The Joyful Wisdom (La Gaya Scienza)
Friedrich Nietzsche
1,346 passages indexed from The Joyful Wisdom (La Gaya Scienza) (Friedrich Nietzsche) — Page 7 of 27
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The Joyful Wisdom (La Gaya Scienza), passage 641
_What we Lack._—We love the _grandeur_ of Nature and have discovered it; that is because human grandeur is lacking in our minds. It was the reverse with the Greeks: their feeling towards Nature was quite different from ours.
The Joyful Wisdom (La Gaya Scienza), passage 1112
Or would it be proper to count such dilettanti and old maids as the mawkish apostle of virginity, Mainländer, among the genuine Germans? After all he was probably a Jew (all Jews become mawkish when they moralise).
The Joyful Wisdom (La Gaya Scienza), passage 53
Harsh and gentle, fine and mean, Quite rare and common, dirty and clean, The fools' and the sages' go-between: All this I will be, this have been, Dove and serpent and swine, I ween!
The Joyful Wisdom (La Gaya Scienza), passage 295
Perhaps our own time furnishes the most remarkable counterpart to this period: I see everywhere (in life, in the theatre, and not least in all that is written) satisfaction at all the _coarser_ outbursts and gestures of passion; a certain convention of passionateness is now desired,—only not the passion itself! Nevertheless _it_ will thereby be at last reached, and our posterity will have a _genuine savagery_, and not merely a formal savagery and unmannerliness.
The Joyful Wisdom (La Gaya Scienza), passage 963
Or, how wouldst thou have to become favourably inclined to thyself and to life, so as _to long for nothing more ardently_ than for this last eternal sanctioning and sealing?—
The Joyful Wisdom (La Gaya Scienza), passage 695
_Secret Enemies._—To be able to keep a secret enemy—that is a luxury which the morality even of the highest-minded persons can rarely afford.
The Joyful Wisdom (La Gaya Scienza), passage 675
_The Thinker._—He is a thinker: that is to say, he knows how to take things more simply than they are.
The Joyful Wisdom (La Gaya Scienza), passage 132
Thus it is that they also speak of the folly, inexpediency and fantasy of mankind, full of astonishment at the madness of the world, and that it will not recognise the "one thing needful for it."—This is the eternal unrighteousness of noble natures.
The Joyful Wisdom (La Gaya Scienza), passage 742
_Sub specie aeterni._—A: "You withdraw faster and faster from the living; they will soon strike you out of their lists!"—B: "It is the only way to participate in the privilege of the dead." A: "In what privilege?"—B: "No longer having to die."
The Joyful Wisdom (La Gaya Scienza), passage 1082
But there are ages entirely the reverse, the properly democratic ages, in which people tend to become more and more oblivious of this conviction, and a sort of impudent conviction and quite contrary mode of viewing things comes to the front, the Athenian conviction which is first observed in the epoch of Pericles, the American conviction of the present day, which wants also more and more to become an European conviction, whereby the individual is convinced that he can do almost anything, that he _can play almost any rôle_, whereby everyone makes experiments with himself, improvises, tries anew, tries with delight, whereby all nature ceases and becomes art....
The Joyful Wisdom (La Gaya Scienza), passage 120
I mean to say that _the greater number of people_ do not find it contemptible to believe this or that, and live according to it, _without_ having been previously aware of the ultimate and surest reasons for and against it, and without even giving themselves any trouble about such reasons afterwards,—the most gifted men and the noblest women still belong to this "greater number." But what is kind-heartedness, refinement and genius to me, if the man with these virtues harbours indolent sentiments in belief and judgment, if _the longing for certainty_ does not rule in him, as his innermost desire and profoundest need—as that which separates higher from lower men!
The Joyful Wisdom (La Gaya Scienza), passage 259
Already even politics ceases to be the business of a gentleman; and it is possible that one day it may be found to be so vulgar as to be brought, like all party literature and daily literature, under the rubric: "Prostitution of the intellect."
The Joyful Wisdom (La Gaya Scienza), passage 112
In order that that which necessarily and always happens of itself and without design, may henceforth appear to be done by design, and may appeal to men as reason and ultimate command,—for that purpose the ethiculturist comes forward as the teacher of design in existence; for that purpose he devises a second and different existence, and by means of this new mechanism he lifts the old common existence off its old common hinges. No!
