FRIEDRICH NIETZSCHE : A MODERN TIME GENIUS

FRIEDRICH WILHELM NIETZSCHE (1844 -1900) was a 19th Century German Philosopher and Philologist. He played an important forerunner of Existentialism movement and his work has generated an extensive secondary literature within both Continental Philosophy and Analytic Philosophy traditions of the 20th Century.

He Challenged the foundations of Christianity and traditional morality, famously asserting that "GOD IS DEAD" .

HE QUOTED -

 "God is dead , God remains dead.And we have killed him . How shall we comfort ourselves, the murderers of all murderers? What was holiest and mightiest of all that world has yet owned has bled to death under our knives : who will wipe this blood off us ? What water is there for us to clean ourselves? What festivals of atonement , what scared games shall we have to invent ? Is not the greatness of this deed too great for us ? Must we ourselves not become gods simply to appear worthy of it?"

This statement led to the charges of Atheism ,Moral skepticism, Relativism and Nihilism on him.

  

He wrote prolifically and profoundly for many years under condition of ill-health and often intense physical pain, ultimately succumbing to serve mental illness. Many of his works remain controversial and open to conflicting interpretations, and his uniquely proactive writing style, and his non-traditional and often speculative thought processes have earned him many enemies as well as great praise. His life-affirming ideas ,however ,have inspired leading figures in all walks of  cultural life, not just philosophy, especially in Continental Europe. 

Now, you have an brief idea about why he is called as Modern Genius.

And I just love this fucking guy.

HERE ARE SOME  MIND BENDING QUOTES BY NIETZSCHE 

• “Without music, life would be a mistake.” 

• “I'm not upset that you lied to me, I'm upset that from now on I can't believe you.” 

• “That which does not kill us makes us stronger.” 

• “It is hard enough to remember my opinions, without also remembering my reasons for them!” 

• “There is always some madness in love. But there is also always some reason in madness.” 

• “There is always some madness in love. But there is also always some reason in madness.” 

• “You must have chaos within you to give birth to a dancing star.” 

• “Sometimes people don't want to hear the truth because they don't want their illusions destroyed.” 

• “The thought of suicide is a great consolation: by means of it one gets through many a dark night.” 

• “Thoughts are the shadows of our feelings -- always darker, emptier and simpler.” 

• “Every deep thinker is more afraid of being understood than of being misunderstood.” 

• “Is man merely a mistake of God's? Or God merely a mistake of man?” 

• “The surest way to corrupt a youth is to instruct him to hold in higher esteem those who think alike than those who think differently.” 

• “Man is the cruelest animal.” 

• "Blessed are the forgetful for they get the better even of their blunders."

• “In individuals, insanity is rare; but in groups, parties, nations and epochs, it is the rule.” 

• “The snake which cannot cast its skin has to die. As well the minds which are prevented from changing their opinions; they cease to be mind.” 

• “No one can construct for you the bridge upon which precisely you must cross the stream of life, no one but you yourself alone.” 

• “When we are tired, we are attacked by ideas we conquered long ago.” 

• “I cannot believe in a God who wants to be praised all the time.” 

• “He who has a why to live for can bear almost any how.” 
• 

Nietzsche's Rare quotes that will make question everything:

“And we should consider every day lost on which we have not danced at least once. And we should call every truth false which was not accompanied by at least one laugh.”

— Nietzsche, Thus Spoke Zarathustra

“How little it takes to make us happy! The sound of a bagpipe. Without music life would be a mistake. The German even imagines God as singing songs.”

