olivieri-highlights/data/kindle/Kindle.Highlights_The.Gay.Science.The.Joyful.Wisdom.Digireads.com.Classic_1663759077599.json

Initial attempt to create a package that returns quotations selected specifically by me

{"asin":"B003TU1OCQ","title":"The Gay Science (The Joyful Wisdom) (Digireads.com Classic)","authors":"Friedrich Nietzsche and Thomas Common","highlights":[{"text":"the human race decree anew that \"there is something which really may not be laughed at.\"","isNoteOnly":false,"location":{"url":"kindle://book?action=open&asin=B003TU1OCQ&location=935","value":935},"note":null},{"text":"Everyone looks at you with strange eyes and continues to make use of his scales, calling this good and that bad; and no one blushes for shame when you remark that these weights are not the full amount,—there is also no indignation against you; perhaps they laugh at your doubt, I mean to say that the greater number of people do not find it contemptible to believe this or that, and live according to it, without having been previously aware of the ultimate and surest reasons for and against it, and without even giving themselves any trouble about such reasons afterwards, the most lifted men and the noblest women still belong to this \"greater number.\"","isNoteOnly":false,"location":{"url":"kindle://book?action=open&asin=B003TU1OCQ&location=945","value":945},"note":null},{"text":"not to be tempted to inexpedient activities by its impulses that is its wisdom and inspiration.","isNoteOnly":false,"location":{"url":"kindle://book?action=open&asin=B003TU1OCQ&location=967","value":967},"note":null},{"text":"the higher nature is more irrational:—for the noble, magnanimous, and self-sacrificing person succumbs in fact to his impulses, and in his best moments his reason lapses altogether.","isNoteOnly":false,"location":{"url":"kindle://book?action=open&asin=B003TU1OCQ&location=968","value":968},"note":null},{"text":"for the most part it believes in its passion as if it were the concealed passion of every one,","isNoteOnly":false,"location":{"url":"kindle://book?action=open&asin=B003TU1OCQ&location=983","value":983},"note":null},{"text":"The new, however, is under all circumstances the evil, as that which wants to conquer, which tries to upset the old boundary-stones and the old piety; only the old is the good!","isNoteOnly":false,"location":{"url":"kindle://book?action=open&asin=B003TU1OCQ&location=995","value":995},"note":null},{"text":"He who feels himself dishonored at the thought of being the instrument of a prince, or of a party and sect, or even of wealthy power (for example, as the descendant of a proud, ancient family), but wishes just to be this instrument, or must be so before himself and before the public—such a person has need of pathetic principles which can at all times be appealed to:—principles of an unconditional ought, to which a person can subject himself without shame, and can show himself subjected. All more refined servility holds fast to the categorical imperative, and is the mortal enemy of those who want to take away the unconditional character of duty: propriety demands this from them, and not only propriety.","isNoteOnly":false,"location":{"url":"kindle://book?action=open&asin=B003TU1OCQ&location=1013","value":1013},"note":null},{"text":"Loss of Dignity.—Meditation has lost all its dignity of form; the ceremonial and solemn bearing of the meditative person have been made a mockery, and one would no longer endure a wise man of the old style. We think too hastily and on the way and while walking and in the midst of business of all kinds, even when we think on the most serious matters; we require little preparation, even little quiet:—it is as if each of us carried about an unceasingly revolving machine in his head, which still works, even under the most unfavorable circumstances. Formerly it was perceived in a person that on some occasion he wanted to think—it was perhaps the exception!—that he now wanted to become wiser and collected his mind on a thought: he put on a long face for it, as for a prayer, and arrested his step—nay, stood still for hours on the street when the thought \"came\"—on one or on two legs. It was thus \"worthy of the affair\"!","isNoteOnly":false,"location":{"url":"kindle://book?action=open&asin=B003TU1OCQ&location=1022","value":1022},"note":"That’s why you use mind maps"},{"text":"with lines and refinements, and sculptures, which might perhaps give pleasure to a God with a divine microscope.","isNoteOnly":false,"location":{"url":"kindle://book?action=open&asin=B003TU1OCQ&location=1061","value":1061},"note":null},{"text":"We have all hidden gardens and plantations in us; and by another simile, we are all growing volcanoes, which will have their hours of eruption:—how","isNoteOnly":false,"location":{"url":"kindle://book?action=open&asin=B003TU1OCQ&location=1073","value":1073},"note":null},{"text":"But what if pleasure and pain should be so closely connected that he who wants the greatest possible amount of the one must also have the greatest possible amount of the other,—that he who wants to experience the \"heavenly high jubilation,\" [7] must also be ready to be \"sorrowful unto death\"?","isNoteOnly":false,"location":{"url":"kindle://book?action=open&asin=B003TU1OCQ&location=1107","value":1107},"note":null},{"text":"The Stoics at least believed it was so, and they were consistent when they wished to have the least possible pleasure, in order to have the least possible pain from life.","isNoteOnly":false,"location":{"url":"kindle://book?action=open&asin=B003TU1OCQ&location=1110","value":1110},"note":null},{"text":"(When one uses the expression: \"The virtuous man is the happiest,\" it is as much the sign-board of the school for the masses, as a casuistic subtlety for the subtle.)","isNoteOnly":false,"location":{"url":"kindle://book?action=open&asin=B003TU1OCQ&location=1111","value":1111},"note":"The masses want virtue to be happy. The subtle know the complexities of this."