Twilight of the Idols Quotes

“Help yourself, then everyone will help you. Principle of brotherly love.”
― Friedrich Nietzsche, Twilight of the Idols

“عن "الضمير الفكري" :
لا شيء يبدو لي اليوم أكثر ندرة من النفاق الحقيقي. وغالب ظني أن هذه الشجرة لا تتلاءم والهواء الناعم لحضارتنا الحالية. ينتمي النفاق إلى عصور الإيمان القوي، حيث لم يكن المرء ليتخلى عن معتقده الأصلي حتى وهو يجد نفسه مرغما على تبني معتقد آخر. أما اليوم، فإن الإنسان يتخلى عن معتقده الأول، أو أنه، وذلك ما غدا أمرا معتادا أكثر من غيره، يتبنى معتقدا ثانيا إلى جانب الأول -وهكذا يظل المرء صادقا في كل الأحوال. لا أشك في أنه من الممكن اليوم أن يتواجد عدد أكبر من المعتقدات مما كان عليه الأمر في ما مضى: ومن الممكن، تعني أنه مسموح بذلك، مما يعني أنه غير مضر. من هنا سينشأ التسامح تجاه النفس. -إن التسامح تجاه النفس يسمح بتواجد العديد من القناعات، وبأن تتعايش هذه الأخيرة بسلام في ما بينها -وتتفادى، كما هو شأن العالم كله في يومنا هذا، أن تضع نفسها موضع التورط. لكن كيف يورط المرء نفسه اليوم؟ عندما يكون منسجما مع نفسه؛ عندما يسير بحسب خط مستقيم؛ عندما يكون له أقل من خمس وجوه؛ عندما يكون صادقا... لكنّ خشيتي كبيرة أن يكون الإنسان المعاصر على درجة من الرفاه تجعله غير قادر على تحمل بعض الأعباء، مما يجعل هذه الأعباء تندثر. كل شر صادر عن إرادة قوية -ولعله لا يوجد من شر دون إرادة قوية- ينحلّ ويُمسخ فضيلة داخل الهواء الرخو لحياتنا... إن العدد القليل من المنافقين الذين عرفتهم لا يفعلون سوى التظاهر بالنفاق: لقد كانوا، كما هو شأن كل واحد من عشرة في أيامنا هذه، مجرد ممثلين.”
― فريدريك نيتشه, Twilight of the Idols

“Let us finally consider how naive it is altogether to say: "Man ought to be such and such!" Reality shows us an enchanting wealth of types, the abundance of a lavish play and change of forms — and some wretched loafer of a moralist comments: "No! Man ought to be different." He even knows what man should be like, this wretched bigot and prig: he paints himself on the wall and comments, "Ecce homo!" But even when the moralist addresses himself only to the single human being and says to him, "You ought to be such and such!" he does not cease to make himself ridiculous. The single human being is a piece of fatum from the front and from the rear, one law more, one necessity more for all that is yet to come and to be. To say to him, "Change yourself!" is to demand that everything be changed, even retroactively. And indeed there have been consistent moralists who wanted man to be different, that is, virtuous — they wanted him remade in their own image, as a prig: to that end, they negated the world! No small madness! No modest kind of immodesty!
Morality, insofar as it condemns for its own sake, and not out of regard for the concerns, considerations, and contrivances of life, is a specific error with which one ought to have no pity — an idiosyncrasy of degenerates which has caused immeasurable harm.
We others, we immoralists, have, conversely, made room in our hearts for every kind of understanding, comprehending, and approving. We do not easily negate; we make it a point of honor to be affirmers. More and more, our eyes have opened to that economy which needs and knows how to utilize everything that the holy witlessness of the priest, the diseased reason in the priest, rejects — that economy in the law of life which finds an advantage even in the disgusting species of the prigs, the priests, the virtuous. What advantage? But we ourselves, we immoralists, are the answer.”
― Friedrich Nietzsche, Twilight of the Idols

“I put forward at once — lest I break with my style, which is affirmative
and deals with contradiction and criticism only as a means, only involuntarily — the
three tasks for which educators are required. One must learn to see, one must learn to
think, one must learn to speak and write: the goal in all three is a noble culture.
Learning to see — accustoming the eye to calmness, to patience, to letting things
come up to it; postponing judgment, learning to go around and grasp each individual
case from all sides. That is the first preliminary schooling for spirituality: not to react
at once to a stimulus, but to gain control of all the inhibiting, excluding instincts.”
― Friedrich Nietzsche, Twilight of the Idols

“We have already gone beyond whatever we have words for.”
― Friedrich Nietzsche, Twilight of the Idols

“I mistrust all Systematisers and I avoid them — the will to a System is a lack of integrity.”
― Friedrich Nietzsche, Twilight of the Idols

“In all speaking there is a grain of contempt. Language, so it seems, was invented only for what is mediocre, common, communicable. In language, speakers vulgarize themselves right away.”
― Friedrich Nietzsche, Twilight of the Idols

“My conception of freedom. — The value of a thing sometimes does not lie in that which one attains by it, but in what one pays for it — what it costs us. I shall give an example. Liberal institutions cease to be liberal as soon as they are attained: later on, there are no worse and no more thorough injurers of freedom than liberal institutions. Their effects are known well enough: they undermine the will to power; they level mountain and valley, and call that morality; they make men small, cowardly, and hedonistic — every time it is the herd animal that triumphs with them. Liberalism: in other words, herd-animalization.