— Nietzsche, Twilight of the Idols

“Main thought! The individual himself is a fallacy. Everything which happens in us is in itself something else which we do not know. ‘The individual’ is merely a sum of conscious feelings and judgments and misconceptions, a belief, a piece of the true life system or many pieces thought together and spun together, a ‘unity’, that doesn’t hold together. We are buds on a single tree—what do we know about what can become of us from the interests of the tree! But we have a consciousness as though we would and should be everything, a phantasy of ‘I’ and all ‘not I.’ Stop feeling oneself as this phantastic ego! Learn gradually to discard the supposed individual! Discover the fallacies of the ego! Recognize  egoism asfallacy! The opposite is not to be understood as altruism! This would be love of other supposed individuals! No! Get beyond ‘myself’ and ‘yourself’!  Experience cosmically!”

― Nietzsche, Kritische Studienausgabe

“Being nationalistic in the sense in which it is now demanded  by public opinion would, it seems to me, be for us who are more spiritual not mere insipidity but dishonesty, a deliberate deadening of our better will and conscience.”

— Nietzsche, Unpublished Note

“. . . This is the mistake which I seem to make eternally, that I imagine the sufferings of others as far greater than they really are. Ever since my childhood, the proposition ‘my greatest dangers lie in pity’ has been confirmed again and again. . . .”

― Nietzsche, 1884 letter

“. . . It seems to me that a human being with the very best of intentions can do immeasurable harm, if he is immodest enough to wish to profit those whose spirit and will are concealed from him. . . .”

                         ― Nietzsche, 1885 letter

“Christianity is called the religion of pity. Pity stands opposed to the tonic emotions which heighten our vitality! It has a depressing effect. We are deprived of strength when we feel pity. That loss of strength which suffering as such inflict on life is still further increased and multiplied by pity. Pity makes suffering contagious. Under certain circumstances, it may engender a total loss of life and vitality out of all proportion to the magnitude of the cause…”

— Nietzsche, The Antichrist

“Some have dared to call pity a virtue (in every noble ethic it is considered a weakness); and as if this were not enough, it has been made the virtue, the basis and source of all virtues. To be sure—and one should always keep this in mind—this was done by a philosophy that was nihilistic and had inscribed the negation of life upon its shield. Schopenhauer was consistent enough: pity negates life and renders it more deserving of negation.

Pity is the practice of nihilism. To repeat: this depressive and contagious instinct crosses those instincts which aim at the preservation of life and at the enhancement of its value. It multiplies misery and conserves all that is miserable, and is thus a prime instrument of the advancement of decadence: pity persuades men to nothingness!”

— Nietzsche, The Antichrist

“The decrease in instincts which are hostile and arouse mistrust—and that is all our ‘progress’ amounts to—represents but one of the consequences attending the general decrease in vitality: it requires a hundred times more trouble and caution to make so conditional and late an existence prevail. Hence each helps the other; hence everyone is to a certain extent sick, and everyone is a nurse for the sick. And that is called ‘virtue.’ Among men who still knew life differently—fuller, more squandering, more overflowing—it would have been called by another name: ‘cowardice’ perhaps, ‘wretchedness,’ ‘old ladies’ morality.'”

— Nietzsche, Twilight of the Idols

“Self-interest is worth as much as the person who has it: it can be worth a great deal, and it can be unworthy and contemptible. Every individual may be scrutinized to see whether he represents the ascending or the descending line of life. Having made that decision, one has a canon for the worth of his self-interest. If he represents the ascending line, then his worth is indeed extraordinary―and for the sake of life as a whole, which takes a step farther through him, the care for his preservation and for the creation of the best conditions for him may even be extreme.”

― Nietzsche, Twilight of the Idols

“In some remote corner of the universe, poured out and glittering in innumerable solar systems, there once was a star on which clever animals invented knowledge. That was the haughtiest and most mendacious minute of ‘world history’―yet only a minute. After nature had drawn a few breaths the star grew cold, and the clever animals had to die.

One might invent such a fable and still not have illustrated sufficiently how wretched, how shadowy and flighty, how aimless and arbitrary, the human intellect appears in nature. There have been eternities when it did not exist; and when it is done for again, nothing will have happened. For this intellect has no further mission that would lead beyond human life. It is human, rather, and only its owner and producer gives it such importance, as if the world pivoted around it. But if we could communicate with the mosquito, then we would learn that it floats through the air with the same self-importance, feeling within itself the flying center of the world.”

