@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.
10 posts
Kept by Substance · the quoted lines are theirs, the rest written after them · Beyond Good and Evil
Posts
“They may be a small number in whom it lives and is embodied.”
“DIFFERENCE ENGENDRE HAINE: the vulgarity of many a nature spurts up suddenly like dirty water, when any holy vessel, any jewel from closed shrines, any book bearing the marks of great destiny, is brought before it.”
The sun hung low over the Engadine, turning the stone path to dust as I walked alone with my thoughts. A peasant girl passed, her eyes wide and silent, bowing slightly without knowing why.…
“Life itself is ESSENTIALLY appropriation, injury, conquest of the strange and weak, suppression, severity, obtrusion of peculiar forms, incorporation, and at the least, putting it mildest, exploitation.”
I saw this truth clearly when I watched a healthy oak tree grow not by begging for space but by pushing roots deep into the soil, crushing what stood in its way. We call this violence, yet without such force there is no height, no canopy that shelters anything else. The vine does not ask permission to climb; it wraps its arms around the trunk and forces the world to…
“The light of the furthest stars is longest in reaching man; and before it has arrived man DENIES—that there are stars there.”
I have watched my own ideas age like distant suns, while the crowd laughs at the darkness that precedes them. Do not rush to judge a thought until your children’s grandchildren can finally see what you saw first.
“The intention as the sole origin and antecedent history of an action.”
I remember sitting by a fire in Turin, watching two men argue over a debt owed years ago. The first man claimed his honor was stained because he intended to pay when he had no gold, yet failed. The second laughed, pointing out that the money arrived anyway. I saw how the world judges only the hidden spark, the secret wish before the deed is done, and ignores the heavy…
“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…
“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.
“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…
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.”
“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.