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February 12, 2007
amore fati
My formula for greatness in a human being is amore fati: that one wants nothing other than it is, not in the future, not in the past, not in all eternity. Not merely to endure that which happens of necessity, still less to dissemble it-all idealism is untruthfulness in the face of necessity-but to love it...
I climbed, I climbed, I dreamed, I thought, but everything oppressed me. I was like a sick man wearied by his sore torment and reawakened from sleep by a worse dream. But there is something in me that I call courage: it has always destroyed every discouragement in me.
Affirmation of life even in its strangest and sternest problems; the will to life rejoicing in its own inexhaustibility through the sacrifice of its highest types. Not so as to get rid of pity and terror, not so as to purify oneself of a dangerous emotion through its vehement discharge-it was thus Aristotle misunderstood it-: but, beyond pity and terror, to realize in oneself the eternal joy of becoming-that joy which also encompasses joy in destruction…
Nietzsche
Posted by amin at February 12, 2007 12:05 AM