},{"text":"At present also ye have still the choice: either the least possible pain, in short painlessness and after all, socialists and politicians of all parties could not honorably promise more to their people, or the greatest possible amount of pain, as the price of the growth of a fullness of refined delights and enjoyments rarely tasted hitherto! If ye decide for the former, if ye therefore want to depress and minimize man's capacity for pain, well, ye must also depress and minimize his capacity for enjoyment.","isNoteOnly":false,"location":{"url":"kindle://book?action=open&asin=B003TU1OCQ&location=1112","value":1112},"note":null},{"text":"we want to show them the advantage there is in being in our power,—they thus become more contented with their position, and more hostile to the enemies of our power and readier to contend with them.","isNoteOnly":false,"location":{"url":"kindle://book?action=open&asin=B003TU1OCQ&location=1128","value":1128},"note":null},{"text":"He who under these circumstances feels that he \"is in possession of truth,\" how many possessions does he not let go, in order to preserve this feeling. What does he not throw overboard, in order to keep himself \"up,\"—that, to say, above the others who lack the \"truth\"!","isNoteOnly":false,"location":{"url":"kindle://book?action=open&asin=B003TU1OCQ&location=1132","value":1132},"note":null},{"text":"It is a question how a person is accustomed to season his life; it is a matter of taste whether a person would rather have the slow or the sudden, the safe or the dangerous and daring increase of power,—he seeks this or that seasoning always according to his temperament.","isNoteOnly":false,"location":{"url":"kindle://book?action=open&asin=B003TU1OCQ&location=1138","value":1138},"note":"Different strokes for different folks"},{"text":"Our pleasure in ourselves seeks to maintain itself by always transforming something new into ourselves,—that is just possessing.","isNoteOnly":false,"location":{"url":"kindle://book?action=open&asin=B003TU1OCQ&location=1156","value":1156},"note":"Ask Julia and Nimit about this"},{"text":"To become satiated with a possession, that is to become satiated with ourselves.","isNoteOnly":false,"location":{"url":"kindle://book?action=open&asin=B003TU1OCQ&location=1157","value":1157},"note":null},{"text":"that out of this love the conception of love as the antithesis of egoism should have been derived, when it is perhaps precisely the most unqualified expression of egoism.","isNoteOnly":false,"location":{"url":"kindle://book?action=open&asin=B003TU1OCQ&location=1168","value":1168},"note":null},{"text":"Here, evidently, the non-possessors and desirers have determined the usage of language,—there were, of course, always too many of them.","isNoteOnly":false,"location":{"url":"kindle://book?action=open&asin=B003TU1OCQ&location=1170","value":1170},"note":null},{"text":"One must be able to dissimulate in intercourse with persons who are ashamed of their feelings; they take a sudden aversion to anyone who surprises them in a state of tenderness, or of enthusiastic and high-running feeling, as if he had seen their secrets. If one wants to be kind to them in such moments one should make them laugh, or say some kind of cold, playful wickedness:—their feeling thereby congeals, and they are again self-possessed.","isNoteOnly":false,"location":{"url":"kindle://book?action=open&asin=B003TU1OCQ&location=1188","value":1188},"note":null},{"text":"But I give the moral before the story.—We were once on a time so near one another in the course of our lives, that nothing more seemed to hinder our friendship and fraternity, and there was merely a small plank between us. While you were just about to step on it, I asked you: \"Do you want to come across the plank to me?\" But then you did not want to come any longer; and when I again entreated, you were silent. Since then mountains and torrents, and whatever separates and alienates, have interposed between us, and even if we wanted to come to one another, we could no longer do so! When, however, you now remember that small plank, you have no longer words,—but merely sobs and amazement.","isNoteOnly":false,"location":{"url":"kindle://book?action=open&asin=B003TU1OCQ&location=1191","value":1191},"note":null},{"text":"The Greek philosopher went through life with the secret feeling that there were many more slaves than people supposed—that is to say, that everyone was a slave who was not a philosopher.","isNoteOnly":false,"location":{"url":"kindle://book?action=open&asin=B003TU1OCQ&location=1211","value":1211},"note":null},{"text":"The poison by which the weaker nature is destroyed is strengthening to the strong individual and he does not call it poison.","isNoteOnly":false,"location":{"url":"kindle://book?action=open&asin=B003TU1OCQ&location=1221","value":1221},"note":null},{"text":"If you have a virtue, an actual, perfect virtue (and not merely a kind of impulse towards virtue!)—you are its victim!","isNoteOnly":false,"location":{"url":"kindle://book?action=open&asin=B003TU1OCQ&location=1237","value":1237},"note":null},{"text":"The maxim, \"Thou shalt renounce thyself and offer thyself as a sacrifice,\" in order not to be inconsistent with its own morality, could only be decreed by a being who himself renounced his own advantage thereby, and who perhaps in the required self-sacrifice of individuals brought about his own dissolution.","isNoteOnly":false,"location":{"url":"kindle://book?action=open&asin=B003TU1OCQ&location=1270","value":1270},"note":"So… Jesus?"},{"text":"arrival of M. Montaigne, who knows how to joke so pleasantly about his sickness,—he suffers from stone.","isNoteOnly":false,"location":{"url":"kindle://book?action=open&asin=B003TU1OCQ&location=1281","value":1281},"note":null},{"text":"But one is accustomed to overlook the fact that the old national energy and national passion, which acquired a magnificent splendor in war and in the tourney, has now transferred itself into innumerable private passions, and has merely become less visible; indeed in periods of \"corruption\" the quantity and quality of the expended energy of a people is probably greater than ever, and the individual spends it lavishly, to such an extent as could not be done formerly—he was not then rich enough to do so!","isNoteOnly":false,"location":{"url":"kindle://book?action=open&asin=B003TU1OCQ&location=1308","value":1308},"note":null},{"text":"that cruelty now becomes more refined,","isNoteOnly":false,"location":{"url":"kindle://book?action=open&asin=B003TU1OCQ&location=1315","value":1315},"note":"Dirty work"},{"text":"what Napoleon once uttered in his classical style—\"I have the right to answer by an eternal 'thus I am' to everything about which complaint is brought against me. I am apart from all the world, I accept conditions from nobody.","isNoteOnly":false,"location":{"url":"kindle://book?action=open&asin=B003TU1OCQ&location=1334","value":1334},"note":null},{"text":"Corruption is only an abusive term for the harvest time of a people.","isNoteOnly":false,"location":{"url":"kindle://book?action=open&asin=B003TU1OCQ&location=1339","value":1339},"note":"30 Rock generations quote reversed"},{"text":"The Self-Renouncer.