Domhnall

S 39 Nobody is likely to consider a doctrine true merely because it makes people happy or virtuous - except perhaps the lovely “idealists” who become effusive about the good, the true, and the beautiful and allow all kinds of motley, clumsy, and benevolent desiderata to swim about in utter confusion in their pond. But people like to forget - even sobre spirits - that making unhappy and evil are no counter-arguments. Something might be true while being harmful and dangerous in the highest degree. Indeed it might be a basic characteristic of existence that those who would know it completely would perish, in which case the strength of a spirit should be measured according to how much of the “truth” one could still barely endure - or to put it more clearly, to what degree one would require it to be thinned down, shrouded, sweetened, blunted, falsified.

S 60 To love man for God’s sake - that has so far been the noblest and most remote feeling attained among men. That the love of man is just one more stupidity and brutishness if there is no ulterior intent to sanctify it, that the inclination to such love of man must receive its measure, its subtlety, its grain of salt and dash of ambergris from some higher inclination - whoever the human being may have been who first felt and “experienced” this, however much his tongue may have stumbled as it tried to express such délicatesse, let him remain holy and venerable for all time as the human being who has flown highest and yet gone astray most beautifully.

S 94 A man’s maturity - consists in having found again the seriousness one had as a child, at play.

S 108 There are no moral phenomena at all, but only a moral interpretation of phenomena.

S204 ...Science is flourishing today and her good conscience is written all over her face, while the level to which all modern philosophy has gradually sunk… invites mistrust and displeasure, if not mockery and pity. Philosophy reduced to “philosophy of knowledge,” in fact no more than a timid epochism and doctrine of abstinence - a philosophy that never gets beyond the threshold and denies itself the right to enter - that is philosophy in its last throes, an end, an agony, something inspiring pity. How could such a philosophy - dominate!

S 223 The hybrid European - all in all, a tolerably ugly plebeian - simply needs a costume: he requires history as a storage room for costumes. To be sure, he soon notices that not one fits him very well; so he keeps changing. Let anyone look at the nineteenth century with an eye for these quick preferences and changes of the style masquerade: also for the moments of despair over the fact that “nothing is becoming.” It is no good to parade as romantic or classical, Christian or Florentine, baroque or “national,” … ; again and again, a new piece of prehistory or a foreign country is tried on, put on, taken off, packed away and above all studied: we are the first age that has truly studied “costumes” - I mean those of moralities, articles of faith, tastes in the arts and religions - prepared like no other age for a carnival in the grand style, for the laughter and high spirits of the most spiritual revelry, for the transcendent heights of the highest nonsense and Aristophanean derision of the world. Perhaps this is where we shall still discover the realm of our invention, that realm where we too can still be original, say, as parodists of world history and God’s buffoons - perhaps, even if nothing else today has any future, our laughter may yet have a future.

S 228 Isn’t a moral philosopher the opposite of a Puritan? Namely, insofar as he is a thinker who considers morality questionable, as calling for question marks, in short as a problem? Surely moralizing should be - immoral?


S250 (footnote 21 by editor and translator Walter Kaufmann) [Of the values ascribed to the Jews in section 195 and the Germans in section 250]: “...of course he does not agree with the values he ascribes to them: but the whole book represents an effort to go “beyond” simpleminded agreement and disagreement, beyond the vulgar faith in antithetic values, “beyond good and evil.” The point of the title is not that the author considers himself beyond good and evil in the crudest sense, but it is in part that he is beyond saying such silly things as “The Jews are good” or “The Jews are evil” or “free spirits” or “scholars” or “virtues” or “honesty” or “humaneness” are “good” or “evil.” Everywhere he introduces distinctions, etching first one type and then another - both generally confounded under a single label. He asks us to shift perspectives, or to perceive hues and gradations instead of simple black and white. This has led superficial readers to suppose that he contradicts himself or that he never embraces any meaningful conclusions (Karl Jaspers); but this book abounds in conclusions. Only one can never be sure what they are as long as one tears sentences and half sentences out of context … or even whole aphorisms.”

S253 (footnote 33 by editor and translator Walter Kaufmann) Nietzsche’s influence on French letters since the start of the century has been second only to his influence on German literature and thought; his reputation in England has been negligible. The British writers of the first rank who were influenced by him were Irish: Shaw, Yeats and Joyce.

S 268 ...Words are acoustical signs for concepts; concepts, however, are more or less definite image signs for often recurring and associated sensations, for groups of sensations. To understand one another, it is not enough that one use the same words; one also has to use the same words for the same species of inner experiences; in the end, one has to have one’s experiences in common.
The greater the danger is, the greater is the need to reach agreement quickly and easily about what must be done; not misunderstanding one another in times of danger is what human beings simply cannot do without in their relations. In every friendship or love affair one still makes this test: nothing of that sort can endure once one discovers that one’s partner associates different feelings, intentions, nuances, desires and fears with the same words. … Which group of sensations is aroused, expresses itself, and issues commands in a soul most quickly, is decisive for the whole order of rank of its values and ultimately determines its table of goods.