and a private disadvantage in respect to the highest private end,—probably some psycho-æsthetic stunting, or even premature dissolution.

The Joyful Wisdom (La Gaya Scienza), passage 1030

It should be taken as symptomatic when individual philosophers, as for example, the consumptive Spinoza, have seen and have been obliged to see the principal feature of life precisely in the so-called self-preservative instinct:—they have just been men in states of distress.

The Joyful Wisdom (La Gaya Scienza), passage 1230

And perhaps worship _the_ unknown thing as _the_ "unknown person" in future? Ah! there are too many _ungodly_ possibilities of interpretation comprised in this unknown, too much devilment, stupidity and folly of interpretation.—also our own human, all too human interpretation itself, which we know....

The Joyful Wisdom (La Gaya Scienza), passage 456

Perhaps he also had his dark hour and his bad angel, just as Brutus had them!—But whatever similarities and secret relationships of that kind there may have been, Shakespeare cast himself on the ground and felt unworthy and alien in presence of the aspect and virtue of Brutus:—he has inscribed the testimony thereof in the tragedy itself.

The Joyful Wisdom (La Gaya Scienza), passage 1252

The age loves intellect, it loves us, and needs us, even when we have to give it to understand that we are artists in despising; that all intercourse with men is something of a horror to us; that with all our gentleness, patience, humanity and courteousness, we cannot persuade our nose to abandon its prejudice against the proximity of man; that we love nature the more, the less humanly things are done by her, and that we love art _when_ it is the flight of the artist from man, or the raillery of the artist at man, or the raillery of the artist at himself....

The Joyful Wisdom (La Gaya Scienza), passage 61

I must ascend an hundred stairs, I must ascend: the herd declares I'm cruel: "Are we made of stone?" I must ascend an hundred stairs: All men the part of stair disown.

The Joyful Wisdom (La Gaya Scienza), passage 543

_The Extent of the Moral._—We construct a new picture, which we see immediately with the aid of all the old experiences which we have had, _always according to the degree_ of our honesty and justice. The only events are moral events, even in the domain of sense-perception.

The Joyful Wisdom (La Gaya Scienza), passage 300

It is thus, however, that it seems to be with most people at present. Owing to the universal inexperience of both kinds of pain, and the comparative rarity of the spectacle of a sufferer, an important consequence results: people now hate pain far more than earlier man did, and calumniate it worse than ever; indeed people nowadays can hardly endure the _thought_ of pain, and make out of it an affair of conscience and a reproach to collective existence.

The Joyful Wisdom (La Gaya Scienza), passage 604

The _Greeks_, on the other hand, were more familiar with the thought that transgression also may have dignity,—even theft, as in the case of Prometheus, even the slaughtering of cattle as the expression of frantic jealousy, as in the case of Ajax; in their need to attribute dignity to transgression and embody it therein, they invented _tragedy_,—an art and a delight, which in its profoundest essence has remained alien to the Jew, in spite of all his poetic endowment and taste for the sublime.

The Joyful Wisdom (La Gaya Scienza), passage 709

_The Natural._—"Evil has always had the great effect! And Nature is evil! Let us therefore be natural!"—so reason secretly the great aspirants after effect, who are too often counted among great men.

The Joyful Wisdom (La Gaya Scienza), passage 754

The life of every day and of every hour seems to be anxious for nothing else but always to prove this proposition anew; let it be what it will, bad or good weather, the loss of a friend, a sickness, a calumny, the non-receipt of a letter, the spraining of one's foot, a glance into a shop-window, a counter-argument, the opening of a book, a dream, a deception:—it shows itself immediately, or very soon afterwards as something "not permitted to be absent,"—it is full of profound significance and utility precisely _for us_!

The Joyful Wisdom (La Gaya Scienza), passage 453

No sacrifice can be too great there: one must be able to sacrifice to it even one's dearest friend, though he be also the grandest of men, the ornament of the world, the genius without peer,—if one really loves freedom as the freedom of great souls, and if _this_ freedom be threatened by him:—it is thus that Shakespeare must have felt!

The Joyful Wisdom (La Gaya Scienza), passage 249

Indeed, the case may happen in which, taken on the whole, they only do injury, because their best is accepted and drunk up as it were solely by those who lose their understanding and their egoism by it, as by too strong a beverage; they become so intoxicated that they go breaking their limbs on all the wrong roads where their drunkenness drives them.