—What does the self-renouncer do? He strives after a higher world, he wants to fly longer and further and higher than all men of affirmation—he throws away many things that would impede his flight, and several things among them that are not valueless, that are not unpleasant to him: he sacrifices them to his desire for elevation. Now this sacrificing, this casting away, is the very thing which becomes visible in him: on that account one calls him a self-renouncer, and as such he stands before us, enveloped in his cowl, and as the soul of a hair-shirt. With this effect, however, which he makes upon us he is well content: he wants to keep concealed from us his desire, his pride, his intention of flying above us.—Yes! He is wiser than we thought, and so courteous towards us—this affirmer! For that is what he is, like us, even in his self-renunciation.","isNoteOnly":false,"location":{"url":"kindle://book?action=open&asin=B003TU1OCQ&location=1375","value":1375},"note":null},{"text":"the reasons and intentions behind the habit, are only added surreptitiously when people begin to combat the habit, and ask for reasons and intentions.","isNoteOnly":false,"location":{"url":"kindle://book?action=open&asin=B003TU1OCQ&location=1399","value":1399},"note":null},{"text":"Buying and selling is now regarded as something ordinary, like the art of reading and writing; everyone is now trained to it even when he is not a tradesman exercising himself daily in the art; precisely as formerly in the period of uncivilized humanity, everyone was a hunter and exercised himself day by day in the art of hunting.","isNoteOnly":false,"location":{"url":"kindle://book?action=open&asin=B003TU1OCQ&location=1418","value":1418},"note":null},{"text":"the necessity for this art will become quite lost; perhaps it may then happen that individuals who are less subjected to the law of the prevailing condition of things will indulge in buying and selling as a luxury of sentiment.","isNoteOnly":false,"location":{"url":"kindle://book?action=open&asin=B003TU1OCQ&location=1423","value":1423},"note":null},{"text":"became indiscreet about himself in his last words; for the first time he let his mask fall, when he gave to understand that he had carried a mask and played a comedy,—he had played the father of his country and wisdom on the throne well, even to the point of illusion!","isNoteOnly":false,"location":{"url":"kindle://book?action=open&asin=B003TU1OCQ&location=1462","value":1462},"note":null},{"text":"Explosive People.—When one considers how ready are the forces of young men for discharge, one does not wonder at seeing them decide so uncritically and with so little selection for this or that cause: that which attracts them is the sight of eagerness for a cause, as it were the sight of the burning match—not the cause itself. The more ingenious seducers on that account operate by holding out the prospect of an explosion to such persons, and do not urge their cause by means of reasons; these powder-barrels are not won over by means of reasons!","isNoteOnly":false,"location":{"url":"kindle://book?action=open&asin=B003TU1OCQ&location=1482","value":1482},"note":"JP—does he know this describes himself"},{"text":"Against Remorse.—The thinker sees in his own actions attempts and questionings to obtain information about something or other; success and failure are answers to him first and foremost. To vex himself, however, because something does not succeed, or to feel remorse at all—he leaves that to those who act because they are commanded to do so, and expect to get a beating when their gracious master is not satisfied with the result.","isNoteOnly":false,"location":{"url":"kindle://book?action=open&asin=B003TU1OCQ&location=1519","value":1519},"note":null},{"text":"They are not so much afraid of ennui as of labor without pleasure; indeed they require much ennui, if their work is to succeed with them. For the thinker and for all inventive spirits ennui is the unpleasant \"calm\" of the soul which precedes the happy voyage and the dancing breezes; he must endure it, he must await the effect it has on him:—it is precisely this which lesser natures cannot at all experience!","isNoteOnly":false,"location":{"url":"kindle://book?action=open&asin=B003TU1OCQ&location=1532","value":1532},"note":null},{"text":"In magnanimity there is the same amount of egoism as in revenge, but a different quality of egoism.","isNoteOnly":false,"location":{"url":"kindle://book?action=open&asin=B003TU1OCQ&location=1629","value":1629},"note":null},{"text":"Certainly not that he generally follows his passions; there are contemptible passions.","isNoteOnly":false,"location":{"url":"kindle://book?action=open&asin=B003TU1OCQ&location=1675","value":1675},"note":"Why should I care if you think my passion is noble? I shouldn’t, but you do and you wouldn’t partake in it yourself so you don’t respect it in me."},{"text":"But that the passion which seizes the noble man is a peculiarity, without his knowing that it is so: the use of a rare and singular measuring-rod, almost a frenzy: the feeling of heat in things which feel cold to all other persons: a divining of values for which scales have not yet been invented: a sacrificing on altars which are consecrated to an unknown God: a bravery without the desire for honor: a self-sufficiency which has superabundance, and imparts to men and things.","isNoteOnly":false,"location":{"url":"kindle://book?action=open&asin=B003TU1OCQ&location=1676","value":1676},"note":null},{"text":"","isNoteOnly":true,"location":{"url":"kindle://book?action=open&asin=B003TU1OCQ&location=1734","value":1734},"note":"Oy vey, Friedrich. Why are you so grossed out by periods? You ought to know better than that."