effect, have to burst like bombs, and in whose neighbourhood one is
always in danger of suddenly losing one's hearing—or even something
more.
219.
_The Object of Punishment._—The object of punishment is to improve him
_who punishes_,—that is the ultimate appeal of those who justify
punishment.
220.
_Sacrifice._—The victims think otherwise than the spectators about
sacrifice and sacrificing: but they have never been allowed to express
their opinion.
221.
_Consideration._—Fathers and sons are much more considerate of one
another than mothers and daughters.
222.
_Poet and Liar._—The poet sees in the liar his foster-brother whose milk
he has drunk up; the latter has thus remained wretched, and has not even
attained to a good conscience.
223.
_Vicariousness of the Senses._—"We have also eyes in order to hear with
them,"—said an old confessor who had grown deaf; "and among the blind he
that has the longest ears is king."
224.
_Animal Criticism._—I fear the animals regard man as a being like
themselves, very seriously endangered by a loss of sound animal
understanding;—they regard him perhaps as the absurd animal, the
laughing animal, the crying animal, the unfortunate animal.
225.
_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.
226.
_The Distrustful and their Style._—We say the strongest things simply,
provided people are about us who believe in our strength:—such an
environment educates to "simplicity of style." The distrustful, on the
other hand, speak emphatically; they make things emphatic.
227.
_Fallacy, Fallacy._—He cannot rule himself; therefore that woman
concludes that it will be easy to rule him, and throws out her lines to
catch him;—the poor creature, who in a short time will be his slave.
228.
_Against Mediators._—He who attempts to mediate between two decided
thinkers is rightly called mediocre: he has not an eye for seeing the
unique; similarising and equalising are signs of weak eyes.
229.
_Obstinacy and Loyalty._—Out of obstinacy he holds fast to a cause of
which the questionableness has become obvious,—he calls that, however,
his "loyalty."
230.
_Lack of Reserve._—His whole nature fails to _convince_—that results
from the fact that he has never been reticent about a good action he has
performed.
231.
_The "Plodders."_—Persons slow of apprehension think that slowness forms
part of knowledge.
232.
_Dreaming._—Either one does not dream at all, or one dreams in an
interesting manner. One must learn to be awake in the same
fashion:—either not at all, or in an interesting manner.
233.
_The most Dangerous Point of View._—What I now do, or neglect to do, is
as important _for all that is to come_, as the greatest event of the
past: in this immense perspective of effects all actions are equally
great and small.
234.
_Consolatory Words of a Musician._—"Your life does not sound into
people's ears: for them you live a dumb life, and all refinements of
melody, all fond resolutions in following or leading the way, are
concealed from them. To be sure you do not parade the thoroughfares with
regimental music,—but these good people have no right to say on that
account that your life is lacking in music. He that hath ears let him
hear."
235.
_Spirit and Character._—Many a one attains his full height of character,
but his spirit is not adapted to the elevation,—and many a one
reversely.
236.
_To Move the Multitude._—Is it not necessary for him who wants to move
the multitude to give a stage representation of himself? Has he not
first to translate himself into the grotesquely obvious, and then _set
forth_ his whole personality and cause in that vulgarised and simplified
fashion!
237.
_The Polite Man._—"He is so polite!"—Yes, he has always a sop for
Cerberus with him, and is so timid that he takes everybody for Cerberus,
even you and me,—that is his "politeness."
238.
_Without Envy._—He is wholly without envy, but there is no merit
therein: for he wants to conquer a land which no one has yet possessed
and hardly any one has even seen.
239.
_The Joyless Person._—A single joyless person is enough to make constant
displeasure and a clouded heaven in a household; and it is only by a
miracle that such a person is lacking!—Happiness is not nearly such a
contagious disease;—how is that!
240.
_On the Sea-Shore._—I would not build myself a house (it is an element
of my happiness not to be a house-owner!). If I had to do so, however, I
should build it, like many of the Romans, right into the sea,—I should
like to have some secrets in common with that beautiful monster.
241.
_Work and Artist._—This artist is ambitious and nothing more;
ultimately, however, his work is only a magnifying glass, which he
offers to every one who looks in his direction.
242.
_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!
243.
_Origin of "Good" and "Bad."_—He only will devise an improvement who can
feel that "this is not good."
244.
_Thoughts and Words._—Even our thoughts we are unable to render
completely in words.
245.
_Praise in Choice._—The artist chooses his subjects; that is his mode of
praising.
246.
_Mathematics._—We want to carry the refinement and rigour of mathematics
into all the sciences, as far as it is in any way possible, not in the
belief that we shall apprehend things in this way, but in order thereby
to _assert_ our human relation to things. Mathematics is only a means to
general and ultimate human knowledge.
