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Moralité larmoyante. — How much entertainment morality provides! Think only what an ocean of delicious tears has flowed, for instance, at the telling of tales of noble, magnanimous deeds! — This embellishment of life would disappear if belief in total unaccountability came to prevail.

Friedrich Nietzsche, Human, All Too Human, On the History of the Moral Sensations: #91

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Ambition a surrogate for moral feeling. — Moral feeling must not be lacking in those natures that have no ambition. The ambitious contrive to get on even without it, and with almost equal success. — That is why, if they should ever lose moral feeling, the sons of modest families that know nothing of ambition decline very rapidly into complete good-for-nothings.

Friedrich Nietzsche, Human, All Too Human, On the History of the Moral Sensations: #78

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Number. — The invention of the laws of numbers was made on the basis of the error, dominant even from the earliest times, that there are identical things (but in fact nothing is identical with anything else); at least that there are things (but there is no 'thing'). The assumption of plurality always presupposes the existence of something that occurs more than once: but precisely here error already holds sway, here already we are fabricating beings, unities which do not exist. — Our sensations of space and time are false, for tested consistently they lead to logical contradictions. The establishment of conclusions in science always unavoidably involves us in calculating with certain false magnitudes: but because these magnitudes are at least constant, as for example are our sensations of time and space, the conclusions of science acquire a complete rigorousness and certainty in their coherence with one another; one can build on them — up to that final stage at which our erroneous basic assumptions, those constant errors, come to be incompatible with our conclusions, for example in the theory of atoms. Here we continue to feel ourselves compelled to assume the existence of a 'thing' or material 'substratum' which is moved, while the whole procedure of science has pursued the task of resolving everything thing-like (material) in motions: here too our sensations divide that which moves from that which is moved, and we cannot get out of this circle because our belief in the existence of things has been tied up with our being from time immemorial. — When Kant says 'the understanding does not draw its laws from nature, it prescribes them to nature', this is wholly true with regard to the concept of nature which we are obliged to attach to nature (nature = world as idea, that is as error), but which is the summation of a host of errors of the understanding. — To a world which is not our idea the laws of numbers are wholly inapplicable: these are valid only in the human world.

Friedrich Nietzsche, Human, All Too Human, Of First and Last Things: #19

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Error regarding life necessary to life. — Every belief in the value and dignity of life rests on false thinking; it is possible only through the fact that empathy with the universal life and suffering of mankind is very feebly developed in the individual. Even those rarer men who think beyond themselves at all have an eye, not for this universal life, but for fenced-off portions of it. If one knows how to keep the exceptions principally in view, I mean the greatly gifted and pure of soul, takes their production for the goal of world-evolution and rejoices in the effects they in turn produce, one may believe in the value of life, because then one is overlooking all other men: thinking falsely, that is to say. And likewise if, though one does keep in view all mankind, one accords validity only to one species of drives, the less egoistical, and justifies them in face of all the others, then again one can hope for something of mankind as a whole and to this extent believe in the value of life: thus, in this case too, through falsity of thinking. Whichever of these attitudes one adopts, however, one is by adopting it an exception among men. The great majority endure life without complaining overmuch; they believe in the value of existence, but they do so precisely because each of them exists for himself alone, refusing to step out of himself as those exceptions do: everything outside themselves they notice not at all or at most as a dim shadow. Thus for the ordinary, everyday man the value of life rests solely on the fact that he regards himself more highly than he does the world. The great lack of imagination from which he suffers means he is unable to feel his way into other beings and thus he participates as little as possible in their fortunes and sufferings. He, on the other hand, who really could participate in them would have to despair of the value of life; if he succeeded in encompassing and feeling within himself the total consciousness of mankind he would collapse with a curse on existence — for mankind has as a whole no goal, and the individual man when he regards its total course cannot derive from it any support or comfort, but must be reduced to despair. If in all he does he has before him the ultimate goallessness of man, his actions acquire in his own eyes the character of useless squandering. But to feel thus squandered, not merely as an individual but as humanity as a whole, in the way we behold the individual fruits of nature squandered, is a feeling beyond all other feelings. — But who is capable of such a feeling? Certainly only a poet: and poets always know how to console themselves.

Friedrich Nietzsche, Human, All Too Human, Of First and Last Things: #33

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Many young people claim to be lost, to be searching for "meaning." If this is a contemporary problem rather than an eternal one, then my prescription is simple: art.