},{"text":"It is really here only that all the \"honor\" of woman is at stake; what would one not forgive them in other respects! But here they are intended to remain ignorant to the very backbone:—they are intended to have neither eyes, ears, words, nor thoughts for this, their \"wickedness\"; indeed knowledge here is already evil. And then! To be hurled as with an awful thunderbolt into reality and knowledge with marriage—and indeed by him whom they most love and esteem: to have to encounter love and shame in contradiction, yea, to have to feel rapture, abandonment, duty, sympathy, and fright at the unexpected proximity of God and animal, and whatever else besides! all at once!—There, in fact, a psychic entanglement has been effected which is quite unequalled! Even the sympathetic curiosity of the wisest discerner of men does not suffice to divine how this or that woman gets along with the solution of this enigma and the enigma of this solution; what dreadful, far-reaching suspicions must awaken thereby in the poor unhinged soul; and forsooth, how the ultimate philosophy and skepticism of the woman casts anchor at this point!—Afterwards","isNoteOnly":false,"location":{"url":"kindle://book?action=open&asin=B003TU1OCQ&location=1840","value":1840},"note":null},{"text":"In short, one cannot be gentle enough towards women!","isNoteOnly":false,"location":{"url":"kindle://book?action=open&asin=B003TU1OCQ&location=1851","value":1851},"note":null},{"text":"the excellent, select taste on the other hand has always something of a seeking, tentative character, not fully certain that it understands,—it is never, and has never been popular!","isNoteOnly":false,"location":{"url":"kindle://book?action=open&asin=B003TU1OCQ&location=1910","value":1910},"note":null},{"text":"In good society one must never want to be in the right absolutely and solely, as all pure logic requires;","isNoteOnly":false,"location":{"url":"kindle://book?action=open&asin=B003TU1OCQ&location=1986","value":1986},"note":null},{"text":"they conquered when they translated,—not","isNoteOnly":false,"location":{"url":"kindle://book?action=open&asin=B003TU1OCQ&location=2005","value":2005},"note":null},{"text":"Men, whose life is not \"action\" but business, sit in front of the stage and look at strange beings to whom life is more than business?","isNoteOnly":false,"location":{"url":"kindle://book?action=open&asin=B003TU1OCQ&location=2073","value":2073},"note":null},{"text":"He who has enough of tragedy and comedy in himself surely prefers to remain away from the theatre;","isNoteOnly":false,"location":{"url":"kindle://book?action=open&asin=B003TU1OCQ&location=2075","value":2075},"note":null},{"text":"Giacomo Leopardi, Prosper Mérimée, Ralph Waldo Emerson, and Walter Savage Landor the author of Imaginary Conversations, as worthy to be called masters of prose.","isNoteOnly":false,"location":{"url":"kindle://book?action=open&asin=B003TU1OCQ&location=2144","value":2144},"note":null},{"text":"B: But why, then, do you write? A: Well, my dear Sir, to tell you in confidence, I have hitherto found no other means of getting rid of my thoughts.","isNoteOnly":false,"location":{"url":"kindle://book?action=open&asin=B003TU1OCQ&location=2151","value":2151},"note":null},{"text":"The Loquacity of Authors.—There is a loquacity of anger—frequent in Luther, also in Schopenhauer. A loquacity which comes from too great a store of conceptual formulæ, as in Kant. A loquacity which comes from delight in ever new modifications of the same idea: one finds it in Montaigne. A loquacity of malicious natures: whoever reads writings of our period will recollect two authors in this connection. A loquacity which comes from delight in fine words and forms of speech: by no means rare in Goethe's prose. A loquacity which comes from pure satisfaction in noise and confusion of feelings: for example in Carlyle.","isNoteOnly":false,"location":{"url":"kindle://book?action=open&asin=B003TU1OCQ&location=2197","value":2197},"note":"What is his loquacità?"},{"text":"Finally, it is of little importance what the philosophy of an artist is, provided it is only a supplementary philosophy, and does not do any injury to his art itself.","isNoteOnly":false,"location":{"url":"kindle://book?action=open&asin=B003TU1OCQ&location=2268","value":2268},"note":null},{"text":"discovers with astonishment how awkward and incompetent all of them are in the expression of their gratitude, and indeed how rarely gratitude is able even to express itself.","isNoteOnly":false,"location":{"url":"kindle://book?action=open&asin=B003TU1OCQ&location=2286","value":2286},"note":null},{"text":"A Word for Philologists.—It is thought that there are books so valuable and royal that whole generations of scholars are well employed when through their efforts these books are kept genuine and intelligible,—to confirm this belief again and again is the purpose of philology. It presupposes that the rare men are not lacking (though they may not be visible), who actually know how to use such valuable books:—those men perhaps who write such books themselves, or could write them. I mean to say that philology presupposes a noble belief,—that for the benefit of some few who are always \"to come,\" and are not there, a very great amount of painful, and even dirty labor has to be done beforehand: it is all labor in usum Delphinorum.","isNoteOnly":false,"location":{"url":"kindle://book?action=open&asin=B003TU1OCQ&location=2306","value":2306},"note":"Who is that future person who will get value from the obscure book some scholar spends years on? What is all this accumulated knowledge for?"