Friedrich Nietzsche
Friedrich Nietzsche
Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzschewas a German philosopher, cultural critic, poet and Latin and Greek scholar whose work has exerted a profound influence on Western philosophy and modern intellectual history. He began his career as a classical philologist before turning to philosophy. He became the youngest ever to hold the Chair of Classical Philology at the University of Basel in 1869, at the age of 24. Nietzsche resigned in 1879 due to health problems that plagued him most of his life, and...
NationalityGerman
ProfessionPhilosopher
Date of Birth15 October 1844
CityRocken, Germany
CountryGermany
You know these things as thoughts, but your thoughts are not your experiences, they are an echo and after-effect of your experiences: as when your room trembles whe na carriage goes past. I however am sitting in the carriage, and often I am the carriage itself. Ina man who thinks like this, the dichotomy between thinking and feeling, intellect and passion, has really disappeared. He feels his thoughts. He can fall in love with an idea. An idea can make him ill.
Even the most beautiful scenery is no longer assured of our love after we have lived in it for three months, and some distant coast attracts our avarice: possessions are generally diminished by possession.
I love him who seeks to create over and beyond himself and thus perishes.
Love matches, so called, have illusion for their father and need for their mother.
This is what is hardest: to close the open hand because one loves.
This is the hardest of all: to close the open hand out of love, and keep modest as a giver.
Then is what you see through this window onto the world so lovely that you have no desire whatsoever to look out through any other window, and that you even make an attempt to prevent others from doing so?
The love of one sole being is a barbarism; for it will be employed to the detriment of all the rest. So too the love of God.
To discover he is loved in return ought really to disenchant the lover with the beloved.
Sensuality often makes love grow too quickly, so that the root remains weak and is easy to pull out.
Out of a brotherly love we occasionally embrace this or that somebody (because we cannot embrace everybody): but we must never letour somebody know it.
Loving and perishing: it's been a rhyme all these eternities. The will to love: that is, also being willing to die.
I devote myself to what I love the most, and for this very reason I hesitate to designate it with lofty words: I do not want to risk believing that it is a sublime compulsion, a law, which I obey: I love what I love the most too much to wish to appear to it as one compelled.
I feel all those human beings to be pernicious who can no longer oppose what they love: they thereby ruin the best things and people.