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June 30, 2012
Only something which has no history can be defined.
Nietzsche
Posted by amin at 12:50 PM
What is a tradition? A higher authority which one obeys, not because it commands what is 'useful' to us, but because it 'commands'.
Nietzsche - Daybreak
Posted by amin at 12:48 PM
Health and sickliness: be careful! The yardstick remains the body's efflorescence, the mind's elasticity, courage and cheerfulness - but also, of course, how much sickliness it can take upon itself and overcome - can make healthy. What would destroy more tender men is one of the stimulants of great health.
Nietzsche - Writings from the Late Notebooks
Posted by amin at 12:47 PM
What yesterday was religion is no longer such today; and what today is atheism tomorrow will be religion.
Feuerbach
Posted by amin at 12:45 PM
Love has been falsified as a giving of oneself (and as altruism), whereas it is a taking in addition, or a giving away that follows from an over-abundance of personality. Only the most whole person can love; the depersonalised, the 'objective' ones are the worst lovers (- ask the ladies). The same applies to love of God, or of the 'fatherland': one must be firm and steady on one's feet.
Nietzsche - Writings from the Late Notebooks
Posted by amin at 12:43 PM
June 1, 2012
Piety, most wondrous mask of the drive for life! Devotion to a perfected dream-world, endowed with the highest moral wisdom. A flight from truth in order to be able to worship it from afar, shrouded in clouds! Reconciliation with reality because it is mysterious! A disinclination to solve puzzles because we are not gods! The pleasure found in falling in the dust, the peace of happiness in misfortune! The supreme self-abandonment of man in his supreme expression! Glorification and transfiguration of the devices of terror and atrocities of existence as the means to cure us of existence! Living joyfully in scorn of life! The triumph of the will in its negation!
On this level of knowledge there are only two paths, the path of the saint and the path of the tragic artist; what they both have in common is the ability to carry on living even in the clearest knowledge of the nullity of existence, without sensing a rupture in their view of the world. Disgust at the continuation of life is felt to be a means of creation, either saintly creation or artistic. The terrifying or the absurd is uplifting because it is only seemingly terrible or absurd. The Dionysiac power of enchantment proves itself even here, at the very summit of this view of the world: all that is real is dissolved in semblance, and behind it the unified nature of the Will manifests itself, completely cloaked in the glory of wisdom and truth and in blinding radiance. Illusion, delusion is at its peak.
Nietzsche - The Dionysiac World View
Posted by amin at 4:50 PM