Nietzsche - On Fathoming the Human Mind

The human soul and its limits, the range of man's inner experiences hitherto attained, the heights, depths, and distancesof these experiences, the entire history of the soul UP TO THE PRESENT TIME, and its still unexhausted possibilities: this isthe preordained hunting-domain for a born psychologist and lover if a "big hunt". But how often must he say despairingly tohimself: "A single individual! alas, only a single individual! and this great forest, this virgin forest!" So he would like to have some hundreds of hunting assistants, and fine trained hounds, that he could send into the history of the human soul, to drive HIS game together. In vain: again and again he experiences, profoundly and bitterly, how difficult it is to find assistants and dogs for all the things that directly excite his curiosity. The evil of sending scholars into new and dangerous hunting-domains, where courage, sagacity, and subtlety in every sense are required, is that they are no longer serviceable just when the "BIG hunt," and also the great danger commences,--it is precisely then that they lose their keen eye and nose...

--Friedrich Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil, Helen Zimmern translation

Nietzsche - The Will to Ignorance

O sancta simplicitiatas! In what strange simplification and falsification man lives! One can never cease wondering when once one has got eyes for beholding this marvel! How we have made everything around us clear and free and easy and simple! how we have been able to give our senses a passport to everything superficial, our thoughts a godlike desire for wanton pranks and wrong inferences!--how from the beginning, we have contrived to retain our ignorance in order to enjoy an almost inconceivable freedom, thoughtlessness, imprudence, heartiness, and gaiety--in order to enjoy life! And only on this solidified, granite-like foundation of ignorance could knowledge rear itself hitherto, the will to knowledge on the foundation of a far more powerful will, the will to ignorance...

--Friedrich Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil, Helen Zimmern translation

Nietzsche - Philosopher's Pain

We philosophers are not free to divide body from soul as the people do; we are even less free to divide soul from spirit. We are not thinking frogs, nor objectifying and registering mechanisms with their innards removed: constantly, we have to give birth to our thoughts out of our pain and, like mothers, endow them with all we have of blood, heart, fire, pleasure, passion, agony, conscience, fate, and catastrophe. Life — that means for us constantly transforming all that we are into light and flame — also everything that wounds us; we simply cannot do otherwise.

...Only great pain, the long, slow pain that takes its time — on which we are burned, as it were, with green wood — compels us philosophers to descend into our ultimate depths and to put aside all trust, everything good-natured, everything that would interpose a veil, that is mild, that is medium — things in which formerly we may have found our humanity. I doubt that such pain makes us "better"—; but I know that it makes us more profound. Whether we learn to pit our pride, our scorn, our will power against it, equaling the American Indian who, however tortured, repays his torturer with the malice of his tongue; or whether we withdraw from pain into that Oriental Nothing — called Nirvana — into mute, rigid, deaf resignation, self-forgetting, self-extinction: out of such long and dangerous exercises of self-mastery one emerges as a different person, with a few more question marks — above all with the will henceforth to question further, more deeply, severely, harshly, evilly, and quietly than one had questioned heretofore. The trust in life is gone: life itself has become a problem.— Yet one should not jump to the conclusion that this necessarily makes one gloomy! Even love of life is still possible — only one loves differently. ... The attraction of everything problematic, the delight in an X, however, is so great in such more spiritual, more spiritualized men that this delight flares up again and again like a bright blaze over all the distress of what is problematic, over all the danger of uncertainty, and even over the jealousy of the lover. We know a new happiness ....

--Friedrich Nietzsche, The Gay Science ("la gaya scienza"), Translation by Walter Kaufmann

Nietzsche - Weariness of Life

Concerning life, the wisest men of all ages have judged alike: it is no good ... Always and everywhere one has heard the same sound from their mouths—a sound full of doubt, full of melancholy, full of weariness of life, full of resistance to life. Even Socrates said, as he died: "To live—that means to be sick a long time: I owe Asclepius the Savior a rooster." Even Socrates was tired of it.— What does that evidence? What does it evince?— Formerly one would have said (—oh, it has been said, and loud enough, and especially by our pessimists!): "At least something of all this must be true! The consensus sapientum [consensus of the sages] evidences the truth."— Shall we still talk like that today? May we? "At least something must be sick here," we retort. These wisest men of all ages—they should first be scrutinized closely! Were they all perhaps shaky on their legs? late? tottery? décadents? Could it be that wisdom appears on earth as a raven, inspired by a little whiff of carrion? ...

--Friedrich Nietzsche, Twilight of the Idols, Translation by Walter Kaufmann

Nietzsche - The Superman

When Zarathustra arrived at the nearest town which adjoineth theforest, he found many people assembled in the market-place; for it had been announced that a rope-dancer would give a performance. And Zarathustra spake thus unto the people:

I teach you the Superman. Man is something that is to be surpassed. What have ye done to surpass man?

All beings hitherto have created something beyond themselves: and ye want to be the ebb of that great tide, and would rather go back to the beast than surpass man?

What is the ape to man? A laughing-stock, a thing of shame. And just the same shall man be to the Superman: a laughing-stock, a thing of shame.

Ye have made your way from the worm to man, and much within you is still worm. Once were ye apes, and even yet man is more of an ape than any of the apes. Even the wisest among you is only a disharmony and hybrid of plantand phantom. But do I bid you become phantoms or plants?
Lo, I teach you the Superman!

The Superman is the meaning of the earth. Let your will say: The Superman shall be the meaning of the earth!


--Friedrich Nietzsche, Thus Spake Zarathustra, translated by Thomas Common