Twenty-One Mind-Altering Quotes from Friedrich Nietzsche
Taken from 'Beyond Good and Evil'
Friedrich Nietzsche is probably one of, if not the most dangerous philosophers of all time.
His book Beyond Good and Evil is head-spinning, but so rich in wisdom and controversy, making it a perfect recipe to be butchered on a Substack post.
For the avoidance of any doubt, I will heretofore be presenting 21 excerpts from the German philosopher which I hope you can gain some value from.
Enjoy.
1. “However much value we may ascribe to truth, truthfulness, or altruism, it may be that we need to attribute to a higher and more fundamental value to appearance, to the will to illusion, to egoism and desire.”
2. “A living being wants above all else to release its strength; life itself is the will to power, and self-preservation is only one of its indirect and most frequent consequences.”
3. “Where man has nothing more to see and grasp, he has nothing more to seek.”
This appears to be a warning. Do not be arrogant. Arrogance blinds man into thinking that he has nothing more to see and grasp. Of course, this is never true, we all have something to learn, even the most intelligent and whole individual on the planet. What’s interesting here is that Nietzsche states that when man adopts this mindset, he stops seeking. Maybe this is one of the answers to the West’s current meaningless epidemic in young men. Maybe we’re just too arrogant. Have we stopped seeing and grasping, and therefore stopped seeking purpose?
4. “In truth their (philosophers’) thinking is much less an act of discovering than an act of recognizing anew, remembering anew, a return back home to a distant, ancient universal economy of the soul from out of which those concepts initially grew.”
Most new self-help is a rephrasing of old self-help. This could be true of philosophy.
5. “How venomous, how wily, how bad one becomes in every long war that cannot be waged in the open. How personal one becomes by holding fears for a long time, by watching long for enemies, possible enemies!”
6. “Anyone who interacts with other people without occasionally displaying all the colours of distress (green and grey with disgust, annoyance, compassion, gloom, loneliness) is surely not a man of higher taste; but if on the other hand he declines to assume this whole dispiriting burden and keeps evading it by remaining, as described above, tucked away peaceful and proud in his fortress, then one thing is certain: he is not made for, not destined for, knowledge.”
A warning to not become too comfortable in your surroundings. We cannot develop our characters without exploring and confronting new territory.
7. “Young people, with their characteristic anger and awe, seem to find no peace until they have neatly falsified people and things, so that they can vent their feelings on them: youth by its very nature is something falsifying and deceptive.”
8. “’For the sake of others’, ‘not for me’: these are feelings containing so much sorcery and sugar that we must be doubly distrustful of them and ask: ‘Are these not perhaps – seductions’.”
9. “The strength of a person’s spirit would then be measured by how much ‘truth’ he could tolerate, or more precisely, to what extent he needs to have it diluted, disguised, sweetened, muted, falsified.”
One of the core features of Nietzschean thought, and subsequently existentialist thought, is the grappling with the idea of truth. They saw it as being central to human existence. Jung, and admirer of Nietzsche, argued that one can sidestep the troubles of psychotherapy and psychic neuroses through a genuine moral effort. Jordan Peterson has argued that we should pay more attention to morality, or lack of it, as a precursor to psychopathology.
10. “We are of the opinion that harshness, violence, enslavement, danger on the street and in the heart, seclusion, stoicism the art of the tempter and every kind of devilry, that everything evil, frightful , tyrannical, predatory, and snake-like about humans serves to heighten the species ‘human being’ as much as does its opposite.”
11. “As his intellectual sight and insight grow stronger, the distances and, as it were, the space surrounding a man increase: his world becomes more profound; new stars, new images and riddles keep coming into view.”
I remember watching a Youtube video in which an academic was discussing the phrase ‘ignorance is bliss’. He refuted it, stating that the beauty of knowing more is that you begin to realise how much you don’t know, and how rich and vastly unexplored the world really is.
12. “To the ordinary people, finally, to the vast majority who exist to serve and be generally useful and must exist only to that end, religion offers an inestimable contentment with their own situation and nature, an ongoing peace of heart, improved obedience, joy and sorrow shared with their own kind, and something in the way of transfiguration and beautification, something that justifies their everyday lives, all the baseness, all the semi-animal poverty of their souls. Being religious and finding religious significance to life sheds sunshine on these constantly afflicted people.”
13. “We are from time immemorial fundamentally – accustomed to lying. Or, to put it more virtuously and hypocritically, more pleasantly in short: we are all artists much more than we realize.”
This is quite the claim, but it feels true.
14. “Considering, then, that obedience has until now been bred and practiced best and longest among humans, we can surely assume that everyone on average is born with a need to obey, as a kind of formal conscience that decrees.”
As an obedient person, I can corroborate this. I always feel a tad lost when someone isn’t telling me what to do. That is partially why I like doing things which require long term consistency in order to see the results. Demonstrating to someone who is obedient that they can be the masters of their own destiny is very fulfilling. It’s also the case that you can be too obedient, almost too socialized.
15. “Ultimately, ‘neighbourly love’ is always something secondary, in part convention and a deliberate fiction in relation to fear of one’s neighbour.”
16. “Certain strong and dangerous instincts, such as adventurousness, recklessness, vengefulness, slyness, rapacity, lust for power, were previously not only honoured as beneficial to the community, but they also had to be cultivated and bred, because people continually, had need of them in their common danger against their common enemies.”
What is striking about Nietzsche’s Beyond Good and Evil is his willingness to admit to the darker side of human nature. Perhaps that’s what makes him, at least partially, such a dangerous philosopher to read.
17. “The worst and most dangerous things that a scholar is capable of come from the instinct of his type to mediocrity, that Jesuitical mediocrity that works instinctively to destroy the extra-ordinary man and tries to break or – even better! – to loosen every tensed bow.”
18. This is what greatness should mean: the ability to be both multifarious and whole, both wide and full. And to ask it once again: nowadays, is – greatness possible?”
19. “Beware of those people who place great value in being considered morally sensitive, or subtle in their moral distinctions.”
20. “Self-contempt is a part of the gloom and ugliness that have been growing in Europe for a hundred years now – and they may in fact be caused by it” The man of ‘modern ideas’, that proud ape, is endlessly dissatisfied with himself, that much is sure. He suffers, and his vanity would have him feel only pity for the suffering of others.”
21. “The discipline of suffering, great suffering – don’t you know that this discipline alone has created all human greatness to date.”