The Joyful Wisdom (La Gaya Scienza), passage 93
Wide blow your nostrils, and across The land your nose holds haughty sway: So you, unhorned rhinoceros, Proud mannikin, fall forward aye! The one trait with the other goes: A straight pride and a crooked nose.
The Joyful Wisdom (La Gaya Scienza), passage 425
_The Conceit of Artists._—I think artists often do not know what they can do best, because they are too conceited, and have set their minds on something loftier than those little plants appear to be, which can grow up to perfection on their soil, fresh, rare, and beautiful. The final value of their own garden and vineyard is superciliously underestimated by them, and their love and their insight are not of the same quality.
The Joyful Wisdom (La Gaya Scienza), passage 939
_The Will to Suffering and the Compassionate._—Is it to your advantage to be above all compassionate? And is it to the advantage of the sufferers when you are so? But let us leave the first question for a moment without an answer.—That from which we suffer most profoundly and personally is almost incomprehensible and inaccessible to every one else: in this matter we are hidden from our neighbour even when he eats at the same table with us.
The Joyful Wisdom (La Gaya Scienza), passage 921
Your decision, "this is right," has a previous history in your impulses, your likes and dislikes, your experiences and non-experiences; "_how_ has it originated?" you must ask, and afterwards the further question: "_what_ really impels me to give ear to it?" You can listen to its command like a brave soldier who hears the command of his officer. Or like a woman who loves him who commands. Or like a flatterer and coward, afraid of the commander.
The Joyful Wisdom (La Gaya Scienza), passage 1219
For example, that which makes the pedantic Englishman, Herbert Spencer, so enthusiastic in his way, and impels him to draw a line of hope, a horizon of desirability, the final reconciliation of "egoism and altruism" of which he dreams,—that almost causes nausea to people like us:—a humanity with such Spencerian perspectives as ultimate perspectives would seem to us deserving of contempt, of extermination!
The Joyful Wisdom (La Gaya Scienza), passage 1049
_Morality dresses up the European_—let us acknowledge it!—in more distinguished, more important, more conspicuous guise—in "divine" guise—
The Joyful Wisdom (La Gaya Scienza), passage 146
_Something for the Laborious._—He who at present wants to make moral questions a subject of study has an immense field of labour before him. All kinds of passions must be thought about singly, and followed singly throughout periods, peoples, great and insignificant individuals; all their rationality, all their valuations and elucidations of things, ought to come to light!
The Joyful Wisdom (La Gaya Scienza), passage 92
If to choose my niche precise Freedom I could win from fate, I'd be in midst of Paradise— Or, sooner still—before the gate!
The Joyful Wisdom (La Gaya Scienza), passage 1134
Yea, virtue _itself_!—And asking the question among ourselves, even the philosopher's pretension to wisdom, which has occasionally been made here and there on the earth, the maddest and most immodest of all pretensions,—has it not always been, in India as well as in Greece, _above all a means of concealment_?
The Joyful Wisdom (La Gaya Scienza), passage 751
I want more and more to perceive the necessary characters in things as the beautiful:—I shall thus be one of those who beautify things. _Amor fati_: let that henceforth be my love! I do not want to wage war with the ugly. I do not want to accuse, I do not want even to accuse the accusers. _Looking aside_, let that be my sole negation! And all in all, to sum up: I wish to be at any time hereafter only a yea-sayer!
The Joyful Wisdom (La Gaya Scienza), passage 1178
_How one has to Distinguish first of all in Works of Art._—Everything that is thought, versified, painted and composed, yea, even built and moulded, belongs either to monologic art, or to art before witnesses. Under the latter there is also to be included the apparently monologic art which involves the belief in God, the whole lyric of prayer; because for a pious man there is no solitude,—we, the godless, have been the first to devise this invention. I know of no profounder distinction in all the perspective of the artist than this: Whether he looks at his growing work of art (at "himself—") with the eye of the witness; or whether he "has forgotten the world," as is the essential thing in all monologic art,——it rests _on forgetting_, it is the music of forgetting.
The Joyful Wisdom (La Gaya Scienza), passage 34
How the theatrical cry of passion now pains our ear, how strange to our taste has all the romantic riot and sensuous bustle which the cultured populace love become (together with their aspirations after the exalted, the elevated, and the intricate)! No, if we convalescents need an art at all, it is _another_ art—a mocking, light, volatile, divinely serene, divinely ingenious art, which blazes up like a clear flame, into a cloudless heaven! Above all, an art for artists, only for artists!