The Joyful Wisdom (La Gaya Scienza), passage 802

It is especially terrifying to him that the hardest is here demanded, that the best is done without the reward of praise or distinction; it is rather as among soldiers—almost nothing but blame and sharp reprimand _is heard_; for doing well prevails here as the rule, doing ill as the exception; the rule, however, has, here as everywhere, a silent tongue. It is the same with this "severity of science" as with the manners and politeness of the best society: it frightens the uninitiated.

The Joyful Wisdom (La Gaya Scienza), passage 648

_Egoism._—Egoism is the _perspective_ law of our sentiment, according to which the near appears large and momentous, while in the distance the magnitude and importance of all things diminish.

The Joyful Wisdom (La Gaya Scienza), passage 446

Is it because the latter had really too much of the German and the Englishman in his nature for the Parisians to endure him?—while Chamfort, a man with ample knowledge of the profundities and secret motives of the soul, gloomy, suffering, ardent—a thinker who found laughter necessary as the remedy of life, and who almost gave himself up as lost every day that he had not laughed,—seems much more like an Italian, and related by blood to Dante and Leopardi, than like a Frenchman.

The Joyful Wisdom (La Gaya Scienza), passage 386

but he certainly did not hit the nail, to say nothing of the head of the nail, when he spoke about the final aim of Greek tragedy! Let us but look at the Grecian tragic poets with respect to _what_ most excited their diligence, their inventiveness, and their emulation,—certainly it was not the intention of subjugating the spectators by emotion! The Athenian went to the theatre _to hear fine talking_!

The Joyful Wisdom (La Gaya Scienza), passage 602

If injury be caused otherwise by sin, if a profound, spreading evil be propagated by it, an evil which, like a disease, attacks and strangles one man after another—that does not trouble this honour-craving Oriental in heaven; sin is an offence against him, not against mankind!—to him on whom he has bestowed his favour he bestows also this indifference to the natural consequences of sin.

The Joyful Wisdom (La Gaya Scienza), passage 1282

What doth me to these woods entice? The chance to give some thief a trouncing? A saw, an image? Ha, in a trice My rhyme is on it, swiftly pouncing! All things that creep or crawl the poet Weaves in his word-loom cunningly. "Yes, yes, good sir, you are a poet," Chirped out the pecker, mocking me.

The Joyful Wisdom (La Gaya Scienza), passage 33

Oh, how repugnant to us now is pleasure, coarse, dull, drab pleasure, as the pleasure-seekers, our "cultured" classes, our rich and ruling classes, usually understand it! How malignantly we now listen to the great holiday-hubbub with which "cultured people" and city-men at present allow themselves to be forced to "spiritual enjoyment" by art, books, and music, with the help of spirituous liquors!

The Joyful Wisdom (La Gaya Scienza), passage 966

I would fain bestow and distribute, until the wise have once more become joyous in their folly, and the poor happy in their riches. Therefore must I descend into the deep, as thou doest in the evening, when thou goest behind the sea and givest light also to the nether-world, thou most rich star! Like thee must I _go down_, as men say, to whom I shall descend. Bless me then, thou tranquil eye, that canst behold even the greatest happiness without envy!

The Joyful Wisdom (La Gaya Scienza), passage 1227

_Our new "Infinite."_—How far the perspective character of existence extends, or whether it have any other character at all, whether an existence without explanation, without "sense" does not just become "nonsense," whether, on the other hand, all existence is not essentially an _explaining_ existence—these questions, as is right and proper, cannot be determined even by the most diligent and severely conscientious analysis and self-examination of the intellect, because in this analysis the human intellect cannot avoid seeing itself in its perspective forms, and _only_ in them.

The Joyful Wisdom (La Gaya Scienza), passage 746

_With a high Aim._—With a high aim a person is superior even to justice, and not only to his deeds and his judges.

The Joyful Wisdom (La Gaya Scienza), passage 46

Stay not on level plain, Climb not the mount too high, But half-way up remain— The world you'll best descry!

The Joyful Wisdom (La Gaya Scienza), passage 881

But we who are different, who are thirsty for reason, want to look as carefully into our experiences, as in the case of a scientific experiment, hour by hour, day by day! We ourselves want to be our own experiments, and our own subjects of experiment.