I have wanted to read this book many times, I have stopped a lot of times before even reaching page 100. Now I finally see its whitened spine and the bookmark resting at page 510. I am proud of myself as I have always been kind of scared of philosophy in English, of not understanding the references, of not grasping the nuances of speech. I can proudly say that my worries have not been in vain, as expected, I haven't understood all of it, I got lost in Nietzsche's understanding of the world, especially politics, as it has never been of interest to me. However, his thoughts on arts, humanity, existence, values, vivid descriptions and sometime poetic grip on his surroundings, made me want to read more. I will miss reading Nietzsche and I will forever cherish his imaginative description of the world. I have never thought to be fair to rate philosophy, except Cioran, as I have read him at a different time in my life when I could emphasize with him on a different, more sentimental level. Nevertheless, I have extracted from the book some aphorisms that made me smile. I think it is of relevance and kind of eerie in the most pleasant way to smile when reading philosophy, be it to agree with the philosopher, to feel what the philosopher feels and to perceive with his/her pair of eyes as with your own.
pg. 325 "172 - The poet no longer a teacher. - Strange as it may sound to our time, there were once poets and artists whose soul was above the passions with their delights and convulsions, and who therefore took their pleasure in purer materials, worthier men, more delicate complications and dénouements. If the artists of our day for the most part unfetter the will, and so are under certain circumstances for that very reason emancipators of life, those were tamers of the will, enchanters of animals, creators of men. In fact, they moulded, re-moulded, and new-moulded life, whereas the fame of poets of our day lies in unharnessing, unchaining, and shattering. The ancient Greeks demanded of the poet that he should be the teacher of grown men. How ashamed the poet would be now if this demand were made of him! He is not even a good student of himself, and so never himself becomes a good poem or a fine picture. Under the most favourable circumstances he remains the shy, attractive ruin of a temple, but at the same time a cavern of cravings, overgrown like a ruin with flowers, nettles, and poisonous weeds, inhabited and haunted by snakes, worms, spiders, and birds; an object for sad reflection as to why the noblest and most precious must grow up at once like a ruin, without the past and future of perfection."
pg. 350 "237 - The wanderer in the mountains to himself. - There are certain signs that you have gone farther and higher. There is a freer, wider prospect before you, the air blows cooler yet milder in your face (you have unlearned the folly of confounding mildness with warmth), your gait is more firm and vigorous, courage and discretion have waxed together. On all these grounds your journey may now be more lonely and in any case more perilous than heretofore, if indeed not to the extent believed by those who from the misty valley see you, the roamer, striding on the mountains."
pg. 378 "366 - 'Will a self'. - Active, successful natures act, not according to the maxim, 'Know thyself', but as if always confronted with the command, 'Will a self, so you will become a self.' - Fate seems always to have left them a choice. Inactive, contemplative natures, on the other hand, reflect on how they have chosen their self 'once for all' at their entry into life."
pg. 383 "399 - Being satisfied. - We show that we have attained maturity of understanding when we no longer go where rare flowers lurk under the thorniest hedges of knowledge, but are satisfied with gardens, forests, meadows, and ploughlands, remembering that life is too short for the rare and uncommon."
pg. 397 "14 - Man as the comic actor of the world. - It would require beings more intellectual than men to relish to the full the humorous side of man's view of himself as the goal of all existence and of his serious pronouncement that he is satisfied only with the prospect of fulfilling a world-mission. If a God created the world, he created man to be his ape, as a perpetual source of amusement in the midst of his rather tedious eternities. The music of the spheres surrounding the world would then presumably be the mocking laughter of all the other creatures around mankind. God in his boredom uses pain for the tickling of his favourite animal, in order to enjoy his proudly tragic gestures and expressions of suffering, and, in general, the intellectual inventiveness of the vainest of his creatures - as inventor of this inventor. For he who invented man as a joke had more intellect and more joy in intellect than has man. Even here, where our human nature is willing to humble itself, our vanity again plays us a trick, in that we men should like in this vanity at least to be quite marvellous and incomparable. Our uniqueness in the world! Oh, what an improbable thing it is! Astronomers, who occasionally acquire a horizon outside our world, give us to understand that the drop of life on the earth is without significance for the total character of the mighty ocean of birth and decay; that countless stars present conditions for the generation of life similar to those of the earth - and yet these are but a handful in comparison with the endless number that have never known, or have long been cured, of the eruption of life; that life on each of these stars, measured by the period of its existence, has been but an instant, a flicker, with long, long intervals afterwards - and thus in no way the aim and final purpose of their existence. Possibly the ant in the forest is quite as firmly convinced that it is the aim and purpose of the existence of the forest, as we are convinced in our imaginations (almost unconsciously) that the destruction of mankind involves the destruction of the world. It is even modesty on our part to go no farther than this, and not to arrange a universal twilight of the world and the gods as the funeral ceremony of the last man. Even to the eye of the most unbiased astronomer a lifeless world can scarcely appear otherwise than as a shining and swinging star wherein man lies buried."
pg.417 - "52 - The sum-total of conscience. - The sum-total of our conscience is all that has regularly been demanded of us, without reason, in the days of our childhood, by people whom we respected or feared. From conscience comes that feeling of obligation ('This I must do, this omit') which does not ask, Why must I? - In all cases where a thing is done with 'because' and 'why', man acts without conscience, but not necessarily on that account against conscience. The belief in authority is the source of conscience; which is therefore not the voice of God in the heart of man, but the voice of some men in man."
pg.422 - "67 - The habit of contrasts. - Superficial, inexact observation sees contrasts everywhere in nature (for instance, 'hot and cold'), where there are no contrasts, only differences of degree. This bad habit has induced us to try to understand and interpret even the inner nature, the intellectual and moral world, in accordance with such contrasts. An infinite amount of cruelty, arrogance, harshness, estrangement, and coldness has entered into human emotion, because men imagined they saw contrasts where there were only transitions."
pg.463 - "194 - Dreams. - Our dreams, if for once in a way they succeed and are complete - generally a dream is a bungled piece of work - are symbolic concatenations of scenes and images in place of a narrative poetical language. They paraphrase our experiences or expectations or relations with poetic boldness and definiteness, so that in the morning we are always astonished at ourselves when we remember the nature of our dream. In dreams we use up too much artistry - and hence are often too poor in artistry in the daytime."