Twilight of the Idols Quotes

“I mistrust all systematizers and I avoid them. The will to a system is a lack of integrity”
― Friedrich Nietzsche, Twilight of the Idols

“The criminal type is the strong type under unfavourable conditions, a strong man rendered sickly. What he lacks is the jungle, a certain freer and more dangerous form of nature and existence where all that serves as arms and armour — in the strong man’s instinctive view — is his by right. His virtues society has prohibited; the liveliest impulses he has borne within him are quickly entangled with the crushing emotions of suspicion, fear and ignominy.”
― Friedrich Nietzsche, Twilight of the Idols

“Let us examine another aspect of the question: it is not only obvious that German culture is declining, but adequate reasons for this decline are not lacking. After all, nobody can spend more than he has: — this is true of individuals, it is also true of nations. If you spend your strength in acquiring power, or in politics on a large scale, or in economy, or in universal commerce, or in parliamentarism, or in military interests — if you dissipate the modicum of reason, of earnestness, of will, and of self-control that constitutes your nature in one particular fashion, you cannot dissipate it in another. Culture and the state — let no one be deceived on this point — are antagonists: A “culture-state” is merely a modern idea. The one lives upon the other, the one flourishes at the expense of the other. All great periods of culture have been periods of political decline; that which is great from the standpoint of culture, was always unpolitical — even anti-political. Goethe’s heart opened at the coming of Napoleon — it closed at the thought of the “Wars of Liberation".”
― Friedrich Nietzsche, Twilight of the Idols

“Aristotle says that in order to live alone, a man must be either an animal or a god. The third alternative is lacking: a man must be both—a philosopher.”
― Friedrich Nietzsche, The Twilight Of The Idols: Or, How To Philosophise With The Hammer By Friedrich Nietzsche - The Antichrist Notes To Zarathustra, And Eternal ... Anthony M. Ludovici And Edited By Oscar Levy

“Dini, ahlakı iyileştirme dahil, antik Yunan'dan Sokrates'ten itibaren geliştirilen iyileştirme anlayışı, tamamen yanlıştı. Baş aşağıydı. Çünkü, en keskin gün ışığı, "her ne pahasına olursa olsun akılcılık" seçeneği, insanın iç dünyasından/duygudan yoksun, hatta ona düşmanca bir tavır takınan, insanın gözünü körleştirici, kuru, yavan, soğuk, tedbirli, salt bilinç düzleminde var olan ışıltılı bir hayat, aslında bir hastalık biçiminden, bir diğer hastalık biçiminden başka bir şey değildir ve dolayısıyla saf akılcılık, "sağlığa, mutluluğa, erdeme" ulaştıracak bir yol değildir.”
― Friedrich Nietzsche, Twilight of the Idols

“Dinin sorması gereken, "insani bir arzu nasıl kutsanır, nasıl güzelleştirilip, yüceleştirilebilir, nasıl tanrılaştırılabilir" olmalıdır. Ama dinin tek yaptığı, haz verici duyguları yok etmek, aç gözlülüğü, intikam duygusunu, iktidar hırsını ve kibri ön plana çıkarmak olmuştur.
Oysa tutkunun köklerine saldırmak, hayatın köklerine saldırmak demektir. Dinin doğal gelişimi, hayata düşmanca bir uygulamadı.”
― Friedrich Nietzsche, Twilight of the Idols

“Gelişmeyi ve ilerlemeyi durdurmak eşyanın tabiatına aykırıdır. Yavaşlatabilirler ama asla ve asla durduramazlar. Bozulanı tamir etmektense tamamen yok etmek elimizdedir. Tamir edilerek bir süre daha insanlığın eziyetine ortak olmayınız. Bozulanı daha çok bozmalısınız. Böylece kaçınılmaz son sizin sayenizde gelecektir.”
― Friedrich Nietzsche, Twilight of the Idols

“İnsana katlanabilmek için, insanın kalbinde yer açması gerekir. Bu demokratik bir şeydir.
İnsan, herkesin giremediği, her sözün söylenemediği kalplerin en iyi misafirperver yerler olduğunu bilir. Çünkü insanlar en iyi odalarını kullanmazlar. Peki neden böyle yaparlar? Çünkü "katlanmak" zorunda olmadıkları misafirleri beklerler.”
― Friedrich Nietzsche, The Twilight Of The Idols: Or, How To Philosophise With The Hammer By Friedrich Nietzsche - The Antichrist Notes To Zarathustra, And Eternal ... Anthony M. Ludovici And Edited By Oscar Levy