― Nietzsche, On Truth and Lie in an Extra-Moral Sense

“Judgments, judgments of value, concerning life, for it or against it, can, in the end, never be true: they have value only as symptoms, they are worthy of consideration only as symptoms; in themselves such judgments are stupidities. One must by all means stretch out one’s fingers and make the attempt to grasp this amazing finesse, that the value of life cannot be estimated.“

— Nietzsche, Twilight of the Idols

“In science, convictions have no rights of citizenship, as is said with good reason. Only when they decide to descend to the modesty of a hypothesis, of a provisional experimental point of view, of a regulative fiction, maybe they be granted admission and even a certain value within the realm of knowledge—though always with the restriction that they remain under police supervision, under the police of mistrust. But does this not mean, more precisely considered, that a conviction may obtain admission to science only when it ceases to be a conviction? Would not the discipline of the scientific spirit begin with this, no longer to permit oneself any convictions? Probably that is how it is. But one must still ask whether it is not the case that, in order that this discipline could begin, a conviction must have been there already, and even such a commanding and unconditional one that it sacrificed all other convictions for its own sake. It is clear that science too rests on a faith; there is no science ‘without presuppositions.’ The question whether truth is needed must not only have been affirmed in advance, but affirmed to the extent that the principle, the faith, the conviction is expressed: ‘nothing is needed more than truth, and in relation to it everything else has only second-rate value.'”

— Nietzsche, The Gay Science

“Consequently, ‘will to truth’ does not mean ‘I will not let myself be deceived’ but—there is no choice—’I will not deceive, not even myself’: and with this we are on the ground of morality. For one should ask oneself carefully: ‘Why don’t you want to deceive?’ especially if it should appear—and it certainly does appear—that life depends on appearance; I mean, on error, simulation, deception, self-deception; and when life has, as a matter of fact, always shown itself to be on the side of the most unscrupulous polytropoi. Such an intent charitably interpreted, could perhaps be a quixotism, a little enthusiastic impudence; but it could also be something worse, namely, a destructive principle, hostile to life. ‘Will to truth’—that might be a concealed will to death.”

— Nietzsche, The Gay Science

“The means by which Julius Caesar defended himself against sickliness and headaches: tremendous marches, the most frugal way of life, uninterrupted sojourn in the open air, continuous exertion—these are, in general, the universal rules of preservation and protection against the extreme vulnerability of that subtle machine, working under the highest pressure, which we call genius.”

— Nietzsche, Twilight of the Idols

“To die proudly when it is no longer possible to live proudly. Death freely chosen, death at the right time, brightly and cheerfully accomplished amid children and witnesses: then a real farewell is still possible, as the one who is taking leave is still there; also a real estimate of what one has achieved and what one has wished, drawing the sum of one’s life—all in opposition to the wretched and revolting comedy that Christianity has made of the hour of death. One should never forget that Christianity has exploited the weakness of the dying for a rape of the conscience; and the manner of death itself, for value judgments about man and the past.”

— Nietzsche, Twilight of the Idols

“If there is to be art, if there is to be any aesthetic doing and seeing, one physiological condition is indispensable: frenzy. Frenzy must first have enhanced the excitability of the whole machine; else there is no art. All kinds of frenzy, however diversely conditioned, have the strength to accomplish this: above all, the frenzy of sexual excitement, this most ancient and original form of frenzy.”

— Nietzsche, Twilight of the Idols

“Rule? Press my type on others? Dreadful. Is not my happiness precisely the sight of many who are different? Problem.”

— Nietzsche, Unpublished Note

 Nietzsche in 12 minutes ,watch this amazing video :       

For more info about the great philosopher -

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Friedrich_Nietzsche