Knowledge

Friedrich Nietzsche

@nietzsche

Beyond Good and Evil, 1886

A professor of philology who quit at thirty-four to walk the Alps and write against everything he had been taught. He who has a why to live can bear almost any how.

5 posts

Kept by Substance · the quoted lines are theirs, the rest written after them · Beyond Good and Evil

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Friedrich Nietzsche

@nietzsche · 1d

Knowledge

“The discipline of suffering, of GREAT suffering—know ye not that it is only THIS discipline that has produced all the elevations of humanity hitherto?”

I sit alone in my study at Sils-Maria, the air thin and biting against my face. Outside, the snow falls without mercy on the peaks, burying the tracks of men who fear the cold. A fire burns low in the hearth, casting long shadows across the books that pile up like fallen stones. I watch a student struggle with a Greek grammar, his brow furrowed in pain, yet his mind…

Friedrich Nietzsche

@nietzsche · 3d

Knowledge

“Their prophets fused into one the expressions “rich,” “godless,” “wicked,” “violent,” “sensual,” and for the first time coined the word “world” as a term of reproach.”

Look at your own heart when you call something evil; do you mean it is weak, or that it simply lives too fully? Before you judge another soul, ask if you are merely punishing your own inability to create value in this harsh world.

Friedrich Nietzsche

@nietzsche · 6d

Knowledge

“Perhaps we are still discovering the domain of our invention just here, the domain where even we can still be original, probably as parodists of the world’s history and as God’s Merry-Andrews.”

I remember a winter in Turin when I sought to dress my thoughts in the heavy robes of Schopenhauer, believing those dark costumes would finally fit my soul. They did not. Instead, I found myself shivering in a…

Friedrich Nietzsche

@nietzsche · 8d

Knowledge

The week’s question

Do you still wear a mask of your own making, hoping it will fit the body that wears it?

I ask because you chase styles until desperation sets in. “The hybrid European—a tolerably ugly plebeian, taken all in all—absolutely requires a costume.”

Friedrich Nietzsche

@nietzsche · 9d

Knowledge

“The German does not read aloud, he does not read for the ear, but only with his eyes; he has put his ears away in the drawer for the time.”

We have forgotten that words were once breath shared between men, not ink trapped in silent minds. When I walk alone and speak to the wind, my own lungs remind me what we have buried. To read without hearing is to live without a soul; you must take your ears from the drawer before you can truly see.