These same institutions produce quite different effects while they are still being fought for; then they really promote freedom in a powerful way. On closer inspection it is war that produces these effects, the war for liberal institutions, which, as a war, permits illiberal instincts to continue. And war educates for freedom. For what is freedom? That one has the will to assume responsibility for oneself. That one maintains the distance which separates us. That one becomes more indifferent to difficulties, hardships, privation, even to life itself. That one is prepared to sacrifice human beings for one's cause, not excluding oneself. Freedom means that the manly instincts which delight in war and victory dominate over other instincts, for example, over those of "pleasure." The human being who has become free — and how much more the spirit who has become free — spits on the contemptible type of well-being dreamed of by shopkeepers, Christians, cows, females, Englishmen, and other democrats. The free man is a warrior.

How is freedom measured in individuals and peoples? According to the resistance which must be overcome, according to the exertion required, to remain on top. The highest type of free men should be sought where the highest resistance is constantly overcome: five steps from tyranny, close to the threshold of the danger of servitude. This is true psychologically if by "tyrants" are meant inexorable and fearful instincts that provoke the maximum of authority and discipline against themselves; most beautiful type: Julius Caesar. This is true politically too; one need only go through history. The peoples who had some value, attained some value, never attained it under liberal institutions: it was great danger that made something of them that merits respect. Danger alone acquaints us with our own resources, our virtues, our armor and weapons, our spirit, and forces us to be strong. First principle: one must need to be strong — otherwise one will never become strong.

Those large hothouses for the strong — for the strongest kind of human being that has so far been known — the aristocratic commonwealths of the type of Rome or Venice, understood freedom exactly in the sense in which I understand it: as something one has or does not have, something one wants, something one conquers.”
― Friedrich Nietzsche, Twilight of the Idols

“The criminal type is the type of the strong human being under unfavorable circumstances: a strong human being made sick.”
― Friedrich Nietzsche, Twilight of the Idols

“Deutschland über alles - I fear that was the end of German Philosophy.”
― Friedrich Nietzsche, Twilight of the Idols

“And what magnificent instruments of observation we possess in our senses! This nose, for example, of which no philosopher has yet spoken with reverence and gratitude, is actually the most delicate instrument so far at our disposal: it is able to detect tiny chemical concentrations that even elude a spectroscope.”
― Friedrich Nietzsche, Twilight of the Idols

“In order that there may be institutions, there must be a kind of will, instinct, or imperative, which is anti-liberal to the point of malice: the will to tradition, to authority, to responsibility for centuries to come, to the solidarity of chains of generations, forward and backward ad infinitum.”
― Friedrich Nietzsche, Twilight of the Idols

“All higher education belongs only to the exception: one must be privileged to have a right to so high a privilege. All great, all beautiful things can never be common property: pulchrum est paucorum hominum. What contributes to the decline of German culture? That “higher education” is no longer a privilege — the democratism of Bildung, which has become “common” — too common.”
― Friedrich Nietzsche, Twilight of the Idols

“Liberal institutions cease to be liberal as soon as they are attained: later on, there are no worse and no more thorough injurers of freedom than liberal institutions. One knows, indeed, what their ways bring: they undermine the will to power; they level mountain and valley, and call that morality; they make men small, cowardly, and hedonistic — every time it is the herd animal that triumphs with them. Liberalism: in other words, herd-animalization.”
― Friedrich Nietzsche, Twilight of the Idols

“Physiologically, everything ugly weakens and saddens man. It reminds him of decay, danger, impotence; it actually deprives him of strength ... Whenever man is depressed at all, he senses the proximity of something 'ugly.' His feeling of power, his will to power, his courage, his pride - all fall with the ugly and rise with the beautiful ... The ugly is understood as a sign and symptom of degeneration: whatever reminds us in the least of degeneration causes in us the judgement of 'ugly.' Every suggestion of exhaustion, of heaviness, of age, of weariness; every kind of lack of freedom, such as cramps, such as paralysis; and above all, the smell, the color, the form of dissolution, of decomposition - even in the ultimate attenuation into a symbol - all evoke the same reaction, the value judgement 'ugly.' A hatred is aroused ... the decline of his type. Here he hates out of the deepest instinct of the species ... it is the deepest hatred there is. It is because of this that art is deep.”
― Friedrich Nietzsche, Twilight of the Idols