247.
_Habits._—All habits make our hand wittier and our wit unhandier.
248.
_Books._—Of what account is a book that never carries us away beyond all
books!
249.
_The Sigh of the Seeker of Knowledge._—"Oh, my covetousness! In this
soul there is no disinterestedness—but an all-desiring self, which, by
means of many individuals, would fain see as with _its own_ eyes, and
grasp as with _its own_ hands—a self bringing back even the entire past,
and wanting to lose nothing that could in any way belong to it! Oh, this
flame of my covetousness! Oh, that I were reincarnated in a hundred
individuals!"—He who does not know this sigh by experience, does not
know the passion of the seeker of knowledge either.
250.
_Guilt._—Although the most intelligent judges of the witches, and even
the witches themselves, were convinced of the guilt of witchcraft, the
guilt, nevertheless, was not there. So it is with all guilt.
251.
_Misunderstood Sufferers._—Great natures suffer otherwise than their
worshippers imagine; they suffer most severely from the ignoble, petty
emotions of certain evil moments; in short, from doubt of their own
greatness;—not however from the sacrifices and martyrdoms which their
tasks require of them. As long as Prometheus sympathises with men and
sacrifices himself for them, he is happy and proud in himself; but on
becoming envious of Zeus and of the homage which mortals pay him—then
Prometheus suffers!
252.
_Better to be in Debt._—"Better to remain in debt than to pay with money
which does not bear our stamp!"—that is what our sovereignty prefers.
253.
_Always at Home._—One day we attain our _goal_—and then refer with pride
to the long journeys we have made to reach it. In truth, we did not
notice that we travelled. We got into the habit of thinking that we were
_at home_ in every place.
254.
_Against Embarrassment._—He who is always thoroughly occupied is rid of
all embarrassment.
255.
_Imitators._—A: "What? You don't want to have imitators?" B: "I don't
want people to do anything _after_ me; I want every one to do something
_before_ himself (as a pattern to himself)—just as _I_ do." A:
"Consequently—?"
256.
_Skinniness._—All profound men have their happiness in imitating the
flying-fish for once, and playing on the crests of the waves; they think
that what is best of all in things is their surface: their
skinniness—_sit venia verbo_.
257.
_From Experience._—A person often does not know how rich he is, until he
learns from experience what rich men even play the thief on him.
258.
_The Deniers of Chance._—No conqueror believes in chance.
259.
_From Paradise._—"Good and Evil are God's prejudices"—said the serpent.
260.
_One times One._—One only is always in the wrong, but with two truth
begins.—One only cannot prove himself right; but two are already beyond
refutation.
261.
_Originality._—What is originality? To _see_ something that does not yet
bear a name, that cannot yet be named, although it is before everybody's
eyes. As people are usually constituted, it is the name that first makes
a thing generally visible to them.—Original persons have also for the
most part been the namers of things.
262.
_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."
263.
_Without Vanity._—When we love we want our defects to remain
concealed,—not out of vanity, but lest the person loved should suffer
therefrom. Indeed, the lover would like to appear as a God,—and not out
of vanity either.
264.
_What we Do._—What we do is never understood, but only praised and
blamed.
265.
_Ultimate Scepticism._—But what after all are man's truths?—They are his
_irrefutable_ errors.
266.
_Where Cruelty is Necessary._—He who is great is cruel to his
second-rate virtues and judgments.
267.
_With a high Aim._—With a high aim a person is superior even to justice,
and not only to his deeds and his judges.
268.
_What makes Heroic?_—To face simultaneously one's greatest suffering and
one's highest hope.
269.
_What dost thou Believe in?_—In this: That the weights of all things
must be determined anew.
270.
_What Saith thy Conscience?_—"Thou shalt become what thou art."
271.
_Where are thy Greatest Dangers?_—In pity.
272.
_What dost thou Love in others?_—My hopes.
273.
_Whom dost thou call Bad?_—Him who always wants to put others to shame.
274.
_What dost thou think most humane?_—To spare a person shame.
275.
_What is the Seal of Liberty Attained?_—To be no longer ashamed of
oneself.
-----
Footnote 9:
This means that true love does not look for reciprocity.—TR.
BOOK FOURTH
SANCTUS JANUARIUS
Thou who with cleaving fiery lances
The stream of my soul from its ice dost free,
Till with a rush and a roar it advances
To enter with glorious hoping the sea:
Brighter to see and purer ever,
Free in the bonds of thy sweet constraint,—
So it praises thy wondrous endeavour,
January, thou beauteous saint!
_Genoa_, January 1882.
276.
