Gautam

“A full and powerful soul not only copes with painful even terrible losses, deprivations, robberies, insults; it emerges from such hells with a greater fullness and powerfulness, and most essential of all with a new increase in the bliss-Fulness of love.

I believe that he who has divined something of the most basic conditions for his growth in love will understand what Dante meant when he wrote over the gate of his inferno: 'I, too, was created by eternal love.”
― Friedrich Nietzsche, The Will to Power

“Nihilism, a normal condition.

It may be a sign of strength; spiritual vigour may have increased to such an extent that the goals toward which man has marched hitherto (the "convictions," articles of faith) are no longer suited to it (for a faith generally expresses the exigencies of the conditions of existence, a submission to the authority of an order of things which conduces to the prosperity, the growth and power of a living creature ...); on the other hand, a sign of insufficient strength, to fix a goal, a "wherefore," and a faith for itself.

It reaches its maximum of relative strength, as a powerful destructive force, in the form of active Nihilism.

Its opposite would be weary Nihilism, which no longer attacks: its most renowned form being Buddhism: as passive Nihilism, a sign of weakness: spiritual strength may be fatigued, exhausted, so that the goals and values which have prevailed hitherto are no longer suited to it and are no longer believed in—so that the synthesis of values and goals (upon which every strong culture stands) [Pg 22]decomposes, and the different values contend with one another: Disintegration, then everything which is relieving, which heals, becalms, or stupefies, steps into the foreground under the cover of various disguises, either religious, moral, political or æsthetic, etc.”
― Friedrich Nietzsche, The Will to Power

“It is a comfort to me to know that above the steam and filth of human lowlands there is a higher, brighter humanity, very small in number (for everything outstanding is by its nature rare): one belongs to it, not because one is more talented or more virtuous or more heroic or more loving than the men below, but—because one is colder, brighter, more far-seeing, more solitary; because one endures, prefers, demands solitude as happiness.”
― Friedrich Nietzsche, The Will to Power

“If by setting one’s heart right every morning and evening, one is able to live as though his body were already dead, he gains freedom in the Way.”
― Yamamoto Tsunetomo, Hagakure: The Book of the Samurai