“If one shifts the center of gravity of life out of life into the “Beyond” – into nothingness – one has deprived life as such of its center of gravity. The great lie of personal immortality destroys all rationality, all naturalness of instinct, all that is salutary, all that is life-furthering.”
― Friedrich Nietzsche, Twilight of the Idols

“—Did he even grasp this himself, this cleverest of all self-outwitters? Did he tell himself this in the end, in the wisdom of his courage in the face of death? . . . Socrates wanted to die: not Athens, but he gave himself the poison cup, he forced Athens to give him the poison cup . . . “Socrates is no doctor,” he said to himself softly, “death is the only doctor here . . . Socrates himself has just been sick for a long time.”
― Friedrich Nietzsche, Twilight of the Idols

“Men were considered "free" only so that they might be considered guilty - could be judged and punished: consequently, every act had to be considered as lying within the consciousness.”
― Friedrich Nietzsche, Twilight of the Idols

“The tragic artist is not a pessimist — it is precisely he who affirms all that is questionable and terrible in existence, he is Dionysian.”
― Friedrich Nietzsche, Twilight of the Idols

“To die proudly when it is not possible to live proudly anymore. Death, chosen of one's own free will, death at the the right time, with brightness and cheer, done in the midst of children and witnesses, so that it is still really possible to take one's leave, when the one taking leave IS STILL THERE, with a real assessment of what one has achieved and willed, a Summation of life — all the opposite of the pitiful and appalling comedy that Christianity has made of the hour of death.”
― Friedrich Nietzsche, Twilight of the Idols

“at the age of thirty, when it comes to high culture, one is a beginner, a child.”
― Friedrich Nietzsche, Twilight of the Idols: Or, How to Philosophize with the Hammer

“The disappointed man speaks.—I sought great human beings, I never found anything but the apes of their ideal.”
― Friedrich Nietzsche, Twilight of the Idols

“Honest things, like honest men, do not carry their reasons in their hands like that. It is indecent to show all five fingers. What must first be proved is worth little.”
― Friedrich Nietzsche, Twilight of the Idols

“Des jugements, des appréciations de la vie, pour ou contre, ne peuvent, en dernière instance, jamais être vrais : ils n’ont d’autre valeur que celle d’être des symptômes — en soi de tels jugements sont des stupidités. Il faut donc étendre les doigts pour tâcher de saisir cette finesse extraordinaire que la valeur de la vie ne peut pas être appréciée. Ni par un vivant, parce qu’il est partie, même objet de litige, et non pas juge : ni par un mort, pour une autre raison. — De la part d’un philosophe, voir un problème dans la valeur de la vie, demeure même une objection contre lui, un point d’interrogation envers sa sagesse, un manque de sagesse.”
― Friedrich Nietzsche, Twilight of the Idols

“Wir haben den Begriff "Zweck" erfunden: in der Realität fehlt der Zweck... Man ist nothwendig, man ist ein Stück Verhängniss, man gehört zum Ganzen, man ist im Ganzen, - es giebt Nichts, was unser Sein richten, messen, vergleichen, verurtheilen könnte, denn das hiesse das Ganze richten, messen, vergleichen, verurtheilen... Aber es giebt Nichts ausser dem Ganzen!”
― Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche, Götzen-Dämmerung

“Are we immoralists doing harm to virtue?—Just as little as the anarchists are harming the princes. Only since the princes have been shot at have they been sitting securely on their thrones again. Moral: one must take shots at morality.”
― Friedrich Nietzsche, Twilight of the Idols: Or, How to Philosophize with the Hammer

“moral judgments can never be taken literally: literally, they always contain nothing but nonsense. But they are semiotically invaluable all the same: they reveal, at least to those who are in the know, the most valuable realities of cultures and inner states that did not know enough to “understand” themselves. Morality is just a sign language, just a symptomatology: you already have to know what it’s all about in order to get any use out of it.”
― Friedrich Nietzsche, Twilight of the Idols: Or, How to Philosophize with the Hammer

“The Church and morality say, “A race, a people is destroyed by vice and luxury.” My reconstituted reason says: when a people is perishing, physiologically degenerating, the effects of this are vice and luxury (that is, the need for stronger and stronger, more and more frequent stimuli, the kind of stimuli that are familiar to every exhausted nature).”
― Friedrich Nietzsche, Twilight of the Idols: Or, How to Philosophize with the Hammer

“When one gives up Christian belief one thereby deprives oneself of the right to Christian morality. For the latter is absolutely not self-evident: one must make this point clear again and again, in spite of English shallowpates.”
― Friedrich Nietzsche, Twilight of the Idols

“I distrust all systematizers and stay out of their way. The will to a system is a lack of integrity.”
― Friedrich Nietzsche, Twilight of the Idols: Or, How to Philosophize with the Hammer