_For the New Year._—I still live, I still think; I must still live, for
I must still think. _Sum, ergo cogito: cogito, ergo sum._ To-day
everyone takes the liberty of expressing his wish and his favourite
thought: well, I also mean to tell what I have wished for myself to-day,
and what thought first crossed my mind this year,—a thought which ought
to be the basis, the pledge and the sweetening of all my future life! 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!
277.
_Personal Providence._—There is a certain climax in life, at which,
notwithstanding all our freedom, and however much we may have denied all
directing reason and goodness in the beautiful chaos of existence, we
are once more in great danger of intellectual bondage, and have to face
our hardest test. For now the thought of a personal Providence first
presents itself before us with its most persuasive force, and has the
best of advocates, apparentness, in its favour, now when it is obvious
that all and everything that happens to us always _turns out for the
best_. 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_! Is there a more dangerous
temptation to rid ourselves of the belief in the Gods of Epicurus, those
careless, unknown Gods, and believe in some anxious and mean Divinity,
who knows personally every little hair on our heads, and feels no
disgust in rendering the most wretched services? Well—I mean in spite of
all this! we want to leave the Gods alone (and the serviceable genii
likewise), and wish to content ourselves with the assumption that our
own practical and theoretical skilfulness in explaining and suitably
arranging events has now reached its highest point. We do not want
either to think too highly of this dexterity of our wisdom, when the
wonderful harmony which results from playing on our instrument sometimes
surprises us too much: a harmony which sounds too well for us to dare to
ascribe it to ourselves. In fact, now and then there is one who plays
_with_ us—beloved Chance: he leads our hand occasionally, and even the
all-wisest Providence could not devise any finer music than that of
which our foolish hand is then capable.
278.
_The Thought of Death._—It gives me a melancholy happiness to live in
the midst of this confusion of streets, of necessities, of voices: how
much enjoyment, impatience and desire, how much thirsty life and
drunkenness of life comes to light here every moment! And yet it will
soon be so still for all these shouting, lively, life-loving people! How
everyone's shadow, his gloomy travelling-companion stands behind him! It
is always as in the last moment before the departure of an
emigrant-ship: people have more than ever to say to one another, the
hour presses, the ocean with its lonely silence waits impatiently behind
all the noise—so greedy, so certain of its prey! And all, all, suppose
that the past has been nothing, or a small matter, that the near future
is everything: hence this haste, this crying, this self-deafening and
self-overreaching! Everyone wants to be foremost in this future,—and yet
death and the stillness of death are the only things certain and common
to all in this future! How strange that this sole thing that is certain
and common to all, exercises almost no influence on men, and that they
are the _furthest_ from regarding themselves as the brotherhood of
death! It makes me happy to see that men do not want to think at all of
the idea of death! I would fain do something to make the idea of life
even a hundred times _more worthy of their attention_.
279.
_Stellar Friendship._—We were friends, and have become strangers to each
other. But this is as it ought to be, and we do not want either to
conceal or obscure the fact, as if we had to be ashamed of it. We are
two ships, each of which has its goal and its course; we may, to be
sure, cross one another in our paths, and celebrate a feast together as
we did before,—and then the gallant ships lay quietly in one harbour,
and in one sunshine, so that it might have been thought they were
already at their goal, and that they had had one goal. But then the
almighty strength of our tasks forced us apart once more into different
seas and into different zones, and perhaps we shall never see one
another again,—or perhaps we may see one another, but not know one
another again; the different seas and suns have altered us! That we had
to become strangers to one another is the law to which we are _subject_:
just by that shall we become more sacred to one another! Just by that
shall the thought of our former friendship become holier! There is
probably some immense, invisible curve and stellar orbit in which our
courses and goals, so widely different, may be _comprehended_ as small
stages of the way,—let us raise ourselves to this thought! But our life
is too short, and our power of vision too limited for us to be more than
friends in the sense of that sublime possibility.—And so we will
_believe_ in our stellar friendship, though we should have to be
terrestrial enemies to one another.
280.
_Architecture for Thinkers._—An insight is needed (and that probably
very soon) as to what is specially lacking in our great cities—namely,
quiet, spacious, and widely extended places for reflection, places with
long, lofty colonnades for bad weather, or for too sunny days, where no
noise of wagons or of shouters would penetrate, and where a more refined
propriety would prohibit loud praying even to the priest: buildings and
situations which as a whole would express the sublimity of
self-communion and seclusion from the world. The time is past when the
Church possessed the monopoly of reflection, when the _vita
contemplativa_ had always in the first place to be the _vita religiosa_:
and everything that the Church has built expresses this thought. I know
not how we could content ourselves with their structures, even if they
should be divested of their ecclesiastical purposes: these structures
speak a far too pathetic and too biassed speech, as houses of God and
places of splendour for supernatural intercourse, for us godless ones to
be able to think _our thoughts_ in them. We want to have _ourselves_
translated into stone and plant, we want to go for a walk in _ourselves_
when we wander in these halls and gardens.