},{"text":"people soon have the words and modes of expression, and finally also the thoughts which just suit these tones!","isNoteOnly":false,"location":{"url":"kindle://book?action=open&asin=B003TU1OCQ&location=2361","value":2361},"note":"Sapir-Whorf"},{"text":"We must rest from ourselves occasionally by contemplating and looking down upon ourselves, and by laughing or weeping over ourselves from an artistic remoteness:","isNoteOnly":false,"location":{"url":"kindle://book?action=open&asin=B003TU1OCQ&location=2399","value":2399},"note":null},{"text":"as long as you are still ashamed of your selves in any way, you still do not belong to us!","isNoteOnly":false,"location":{"url":"kindle://book?action=open&asin=B003TU1OCQ&location=2408","value":2408},"note":null},{"text":"We know tolerably well what the organic is;","isNoteOnly":false,"location":{"url":"kindle://book?action=open&asin=B003TU1OCQ&location=2421","value":2421},"note":"Do we? Can we define life?"},{"text":"guard against ascribing to it heartlessness and unreason, or their opposites; it is neither perfect, nor beautiful, nor noble; nor does it seek to be anything of the kind, it does not at all attempt to imitate man! It is altogether unaffected by our æsthetic and moral judgments! Neither has it any self-preservative instinct, nor instinct at all; it also knows no law. Let us be on our guard against saying that there are laws in nature. There are only necessities: there is no one who commands, no one who obeys, no one who transgresses. When you know that there is no design, you know also that there is no chance:","isNoteOnly":false,"location":{"url":"kindle://book?action=open&asin=B003TU1OCQ&location=2432","value":2432},"note":"Judge Holden"},{"text":"the beings not seeing correctly had an advantage over those who saw everything \"in flux.\" In itself every high degree of circumspection in conclusions, every skeptical inclination, is a great danger to life.","isNoteOnly":false,"location":{"url":"kindle://book?action=open&asin=B003TU1OCQ&location=2489","value":2489},"note":null},{"text":"The peculiarity, for example, in every chemical process seems a \"miracle,\" the same as before, just like all locomotion; nobody has \"explained\" impulse. How could we ever explain! We operate only with things which do not exist, with lines, surfaces, bodies, atoms, divisible times, divisible spaces—how can explanation ever be possible when we first make everything a conception, our conception!","isNoteOnly":false,"location":{"url":"kindle://book?action=open&asin=B003TU1OCQ&location=2502","value":2502},"note":"Thus phenomenonology"},{"text":"we always learn to describe ourselves more accurately by describing things and their successions.","isNoteOnly":false,"location":{"url":"kindle://book?action=open&asin=B003TU1OCQ&location=2506","value":2506},"note":null},{"text":"By morality the individual is taught to become a function of the herd, and to ascribe to himself value only as a function.","isNoteOnly":false,"location":{"url":"kindle://book?action=open&asin=B003TU1OCQ&location=2541","value":2541},"note":null},{"text":"While we feel law and regulation as constraint and loss, people formerly regarded egoism as a painful thing, and a veritable evil. For a person to be himself, to value himself according to his own measure and weight—that was then quite distasteful. The inclination to such a thing would have been regarded as madness; for all miseries and terrors were associated with being alone.","isNoteOnly":false,"location":{"url":"kindle://book?action=open&asin=B003TU1OCQ&location=2553","value":2553},"note":"What about Alcibiades?Is this why he wanted to return to Athens?Still feels like a big claim."},{"text":"Gladness and covetousness are united in the stronger person, who wants to transform something to his function: gladness and desire-to-be-coveted in the weaker person, who would like to become a function.—The","isNoteOnly":false,"location":{"url":"kindle://book?action=open&asin=B003TU1OCQ&location=2566","value":2566},"note":null},{"text":"delight in wanting to be a function; they strive after it, and have the keenest scent for all those positions in which precisely they themselves can be functions. Among such persons are those women who transform themselves into just that function of a man that is but weakly developed in him, and then become his purse, or his politics, or his social intercourse. Such beings maintain themselves best when they insert themselves in an alien organism; if they do not succeed they become vexed, irritated, and eat themselves up.","isNoteOnly":false,"location":{"url":"kindle://book?action=open&asin=B003TU1OCQ&location=2572","value":2572},"note":"Couldn’t you define almost anyone as a function in one way or another?"},{"text":"it made the great virtuous ones, of whom antiquity had no lack, vanish for ever from the earth, those popular men, who, in the belief in their perfection, walked about with the dignity of a hero of the bull-fight.","isNoteOnly":false,"location":{"url":"kindle://book?action=open&asin=B003TU1OCQ&location=2602","value":2602},"note":"Odd that you say they vanished forever but used a modern personality to compare them to."},{"text":"Mystical explanations are regarded as profound; the truth is that they do not even go the length of being superficial.","isNoteOnly":false,"location":{"url":"kindle://book?action=open&asin=B003TU1OCQ&location=2663","value":2663},"note":null},{"text":"Prayer has been devised for such men as have never any thoughts of their own, and to whom an elevation of the soul is unknown, or passes unnoticed; what shall these people do in holy places and in all important situations in life which require repose and some kind of dignity? In order at least that they may not disturb, the wisdom of all the founders of religions, the small as well as the great, has commended to them the formula of prayer, as a long mechanical labor of the lips, united with an effort of the memory, and with a uniform, prescribed attitude of hands and feet—and eyes! They may then, like the Tibetans, chew the cud of their \"om mane padme hum,\" innumerable times, or, as in Benares, count the name of the God Ram-Ram-Ram (etc., with or without grace) on their fingers; or honor Vishnu with his thousand names of invocation, Allah with his ninety-nine; or they may make use of the prayer-wheels and the rosary: the main thing is that they are settled down for a time at this work, and present a tolerable appearance; their mode of prayer is devised for the advantage of the pious who have thought and elevation of their own. But even these have their weary hours when a series of venerable words and sounds, and a mechanical, pious