The Joyful Wisdom (La Gaya Scienza), passage 689
_Need._—Need is supposed to be the cause of things; but in truth it is often only the effect of the things themselves.
The Joyful Wisdom (La Gaya Scienza), passage 1012
For such is man: a theological dogma might be refuted to him a thousand times,—provided, however, that he had need of it, he would again and again accept it as "true,"—according to the famous "proof of power" of which the Bible speaks.
The Joyful Wisdom (La Gaya Scienza), passage 988
But what I have in view will now be understood, namely, that it is always a _metaphysical belief_ on which our belief in science rests,—and that even we knowing ones of to-day, the godless and anti-metaphysical, still take _our_ fire from the conflagration kindled by a belief a millennium old, the Christian belief, which was also the belief of Plato, that God is truth, that the truth is divine....
The Joyful Wisdom (La Gaya Scienza), passage 726
_Suum cuique._—However great be my greed of knowledge, I cannot appropriate aught of things but what already belongs to me,—the property of others still remains in the things. How is it possible for a man to be a thief or a robber!
The Joyful Wisdom (La Gaya Scienza), passage 794
The whole district is overgrown with this superb, insatiable egoism of the desire to possess and exploit; and as these men when abroad recognised no frontiers, and in their thirst for the new placed a new world beside the old, so also at home everyone rose up against everyone else, and devised some mode of expressing his superiority, and of placing between himself and his neighbour his personal illimitableness.
The Joyful Wisdom (La Gaya Scienza), passage 1099
The event _after_ which this problem was to be expected with certainty, so that an astronomer of the soul could have calculated the day and the hour for it—namely, the decay of the belief in the Christian God, the victory of scientific atheism,—is a universal European event, in which all races are to have their share of service and honour.
The Joyful Wisdom (La Gaya Scienza), passage 480
_Voltaire._—Wherever there has been a court, it has furnished the standard of good-speaking, and with this also the standard of style for writers.
The Joyful Wisdom (La Gaya Scienza), passage 1040
And to whom should the people ever have more reason to be grateful than to these men who pertain to its class and rise from its ranks, but are persons consecrated, chosen, and _sacrificed_ for its good—they themselves believe themselves sacrificed to God,—before whom the people can pour forth its heart with impunity, by whom it can _get rid_ of its secrets, cares, and worse things (for the man who "communicates himself" gets rid of himself, and he who has "confessed" forgets).
The Joyful Wisdom (La Gaya Scienza), passage 907
_Better Deaf than Deafened._—Formerly a person wanted to have a _calling_, but that no longer suffices to-day, for the market has become too large,—there has now to be _bawling_. The consequence is that even good throats outcry each other, and the best wares are offered for sale with hoarse voices; without market-place bawling and hoarseness there is now no longer any genius.—It is, sure enough, an evil age for the thinker: he has to learn to find his stillness betwixt two noises, and has to pretend to be deaf until he finally becomes so. As long as he has not learned this, he is in danger of perishing from impatience and headaches.
The Joyful Wisdom (La Gaya Scienza), passage 1118
In any case the structure of the Church rests on a _southern_ freedom and liberality of spirit, and similarly on a southern suspicion of nature, man, and spirit,—it rests on a knowledge of man, an experience of man, entirely different from what the north has had.
The Joyful Wisdom (La Gaya Scienza), passage 15
In the other more usual case, however, when states of distress occupy themselves with philosophy (as is the case with all sickly thinkers—and perhaps the sickly thinkers preponderate in the history of philosophy), what will happen to the thought itself which is brought under the _pressure_ of sickness? This is the important question for psychologists: and here experiment is possible.
The Joyful Wisdom (La Gaya Scienza), passage 972
This lengthy, vast and uninterrupted process of crumbling, destruction, ruin and overthrow which is now imminent: who has realised it sufficiently to-day to have to stand up as the teacher and herald of such a tremendous logic of terror, as the prophet of a period of gloom and eclipse, the like of which has probably never taken place on earth before?...
The Joyful Wisdom (La Gaya Scienza), passage 531
_Origin of the Logical._—Where has logic originated in men's heads? Undoubtedly out of the illogical, the domain of which must originally have been immense. But numberless beings who reasoned otherwise than we do at present, perished; albeit that they may have come nearer to truth than we!