“Witness modern marriage. All rationality has clearly vanished from modern marriage; yet that is no objection to marriage, but to modernity. The rationality of marriage — that lay in the husband's sole juridical responsibility, which gave marriage a center of gravity, while today it limps on both legs. The rationality of marriage — that lay in its indissolubility in principle, which lent it an accent that could be heard above the accident of feeling, passion, and what is merely momentary. It also lay in the family's responsibility for the choice of a spouse. With the growing indulgence of love matches, the very foundation of marriage has been eliminated, that which alone makes an institution of it. Never, absolutely never, can an institution be founded on an idiosyncrasy; one cannot, as I have said, found marriage on "love" — it can be founded on the sex drive, on the property drive (wife and child as property), on the drive to dominate, which continually organizes for itself the smallest structure of domination, the family, and which needs children and heirs to hold fast — physiologically too — to an attained measure of power, influence, and wealth, in order to prepare for long-range tasks, for a solidarity of instinct between the centuries. Marriage as an institution involves the affirmation of the largest and most enduring form of organization: when society cannot affirm itself as a whole, down to the most distant generations, then marriage has altogether no meaning. Modern marriage has lost its meaning — consequently one abolishes it.”
― Friedrich Nietzsche, Twilight of the Idols

“It has been said, not without subtlety: It is unworthy of great souls to spread the inner turmoil they feel.”
― Friedrich Nietzsche, Twilight of the Idols

“Such a spirit, who has become free stands in the middle of the world with a cheerful and trusting fatalism in the belief that only the individual is reprehensible, that everything is redeemed and affirmed in the whole – he does not negate anymore. Such a faith however, is the highest of all possible faiths: I have baptized it with the name of Dionysus.”
― Friedrich Nietzsche, Twilight of the Idols

“The Natural Value of Egoism.—Selfishness has as much value as the physiological value of him who practises it: its worth may be great, or it may be worthless and contemptible. Every individual may be classified according to whether he represents the ascending or the descending line of life. When this is decided, a canon is obtained by means of which the value of his selfishness may be determined. If he represent the ascending line of life, his value is of course extraordinary—and for the sake of the collective life which in him makes one step forward, the concern about his maintenance, about procuring his optimum of conditions may even be extreme. The human unit, the “individual,” as the people and the philosopher have always understood him, is certainly an error: he is nothing in himself, no atom, no “link in the chain,” no mere heritage from the past,—he represents the whole direct line of mankind up to his own life.... If he represent declining development, decay, chronic degeneration, sickness (—illnesses are on the whole already the outcome of decline, and not the cause thereof), he is of little worth, and the purest equity would have him take away as little as possible from those who are lucky strokes of nature. He is then only a parasite upon them....”
― Friedrich Nietzsche, Twilight of the Idols

“People used to consider change, alteration, and becoming in general as proof that appearances were illusory, as a sign that something must be misleading us.
These days, on the other hand, we see ourselves mired in error, drawn necessarily into error, precisely to the extent that the prejudice of reason forces us to make use of unity, identity, permanence, substance, cause, objectification, being.
We have checked this through rigorously and are sure that this is where the error lies.
This is no different than the movement of the sun, where our eye is a constant advocate for error, here it is language.
Language began at a time when psychology was in its most rudimentary form: we enter into a crudely fetishistic mindset when we call into consciousness the basic presuppositions of the metaphysics of language - in the vernacular: the presuppositions of reason.
It sees doers and deeds all over: it believes that will has causal efficacy: it believes in the 'I', in the I as being, in the I as substance, and it projects this belief in the I-substance onto all things - this is how it creates the concept of 'thing' in the first place.
Being is imagined into everything - pushed under everything - as a cause; the concept of 'being' is only derived from the concept of 'I' . . .
In the beginning there was the great disaster of an error, the belief that the will is a thing with causal efficacy, - that will is a faculty . . . These days we know that it is just a word.”
― Friedrich Nietzsche, Twilight of the Idols

“Another Problem of Diet. — The means by which Julius Caesar protected himself against minor ailments and headaches: immense marches, the simplest of ways of life, uninterrupted periods in the open air, constant exertions — these are by and large the definitive measures for preserving and protecting against the extreme vulnerability of that subtle machine working under the most intense pressure, called genius.”
― Friedrich Nietzsche, Twilight of the Idols

“Sometimes the value of a thing does not lie in that which it helps us to achieve, but in the amount we have to pay for it, — what it costs us. For instance, liberal institutions straightway cease from being liberal, the moment they are soundly established: once this is attained no more grievous and more thorough enemies of freedom exist than liberal institutions! One knows, of course, what they bring about: they undermine the Will to Power, they are the levelling of mountain and valley exalted to a morality, they make people small, cowardly and pleasure-loving, — by means of them the gregarious animal invariably triumphs. Liberalism, or, in plain English, the transformation of mankind into cattle.”
― Friedrich Nietzsche, Twilight of the Idols

“The individual in his past and future is a piece of fate, one law the more, one necessity the more for all that is to come and is to be. To say to him “change thyself,” is tantamount to saying that everything should change, even backwards as well.”
― Friedrich Nietzsche, Twilight of the Idols

“Toward a psychology of the artist. — 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.”
― Friedrich Nietzsche, Twilight of the Idols