ritual does them good. But supposing that these rare men—in every religion the religious man is an exception—know how to help themselves, the poor in spirit do not know, and to forbid them the prayer-babbling would mean to take their religion from them,","isNoteOnly":false,"location":{"url":"kindle://book?action=open&asin=B003TU1OCQ&location=2693","value":2693},"note":null},{"text":"those Indian teachers, praise a purely vegetable diet, and would like to make it a law for the masses: they want thereby to call forth and augment the need which they are in a position to satisfy.","isNoteOnly":false,"location":{"url":"kindle://book?action=open&asin=B003TU1OCQ&location=2843","value":2843},"note":null},{"text":"The Tartars, for example, according to their name, are \"the dogs\"; they were so christened by the Chinese. \"Deutschen\" (Germans) means originally \"heathen\": it is thus that the Goths after their conversion named the great mass of their unbaptized fellow-tribes, according to the indication in their translation of the Septuagint, in which the heathen are designated by the word which in Greek signifies \"the nations.\"","isNoteOnly":false,"location":{"url":"kindle://book?action=open&asin=B003TU1OCQ&location=2849","value":2849},"note":null},{"text":"An Inconvenient Peculiarity.—To find everything deep is an inconvenient peculiarity: it makes one constantly strain one's eyes, so that in the end one always finds more than one wishes.","isNoteOnly":false,"location":{"url":"kindle://book?action=open&asin=B003TU1OCQ&location=2946","value":2946},"note":null},{"text":"We are only in our own society always.","isNoteOnly":false,"location":{"url":"kindle://book?action=open&asin=B003TU1OCQ&location=2987","value":2987},"note":null},{"text":"After all, however, it is a matter of indifference whether one opinion is imposed upon the herd, or five opinions are permitted to it.—He who diverges from the five public opinions and goes apart, has always the whole herd against him.","isNoteOnly":false,"location":{"url":"kindle://book?action=open&asin=B003TU1OCQ&location=3033","value":3033},"note":null},{"text":"Thoughts are the shadows of our sentiments—always however obscurer, emptier and simpler.","isNoteOnly":false,"location":{"url":"kindle://book?action=open&asin=B003TU1OCQ&location=3059","value":3059},"note":null},{"text":"Against many a Vindication.—The most perfidious manner of injuring a cause is to vindicate it intentionally with fallacious arguments.","isNoteOnly":false,"location":{"url":"kindle://book?action=open&asin=B003TU1OCQ&location=3116","value":3116},"note":"We think alike"},{"text":"The proud man is vexed even with those who help him forward: he looks angrily at his carriage-horses","isNoteOnly":false,"location":{"url":"kindle://book?action=open&asin=B003TU1OCQ&location=3151","value":3151},"note":null},{"text":"Virtue gives happiness and a state of blessedness only to those who have a strong faith in their virtue:—not, however, to the more refined souls whose virtue consists of a profound distrust of themselves and of all virtue. After all, therefore, it is \"faith that saves\" here also!—and be it well observed, not virtue!","isNoteOnly":false,"location":{"url":"kindle://book?action=open&asin=B003TU1OCQ&location=3225","value":3225},"note":null},{"text":"Without Envy.—He is wholly without envy, but there is no merit therein: for he wants to conquer a land which no one has yet possessed and hardly anyone has even seen.","isNoteOnly":false,"location":{"url":"kindle://book?action=open&asin=B003TU1OCQ&location=3341","value":3341},"note":"I don’t mind not having merit"},{"text":"(it is an element of my happiness not to be a house-owner!).","isNoteOnly":false,"location":{"url":"kindle://book?action=open&asin=B003TU1OCQ&location=3351","value":3351},"note":null},{"text":"The Sigh of the Seeker of Knowledge.—\"Oh, my covetousness! In this soul there is no disinterestedness but an all-desiring self, which, by means of many individuals, would fain see as with its own eyes, and grasp as with its own hands—a self bringing back even the entire past, and wanting to lose nothing that could in any way belong to it! Oh, this flame of my covetousness! Oh, that I were reincarnated in a hundred individuals!\"—He who does not know this sigh by experience, does not know the passion of the seeker of knowledge either.","isNoteOnly":false,"location":{"url":"kindle://book?action=open&asin=B003TU1OCQ&location=3392","value":3392},"note":null},{"text":"Against Embarrassment.—He who is always thoroughly occupied is rid of all embarrassment.","isNoteOnly":false,"location":{"url":"kindle://book?action=open&asin=B003TU1OCQ&location=3421","value":3421},"note":null},{"text":"What makes Heroic?—To face simultaneously one's greatest suffering and one's highest hope.","isNoteOnly":false,"location":{"url":"kindle://book?action=open&asin=B003TU1OCQ&location=3484","value":3484},"note":null},{"text":"What dost thou think most humane?—To spare a person shame.","isNoteOnly":false,"location":{"url":"kindle://book?action=open&asin=B003TU1OCQ&location=3508","value":3508},"note":null},{"text":"What is the Seal of Attained Liberty?—To be no longer ashamed of oneself.","isNoteOnly":false,"location":{"url":"kindle://book?action=open&asin=B003TU1OCQ&location=3512","value":3512},"note":null},{"text":"I wish to be at any time hereafter only a yea-sayer!","isNoteOnly":false,"location":{"url":"kindle://book?action=open&asin=B003TU1OCQ&location=3539","value":3539},"note":null},{"text":"now when it is obvious that all and everything that happens to us always turns out for the best. The life of every day and of every hour seems to be anxious for nothing else but always to prove this proposition anew; let it be what it will, bad or good weather, the loss of a friend, a sickness, a calumny, the non-receipt of a letter, the spraining of one's foot, a glance into a shop-window, a counter-argument, the opening of a book, a dream, a deception:—it shows itself immediately, or very soon afterwards, as something \"not permitted to be absent,\"—it is full of profound significance and utility precisely for us!","isNoteOnly":false,"location":{"url":"kindle://book?action=open&asin=B003TU1OCQ&location=3546","value":3546},"note":null},{"text":"wish to content ourselves with the assumption that our own practical and theoretical skillfulness in explaining and suitably arranging events has now reached its highest point.","isNoteOnly":false,"location":{"url":"kindle://book?action=open&asin=B003TU1OCQ&location=3553","value":3553},"note":"Yes. This is exactly what I read this book to find."