The Joyful Wisdom (La Gaya Scienza), passage 421
One gives the mole wings and proud fancies—before going to sleep, before he creeps into his hole? One sends him into the theatre and puts great magnifying-glasses to his blind and tired eyes? Men, whose life is not "action" but business, sit in front of the stage and look at strange beings to whom life is more than business? "This is proper," you say, "this is entertaining, this is what culture wants!"—Well then! culture is too often lacking in me, for this sight is too often disgusting to me.
The Joyful Wisdom (La Gaya Scienza), passage 1341
When thou partest, take a token Of the joy thou hast awoken, Take our wreath and fling it far; Toss it up and catch it never, Whirl it on before thee ever, Till it reach the farthest star.
The Joyful Wisdom (La Gaya Scienza), passage 800
Perhaps you will thus win over for those things the sort of men who are only of any account, I mean the _heroic_. But then there must be something formidable in them, and not as hitherto something disgusting! Might one not be inclined to say at present with reference to morality what Master Eckardt says: "I pray God to deliver me from God!"
The Joyful Wisdom (La Gaya Scienza), passage 1259
It is by no means an objection to a book when someone finds it unintelligible: perhaps this might just have been the intention of its author,—perhaps he did not _want_ to be understood by "anyone." A distinguished intellect and taste, when it wants to communicate its thoughts, always selects its hearers; by selecting them, it at the same time closes its barriers against "the others." It is there that all the more refined laws of style have their origin: they at the same time keep off, they create distance, they prevent "access" (intelligibility, as we have said,)—while they open the ears of those who are acoustically related to them.
The Joyful Wisdom (La Gaya Scienza), passage 1055
It is he who brings them together: the founding of a religion, therefore, always becomes a long ceremony of recognition.—
The Joyful Wisdom (La Gaya Scienza), passage 556
There are consequently innumerable kinds of physical health; and the more one again permits the unique and unparalleled to raise its head, the more one unlearns the dogma of the "Equality of men," so much the more also must the conception of a normal health, together with a normal diet and a normal course of disease, be abrogated by our physicians.
The Joyful Wisdom (La Gaya Scienza), passage 640
_Differences in the Dangerousness of Life._—You don't know at all what you experience; you run through life as if intoxicated, and now and then fall down a stair. Thanks however to your intoxication you still do not break your limbs: your muscles are too languid and your head too confused to find the stones of the staircase as hard as we others do! For us life is a greater danger: we are made of glass—alas, if we should _strike against_ anything! And all is lost if we should _fall_!
The Joyful Wisdom (La Gaya Scienza), passage 801
_Our Atmosphere._—We know it well: to him who only casts a glance now and then at science, as in taking a walk (in the manner of women, and alas! also like many artists), the strictness in its service, its inexorability in small matters as well as in great, its rapidity in weighing, judging and condemning, produce something of a feeling of giddiness and fright.
The Joyful Wisdom (La Gaya Scienza), passage 861
Do as ye will, ye wanton creatures, roar with delight and wickedness—or dive under again, pour your emeralds down into the depths, and cast your endless white tresses of foam and spray over them—it is all the same to me, for all is so well with you, and I am so pleased with you for it all: how could I betray _you_! For—take this to heart!—I know you and your secret, I know your race! You and I are indeed of one race! You and I have indeed one secret!
The Joyful Wisdom (La Gaya Scienza), passage 376
Without that art we should be nothing but fore-ground, and would live absolutely under the spell of the perspective which makes the closest and the commonest seem immensely large and like reality in itself.—Perhaps there is merit of a similar kind in the religion which commanded us to look at the sinfulness of every individual man with a magnifying-glass, and to make a great, immortal criminal out of the sinner; in that it put eternal perspectives around man, it taught him to see himself from a distance, and as something past, something entire.
The Joyful Wisdom (La Gaya Scienza), passage 517
Let us be on our guard against ascribing to it heartlessness and unreason, or their opposites; it is neither perfect, nor beautiful, nor noble; nor does it seek to be anything of the kind, it does not at all attempt to imitate man! It is altogether unaffected by our æsthetic and moral judgments! Neither has it any self-preservative instinct, nor instinct at all; it also knows no law. Let us be on our guard against saying that there are laws in nature.
The Joyful Wisdom (La Gaya Scienza), passage 390
Is it perhaps the same? Perhaps otherwise? It would often seem to me as if one needed to have learned by heart both the words _and_ the music of his creations before the performances; for without that—so it seemed to me—one _may hear_ neither the words, nor even the music.