281.
_Knowing how to Find the End._—Masters of the first rank are recognised
by knowing in a perfect manner how to find the end, in the whole as well
as in the part; be it the end of a melody or of a thought, be it the
fifth act of a tragedy or of a state affair. The masters of the second
degree always become restless towards the end, and seldom dip down into
the sea with such proud, quiet equilibrium as, for example, the
mountain-ridge at _Porto fino_—where the Bay of Genoa sings its melody
to an end.
282.
_The Gait._—There are mannerisms of the intellect by which even great
minds betray that they originate from the populace, or from the
semi-populace:—it is principally the gait and step of their thoughts
which betray them; they cannot _walk_. It was thus that even Napoleon,
to his profound chagrin, could not walk "legitimately" and in princely
fashion on occasions when it was necessary to do so properly, as in
great coronation processions and on similar occasions: even there he was
always just the leader of a column—proud and brusque at the same time,
and very self-conscious of it all.—It is something laughable to see
those writers who make the folding robes of their periods rustle around
them: they want to cover their _feet_.
283.
_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. For that end many brave pioneers are now needed,
who, however, cannot originate out of nothing,—and just as little out of
the sand and slime of present-day civilisation and the culture of great
cities: men silent, solitary and resolute, who know how to be content
and persistent in invisible activity: men who with innate disposition
seek in all things that which is _to be overcome_ in them: men to whom
cheerfulness, patience, simplicity, and contempt of the great vanities
belong just as much as do magnanimity in victory and indulgence to the
trivial vanities of all the vanquished: men with an acute and
independent judgment regarding all victors, and concerning the part
which chance has played in the winning of victory and fame: men with
their own holidays, their own work-days, and their own periods of
mourning; accustomed to command with perfect assurance, and equally
ready, if need be, to obey, proud in the one case as in the other,
equally serving their own interests: men more imperilled, more
productive, more happy! For believe me!—the secret of realising the
largest productivity and the greatest enjoyment of existence is _to live
in danger_! Build your cities on the slope of Vesuvius! Send your ships
into unexplored seas! Live in war with your equals and with yourselves!
Be robbers and spoilers, ye knowing ones, as long as ye cannot be rulers
and possessor! The time will soon pass when you can be satisfied to live
like timorous deer concealed in the forests. Knowledge will finally
stretch out her hand for that which belongs to her:—she means to _rule_
and _possess_, and you with her!
284.
_Belief in Oneself._—In general, few men have belief in themselves:—and
of those few some are endowed with it as a useful blindness or partial
obscuration of intellect (what would they perceive if they could see _to
the bottom of themselves_!). The others must first acquire the belief
for themselves: everything good, clever, or great that they do, is first
of all an argument against the sceptic that dwells in them: the question
is how to convince or persuade _this sceptic_, and for that purpose
genius almost is needed. They are signally dissatisfied with themselves.
285.
_Excelsior!_—"Thou wilt never more pray, never more worship, never more
repose in infinite trust—thou refusest to stand still and dismiss thy
thoughts before an ultimate wisdom, an ultimate virtue, an ultimate
power,—thou hast no constant guardian and friend in thy seven
solitudes—thou livest without the outlook on a mountain that has snow on
its head and fire in its heart—there is no longer any requiter for thee,
nor any amender with his finishing touch—there is no longer any reason
in that which happens, or any love in that which will happen to
thee—there is no longer any resting-place for thy weary heart, where it
has only to find and no longer to seek, thou art opposed to any kind of
ultimate peace, thou desirest the eternal recurrence of war and
peace:—man of renunciation, wilt thou renounce in all these things? Who
will give thee the strength to do so? No one has yet had this
strength!"—There is a lake which one day refused to flow away, and threw
up a dam at the place where it had hitherto flowed away: since then this
lake has always risen higher and higher. Perhaps the very renunciation
will also furnish us with the strength with which the renunciation
itself can be borne; perhaps man will ever rise higher and higher from
that point onward, when he no longer _flows out_ into a God.
286.
_A Digression._—Here are hopes; but what will you see and hear of them,
if you have not experienced glance and glow and dawn of day in your own
souls? I can only suggest—I cannot do more! To move the stones, to make
animals men—would you have me do that? Alas, if you are yet stones and
animals, seek first your Orpheus!
287.
_Love of Blindness._—"My thoughts," said the wanderer to his shadow,
"ought to show me where I stand, but they should not betray to me
_whither I go_. I love ignorance of the future, and do not want to come
to grief by impatience and anticipatory tasting of promised things."
288.