},{"text":"We do not want either to think too highly of this dexterity of our wisdom, when the wonderful harmony which results from playing on our instrument sometimes surprises us too much: a harmony which sounds too well for us to dare to ascribe it to ourselves. In fact, now and then there is one who plays with us—beloved Chance: he leads our hand occasionally, and even the all-wisest Providence could not devise any finer music than that of which our foolish hand is then capable.","isNoteOnly":false,"location":{"url":"kindle://book?action=open&asin=B003TU1OCQ&location=3554","value":3554},"note":"Play your experience like a million stranded harp."},{"text":"we want to go for a walk in ourselves when we wander in these halls and gardens.","isNoteOnly":false,"location":{"url":"kindle://book?action=open&asin=B003TU1OCQ&location=3595","value":3595},"note":null},{"text":"","isNoteOnly":true,"location":{"url":"kindle://book?action=open&asin=B003TU1OCQ&location=3628","value":3628},"note":"How brave of him to show that even a genius can say such idiot things."},{"text":"everything good, clever, or great that they do, is first of all an argument against the skeptic that dwells in them: the question is how to convince or persuade this skeptic, and for that purpose genius almost is needed. They are signally dissatisfied with themselves.","isNoteOnly":false,"location":{"url":"kindle://book?action=open&asin=B003TU1OCQ&location=3633","value":3633},"note":null},{"text":"Short-lived Habits.—I love short-lived habits, and regard them as an invaluable means for getting a knowledge of many things and various conditions, to the very bottom of their sweetness and bitterness; my nature is altogether arranged for short-lived habits, even in the needs of its bodily health, and in general, as far as I can see, from the lowest up to the highest matters. I always think that this will at last satisfy me permanently (the short-lived habit has also this characteristic belief of passion, the belief in everlasting duration;","isNoteOnly":false,"location":{"url":"kindle://book?action=open&asin=B003TU1OCQ&location=3765","value":3765},"note":null},{"text":"peaceably, and as though satisfied with me, as I am with it; as if we had to be mutually thankful, and thus shook hands for farewell.","isNoteOnly":false,"location":{"url":"kindle://book?action=open&asin=B003TU1OCQ&location=3771","value":3771},"note":null},{"text":"So it is with me as regards foods, thoughts, men, cities, poems, music, doctrines, arrangements of the day, and modes of life.—On the other hand, I hate permanent habits, and feel as if a tyrant came into my neighborhood, and as if my life's breath condensed,","isNoteOnly":false,"location":{"url":"kindle://book?action=open&asin=B003TU1OCQ&location=3773","value":3773},"note":null},{"text":"we, however, want to be the poets of our lives, and first of all in the smallest and most commonplace matters.","isNoteOnly":false,"location":{"url":"kindle://book?action=open&asin=B003TU1OCQ&location=3820","value":3820},"note":null},{"text":"Higher men are distinguished from lower, by seeing and hearing immensely more, and in a thoughtful manner—and it is precisely this that distinguishes man from the animal, and the higher animal from the lower. The world always becomes fuller for him who grows up to the full stature of humanity; there are always more interesting fishing-hooks, thrown out to him; the number of his stimuli is continually on the increase, and similarly the varieties of his pleasure and pain,—the higher man becomes always at the same time happier and unhappier.","isNoteOnly":false,"location":{"url":"kindle://book?action=open&asin=B003TU1OCQ&location=3838","value":3838},"note":null},{"text":"Something now appears to thee as an error which thou formerly lovedst as a truth, or as a probability: thou pushest it from thee and imaginest that thy reason has there gained a victory. But perhaps that error was then, when thou wast still another person—thou art always another person,—just as necessary to thee as all thy present \"truths,\"","isNoteOnly":false,"location":{"url":"kindle://book?action=open&asin=B003TU1OCQ&location=3920","value":3920},"note":null},{"text":"Here are my defects and mistakes, here are my illusions, my bad taste, my confusion, my tears, my vanity, my owlish concealment, my contradictions! Here you have something to laugh at! Laugh then, and enjoy yourselves! I am not averse to the law and nature of things, which is that defects and errors should give pleasure!—To","isNoteOnly":false,"location":{"url":"kindle://book?action=open&asin=B003TU1OCQ&location=3967","value":3967},"note":null},{"text":"however, we do not think thus when we are brave; we do not think about it at all.","isNoteOnly":false,"location":{"url":"kindle://book?action=open&asin=B003TU1OCQ&location=3971","value":3971},"note":null},{"text":"We our selves want to be our own experiments, and our own subjects of experiment.","isNoteOnly":false,"location":{"url":"kindle://book?action=open&asin=B003TU1OCQ&location=4039","value":4039},"note":null},{"text":"\"Life as a means to knowledge\"—with","isNoteOnly":false,"location":{"url":"kindle://book?action=open&asin=B003TU1OCQ&location=4073","value":4073},"note":null},{"text":"the belief in the reprehensibility of egoism, preached with such stubbornness and conviction, has on the whole done harm to egoism (in favor of the herd-instinct, as I shall repeat a hundred times!),","isNoteOnly":false,"location":{"url":"kindle://book?action=open&asin=B003TU1OCQ&location=4114","value":4114},"note":"Self aware"},{"text":"Work is winning over more and more the good conscience to its side: the desire for enjoyment already calls itself \"need of recreation,\" and even begins to be ashamed of itself. \"One owes it to one's health,\" people say, when they are caught at a