Art helps the soul in its quest to connect and live. Almost everything else contributes to the morbid and decadent environment we're forced to live in.

Art that succeeds technically often can do only that.

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"The medium is the message." And yet the message is always the same, regardless of the medium. Give me a keyboard, a pencil, a conversation, an audience; what I want to say never changes. Neither medium nor time has any effect. I crack open a stubborn notebook, and smudged ink from ages ago reveals what I already know. Those who know how to read believe that this is true of any artwork, not just their own. What happens to art when you realize you love the artist?

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A very popular error--having the courage of one's convictions: rather it is a matter of having the courage for an attack upon one's convictions.

Friedrich Nietzsche

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Draconian law against writers. One should regard a writer as a criminal who deserves acquittal or clemency only in the rarest cases: that would be a way to keep books from getting out of hand.

Friedrich Nietzsche, Human, All Too Human, #193

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In honor of friendship.—In antiquity the feeling of friendship was considered the highest feeling, even higher than the most celebrated pride of the self-sufficient sage—somehow as the sole and still more sacred sibling of this pride. This is expressed very well in the story of the Macedonian king who gave an Athenian philosopher, who despised the world, a talent as a present—and promptly got it back. "How is that?" asked the king; "has he no friend?" He meant: "I honor the pride of this independent sage, but I should honor his humanity even more if the friend in him had triumphed over his pride. The philosopher has lowered himself before me by showing that he does not know one of the two highest feelings—and the higher one at that."

Friedrich Nietzsche

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Against remorse.—A thinker sees his own actions as experiments and questions—as attempts to find out something. Success and failure are for him answers above all. To be annoyed or feel remorse because something goes wrong—that he leaves to those who act because they have received orders and who have to reckon with a beating when his lordship is not satisfied with the result.

Friedrich Nietzsche, The Gay Science, #41

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Value of honest books.—Honest books make the reader honest, at least by luring into the open his hatred and aversion which his sly prudence otherwise knows how to conceal best. But against a book one lets oneself go, even if one is very reserved toward people.

Friedrich Nietzsche, Mixed Opinions and Maxims, #145

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Every profound thinker is more afraid of being understood than of being misunderstood. The latter may perhaps wound his vanity; but the former will wound his heart, his sympathy, which says always: 'alas, why do you want to have as hard a time of it as I had?'

Friedrich Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil (#290)

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Concrete

John Henry Lorimer, The Flight of the Swallows (1906)

Life started when I was around five years old. All the neighborhood kids, maybe a dozen or so, were piled on our front porch, embraced by my mom's hydrangeas, sitting and watching what was going on next door. Our neighbors were redoing their driveway, which touched ours. They had made the bored middle-class decision to switch from the gravel that gets stuck in tire treads to a flat concrete strip that'd be easy to shovel in the winter. Before us there was dirt and destruction and moving mechanisms—the apple of any child's eye. The kids were mesmerized. My mom was out there too, my dad at work. I quickly became tired of the whole spectacle. But despite my half-hearted begging, no one wanted to do anything else. They just wanted to watch. I complained to my mom, and I was told to be patient. Several snowy winters have passed, yet it's as if the pavers are still there. Life starts when the playing stops.

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You Matter

"I love you," he said.

"You are loved," she replied.

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Through the Thou a man becomes I. That which confronts him comes and disappears, relational events condense, then are scattered, and in the change consciousness of the unchanging partner, of the I, grows clear, and each time stronger. To be sure, it is still seen caught in the web of the relation with the Thou, as the increasingly distinguishable feature of that which reaches out to and yet is not the Thou. But it continually breaks through with more power, till a time comes when it bursts its bonds, and the I confronts itself for a moment, separated as though it were a Thou; as quickly to take possession of itself and from then on to enter into relations in consciousness of itself.

Martin Buber, I and Thou (1958), trans. Ronald Gregor Smith

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The world of It is set in the context of space and time. The world of Thou is not set in the context of either of these. Its context is in the Centre, where the extended lines of relations meet--in the eternal Thou. In the great privilege of pure relation the privileges of the world of It are abolished. By virtue of this privilege there exists the unbroken world of Thou: the isolated moments of relations are bound up in a life of world solidarity.

Martin Buber, I and Thou (1958), trans. Ronald Gregor Smith

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The development of the function of expressing and using comes about mostly through decrease of man's power to enter into relation.

Martin Buber, I and Thou (1958), trans. Ronald Gregor Smith