Part One
Aphorisms & Entr’Acts (Part Two)
from Beyond Good & Evil by Friedrich
Nietzsche
A sign of strong character, when once the resolution has been taken, to
shut the ear even to the best counter-arguments. Occasionally, therefore, a will to
stupidity.
There is no such thing as moral phenomena, but only a moral
interpretation of phenomena.
The criminal is often enough not equal to his deed: he extenuates and
maligns it.
The advocates of a criminal are seldom artists enough to turn the
beautiful terribleness of the deed to the advantage to the doer.
Our vanity is most difficult to wound just when our pride has been
wounded.
To him who feels himself preordained to contemplation and not to
belief, all believers are too noisy and obtrusive; he guards against them.
”You want to prepossess him in your favour? Then you must be
embarrassed before him.”
The immense expectation with regard to sexual love, and the coyness in
this expectation, spoils all the perspectives of women at the outset.
Where there is neither love nor hatred in the game, women’s play is
mediocre.
The great epochs of our life are at the points when we gain courage to
rebaptize our badness as the best in us.
The will to overcome an emotion, is ultimately only the will of another,
or of several other, emotions.
There is an innocence of admiration: it is possessed by him to whom it
has not yet occurred that he himself may be admired someday.
Our loathing of dirt may be so great as to prevent our cleaning
ourselves--”justifying” ourselves.
Sensuality often forces the growth of love too much, so that its root
remains weak, and is easily torn up.
It is curious that God learned Greek when he wished to turn
author--and that he did not learn it better.
To rejoice on account of praise is in many cases merely politeness of
heart--and the very opposite of vanity of spirit.
Even concubinage has been corrupted--by marriage.
He who exults at the stake, does not triumph over pain, but because of
the fact that he does not feel pain where he expected it. A parable.
When we have to change an opinion about any one, we charge heavily to
his account the inconvenience he thereby causes us.
A nation, or a people, is a detour of nature to arrive at six or seven great
men.--Yes, and then to get round them.
In the eyes of all true women science is hostile to the sense of shame.
They feel as if one wished to peep under their skin with it--or worse still! under their dress
and finery.
The more abstract the truth you wish to teach, the more must you allure
the senses to it.
The devil has the most extensive perspectives for God; on that account
he keeps so far away from him:--the devil, in effect, as the oldest friend of knowledge.
What a person is begins to betray itself when his talent
decreases,--when he ceases to show what he can do. Talent is also an
adornment; an adornment is also a concealment.
The sexes deceive themselves about each other: the reason is that in
reality they honour and love only themselves (or their own ideal, to express it more
agreeably). Thus man wishes woman to be peaceable: but in fact woman is
essentially unpeaceable, like the cat, however well she may have assumed the
peaceable demeanour.
One is punished best for one’s virtues.
He who cannot find the way to his ideal, lives more frivolously
and shamelessy than the man without an ideal.
Translated by Helen Ziimmern.
Part One
Part Three