picnic.","isNoteOnly":false,"location":{"url":"kindle://book?action=open&asin=B003TU1OCQ&location=4140","value":4140},"note":null},{"text":"Formerly it was the very reverse: it was \"action\" that suffered from a bad conscience. A man of good family concealed his work when need compelled him to labor. The slave labored under the weight of the feeling that he did something contemptible:—the \"doing\" itself was something contemptible.","isNoteOnly":false,"location":{"url":"kindle://book?action=open&asin=B003TU1OCQ&location=4144","value":4144},"note":null},{"text":"—He who still thinks that \"each would have to act in this manner in this case,\" has not yet advanced half a dozen paces in self-knowledge: otherwise he would know that there neither are, nor can be, similar actions, that every action that has been done, has been done in an entirely unique and inimitable manner,","isNoteOnly":false,"location":{"url":"kindle://book?action=open&asin=B003TU1OCQ&location=4234","value":4234},"note":null},{"text":"The entire economy of my soul and its adjustment by \"misfortune,\" the uprising of new sources and needs, the closing up of old wounds, the repudiation of whole periods of the past—none of these things which may be connected with misfortune preoccupy the dear sympathiser.","isNoteOnly":false,"location":{"url":"kindle://book?action=open&asin=B003TU1OCQ&location=4287","value":4287},"note":null},{"text":"How is it at all possible for a person to keep to his path! Some cry or other is continually calling one aside: our eye then rarely lights on anything without it becoming necessary for us to leave for a moment our own affairs and rush to give assistance. I know there are hundreds of respectable and laudable methods of making me stray from my course, and in truth the most \"moral\" of methods! Indeed, the opinion of the present-day preachers of the morality of compassion goes so far as to imply that just this, and this alone is moral:—to stray from our course to that extent and to run to the assistance of our neighbor. I am equally certain that I need only give myself over to the sight of one case of actual distress, and I, too, am lost!","isNoteOnly":false,"location":{"url":"kindle://book?action=open&asin=B003TU1OCQ&location=4298","value":4298},"note":null},{"text":"Indeed, there is even a secret seduction in all this awakening of compassion, and calling for help: our \"own way\" is a thing too hard and insistent, and too far removed from the love and gratitude of others,—we escape from it and from our most personal conscience, not at all unwillingly, and, seeking security in the conscience of others, we take refuge in the lovely temple of the \"religion of pity.\"","isNoteOnly":false,"location":{"url":"kindle://book?action=open&asin=B003TU1OCQ&location=4305","value":4305},"note":null},{"text":"in the sacrifice for their country they have finally that long-sought-for permission—the permission to shirk their aim:—war is for them a detour to suicide, a detour, however, with a good conscience.","isNoteOnly":false,"location":{"url":"kindle://book?action=open&asin=B003TU1OCQ&location=4310","value":4310},"note":null},{"text":"I will not, however, be silent about my morality, which says to me: Live in concealment in order that thou mayest live to thyself. Live ignorant of that which seems to thy age to be most important! Put at least the skin of three centuries betwixt thyself and the present day!","isNoteOnly":false,"location":{"url":"kindle://book?action=open&asin=B003TU1OCQ&location=4311","value":4311},"note":null},{"text":"Thou wilt also want to help, but only those whose distress thou entirely understandest, because they have one sorrow and one hope in common with thee—thy friends: and only in the way that thou helpest thyself:—I want to make them more courageous, more enduring, more simple, more joyful! I want to teach them that which at present so few understand, and the preachers of fellowship in sorrow least of all:—namely, fellowship in joy!","isNoteOnly":false,"location":{"url":"kindle://book?action=open&asin=B003TU1OCQ&location=4314","value":4314},"note":null},{"text":"I mean to say that the world is overfull of beautiful things, but it is nevertheless poor, very poor, in beautiful moments, and in the unveiling of those beautiful things. But perhaps this is the greatest charm of life: it puts a gold-embroidered veil of lovely potentialities over itself, promising, resisting, modest, mocking, sympathetic, seductive. Yes, life is a woman!","isNoteOnly":false,"location":{"url":"kindle://book?action=open&asin=B003TU1OCQ&location=4328","value":4328},"note":null},{"text":"The Heaviest Burden.—What if a demon crept after thee into thy loneliest loneliness some day or night, and said to thee: \"This life, as thou livest it at present, and hast lived it, thou must live it once more, and also innumerable times; and there will be nothing new in it, but every pain and every joy and every thought and every sigh, and all the unspeakably small and great in thy life must come to thee again, and all in the same series and sequence—and similarly this spider and this moonlight among the trees, and similarly this moment, and I myself. The eternal sand-glass of existence will ever be turned once more, and thou with it, thou speck of dust!\"—Wouldst thou not throw thyself down and gnash thy teeth, and curse the demon that so spake? Or hast thou once experienced a tremendous moment in which thou wouldst answer him: \"Thou art a God, and never did I hear anything so divine!\" If that thought acquired power over thee as thou art, it would transform thee, and perhaps crush thee; the question with regard to all and everything: \"Dost thou want this once more, and also for innumerable times?\" would lie as the heaviest burden upon thy activity! Or, how wouldst thou have to become favorably inclined to thyself and to life, so as to long for nothing more ardently than for this last eternal sanctioning and sealing?—","isNoteOnly":false,"location":{"url":"kindle://book?action=open&asin=B003TU1OCQ&location=4346","value":4346},"note":null},{"text":"344.","isNoteOnly":false,"location":{"url":"kindle://book?action=open&asin=B003TU1OCQ&location=4402","value":4402},"note":null},{"text":"One sees that science also rests on a belief: there is no scienc