“Nature, estimated artistically, is no model. It exaggerates, it distorts, it leaves gaps. Nature is chance. To study 'from nature' seems to me to be a bad sign: it betrays submission, weakness, fatalism; this lying in the dust before petit faits is unworthy of a whole artist. To see what is — that is the mark of another kind of spirit, the anti-artistic, the factual. One must know who one is.”
― Friedrich Nietzsche, Twilight of the Idols

“We hate lies and hypocrisy because our sense of honor is easily provoked. But the same hatred can arise from cowardice, since lies are forbidden by divine commandment: in that case, we are too cowardly to lie.”
― Friedrich Nietzsche , Twilight of the Idols

“My conception of genius. — Great men, like great ages, are explosives in which a tremendous force is stored up; their precondition is always, historically and physiologically, that for a long time much has been gathered, stored up, saved up, and conserved for them — that there has been no explosion for a long time. Once the tension in the mass has become too great, then the most accidental stimulus suffices to summon into the world the 'genius,' the 'deed,' the great destiny. What does the environment matter then, or the age, or the 'spirit of the age,' or 'public opinion'!”
― Friedrich Nietzsche, Twilight of the Idols

“In all ages, the wisest have always agreed in their judgment of life: it is no good.”
― Friedrich Nietzsche, Twilight of the Idols

“It may be nobility of the soul when a philosopher is silent, it may be love when he contradicts himself; and he who has knowledge maybe polite enough to lie.”
― Friedrich Nietzsche, Twilight of the Idols

“The genius, in work and deed, is necessarily a squanderer: that he squanders himself, that is his greatness! The instinct of self-preservation is suspended, as it were: the overpowering pressure of outflowing forces forbids him any such care or caution. People call this 'self-sacrifice' and praise his 'heroism,' his indifference to his own well-being, his devotion to an idea, a great cause, a fatherland: without exception, misunderstandings. He flows out, he overflows, he uses himself up, he does not spare himself — and this is a calamitous involuntary fatality, no less than a river's flooding the land. Yet, because much is owed to such explosives, much has also been given them in return: for example, a kind of higher morality. After all, that is the way of human gratitude: it misunderstands its benefactors.”
― Friedrich Nietzsche, Twilight of the Idols

“The value of a thing sometimes lies not in what one attains with it, but in what one pays for it–what it costs us.”
― Friedrich Nietzsche, Twilight of the Idols

“To bewail one's lot is always despicable: it is always the outcome of weakness. Whether one ascribes one's afflictions to others or to one's self, it is all the same.”
― Friedrich Nietzsche, Twilight of the Idols

“Wisdom sets bounds even to knowledge.”
― Friedrich Nietzsche, Twilight of the Idols

“Complaining is never any good: it stems from weakness. Whether one charges one’s misfortune to others or to oneself—the socialist does the former; the Christian, for example, the latter—really makes no difference. The common and, let us add, the unworthy thing is that it is supposed to be somebody’s fault that one is suffering; in short, that the sufferer prescribes the honey of revenge for himself against his suffering. The objects of this need for revenge, as a need for pleasure, are mere occasions: everywhere the sufferer finds occasions for satisfying his little revenge.”
― Friedrich Nietzsche, Twilight of the Idols

“To bewail one’s lot is always despicable: it is always the outcome of weakness. Whether one ascribes one’s afflictions to others or to one’s self, it is all the same. The socialist does the former, the Christian, for instance, does the latter. That which is common to both attitudes, or rather that which is equally ignoble in them both, is the fact that somebody must be to blame if one suffers—in short, that the sufferer drugs himself with the honey of revenge to allay his anguish.”
― Friedrich Nietzsche, Twilight of the Idols

“Tracing something unfamiliar back to something familiar alleviates us, calms us, pacifies us, and in addition provides a feeling of power. The unfamiliar brings with it danger, unrest, and care—our first instinct is to do away with these painful conditions. First principle: some explanation is better than none.”
― Friedrich Nietzsche, Twilight of the Idols

“My recreation, my preference, my cure from all Platonism has always been Thucydides. Thucydides and, perhaps, Machiavelli’s Principe are most closely related to myself by the unconditional will not to gull oneself and to see reason in reality–not in “reason,” still less in “morality.” For the wretched embellishment of the Greeks into an ideal, which the “classically educated” youth carries into life as a prize for his classroom drill, there is no more complete cure than Thucydides. One must follow him line by line and read no less clearly between the lines: there are few thinkers who say so much between the lines. With him the culture of the Sophists, by which I mean the culture of the realists, reaches its perfect expression–this inestimable movement amid the moralistic and idealistic swindle set loose on all sides by the Socratic schools. Greek philosophy: the decadence of the Greek instinct. Thucydides: the great sum, the last revelation of that strong, severe, hard factuality which was instinctive with the older Hellenes. In the end, it is courage in the face of reality that distinguishes a man like Thucydides from Plato: Plato is a coward before reality, consequently he flees into the ideal; Thucydides has control of himself, consequently he also maintains control of things.”
― Friedrich Nietzsche, Twilight of the Idols