Let's talk Nietzche. Not sure I like the man much, but he sure had a knack for irony and sarcasm, something rare in Philosophy.

Here's one of my favorites - Please find and post some of your own favorites. And feel free to discuss his philosophy at any point. I'm interested in what other think of him.

"The greatest mystery is not that we have been flung at random between the profusion of the earth and the galaxy of the stars, but that in this prison we can fashion images of ourselves sufficiently powerful to deny our nothingness."

I 'yam what I 'yam...
And that's all that I 'yam.


How's that?

Well somewhere in there ya just gots ta have marshmallows.

Eros is an astute fan of POPEYE the sailor man and I am too.

I like, "ehhh...how do you like me now?...never did, didya?


But Nietzche, on the other hand, is too foreign to my whole inner being in sum total to embrace.
He, eloquently in this quote, directs his attention away from the confusion he harbors as being caught in a no mans land in the vacuum of space, and then supposes validity upon his delusion and escaping personal accountability for his image with arrogant pontification.

Nothing was lost in translation.

He is lost.

His words are folly and reckless machinations that display the corruption that he possesses and embraces within himself.

He is his biggest fan.

That elitists, with a higher regard for privelege than for compassion, would embrace and enshrine his delusions as profound utterances of wisdom speaks to the decadence within our culture and not to the heartbeat of the masses in our culture.

Such fodder is only useful to the mind of the idle and leisurely comfortable without regard to its stinging entrapments.

The simple and underpriveleged rely on compassion and sympathy to cope with life ; and find courage in the rewards of giving that lead never to such conclusions.


For what its worth, there's more worth knowing.

"The surest way to corrupt a youth is to instruct him to hold in higher esteem those who think alike than those who think differently."
Friedrich Nietzsche, The Dawn, Sec. 297







*nodding*
uh-huh this explains a lot

I had to laugh with your post, Wouldee. The first time I tried to read Nietzsche, I was a bit disgusted by what I perceived to be a mighty ego. But later I began to see something else beneath teh ego. I do have an appreciation for much of what he says, but I don't always like the way he goes about saying it, nor do I always agree. But there are time he just strikes a right chord.

MissBehaving - I almost posted that one first - I'll have to find another for my second quote. Good choice.

"To predict the behavior of ordinary people in advance, you only have to assume that they will always try to escape a disagreeable situation with the smallest possible expenditure of intelligence. "
Friedrich Nietzsche

All three go the same way. [his quotes]

I have studied his work.

In fascination and out of curiousity about his influences.

Even the mach!

I'm pat.

His work should not be taken lightly, by any means.

We all can learn from his lesson.


Just my thoughts...don't want to discourage, but don't want to condone his work either.

"That we find no God -- either in history or in nature or behind nature -- is not what differentiates us, but that we experience what has been revered as God, not as 'godlike' but as miserable,as absurd, as harmful, not merely as an error but as a crime against life. We deny God as God. If one were to prove this God of the Christians to us, we should be even less able to believe in him. In a formula: deus, qualem Paulus creavit, dei negatio ('God, as Paul created him, is the negation of God').

"A religion like Christianity, which does not have contact with reality at any point, which crumbles as soon as reality is conceded its rights at even a single point, must naturally be hostile against the 'wisdom of this world,' which means science. It will applaud all means with which the discipline of the spirit, purity and severity in the spirit's matters of conscience, the noble coolness and freedom of the spirit, can be poisoned, slandered, brought into disrepute. 'Faith' as an imperative is the veto against science -- in practice, the lie at any price."

-- The Antichrist, section 47.


"'For if ye love them which love you, what reward have ye? do not even the publicans the same? And if ye salute your brethren only, what do ye more than others? do not even the publicans so?' (Matt. 5:46f.). The principle of 'Christian love': in the end it wants to be paid well."

-- The Antichrist, section 45.

“The true man wants two things: danger and play. For that reason he wants woman, as the most dangerous plaything.”

“He who fights with monsters might take care lest he thereby become a monster. And if you gaze for long into an abyss, the abyss gazes also into you.”

“You have your way. I have my way. As for the right way, the correct way, and the only way, it does not exist.”

“A casual stroll through the lunatic asylum shows that faith does not prove anything.”

Friedrich Nietsche
provoker of thought

We are always in our own company. Friedrich Nietzche

Makes sense to me.

We want to be poets of our life — first of all in the smallest most everyday matters. Friedrich Nietzche

I think that is beautiful.

Hi LEX - havn't seen ya in a while, good choices of quotes.

s1owhand - good ones, ever popular.


Here is another: "Insanity in individuals is something rare - but in groups, parties, nations and epochs, it is the rule. "

Oh, I meant to use this too.

"The most perfidious way of harming a cause consists of defending it deliberately with faulty arguments."

my kind of existentialist. but don't buy all of it!

"He who strays from tradition becomes a sacrifice to the extraordinary."

That is not 'banal'!!!

Eventhough youare asking for quotes, 'redy', I hope you will forgive my 'Nietzche' transgression of your request, and propose instead my understanding and appreciation of the man, such that his quotes might be heard in the context that I humbly think they were 'maybe' intended.

Although it may be taken for granted today, the democratization of thought and a supreme right to question, denounce, and revolt against mid 19th century orthodoxy, was about as common place as an elephant in a living room. In fact there is no need to go all the way back to the 19th century, just look around and assess the overwhelming remnants of that 'mortgaged thougt' mentality today.

Back to Nietzche in his 19th century epoch, European and North American nations had gone through the first 50 or so years of democracy, but people’s way of 'thinking the world', had not yet been freed.

Nietzche was considered audacious by some, and luminous by others, but mostly he was wrongly judged as a dark cynic, and irreverent antagonist. But Nietzche, more than any of the ‘critical’ contemporaries of his period, ‘attacked’ what he saw as a ‘zombie’ like manner of ‘thinking’, a pretend ‘thinking’, which he insightfully coined ‘out-of-sync’ with the democratization of 'thought'.

This to me, is Nietzche’s true contribution. He single-handledly named, and further articulated the foundations of one of the most significant dialectical shift that would shape and define the 20th century: opposing to the learned and assumed ‘thoughts of others’ from the past, this unusually uncomfortable and ‘risky’ revolutionary concept of ‘thinking for oneself’, which inevitably implied a ‘forward thought’.

That was the inspiration and mission of his short life: this concept of ‘self volition of power’, or individual ‘will to power’. Distinct from a ‘power’ to rule or control others. Nietzche was scratching the surface of an individual, freely choosing to exercise ‘power over self’ !!!

If we were to silence what still remains today as the ‘buzz’ around Nietzche, this sort of social and character assassination of the man, when we speak of his works as ‘blasphemous’, ‘irreverent’, ‘grossly disrespectful’, ‘confused’, ‘heretic’ (that word again), we would be left with the essence: doing violence to the ‘domination’ of past teachings’, which by definition, rob one of his true ‘freedom of thought’, or ‘will to power over self’.

If you remain stuck in what most have perceived as personal insults, well he has equally insulted everything and everyone. THAT WAS HIS ONLY POINT: not to insult, which resided with anyone’s perception of his message, but rather calling people to do violence to conventions, received teachings, and orthodoxies of all nature which invariably poisoned ‘freedom of thought’.

Heck, he even deconstructed ‘Shopenhauer’s ‘volition to live’ thesis, from which his own ‘volition to power’ was inspired. And if he were to learn that his message had been turned into a ‘formula’ (‘volition to power’ in ten easy lessons), he would be go ballistic !!!

Camus and Krisnamurti, in my experience are two great 20th century thinkers, whom have truly gotten, and transcended Nietzche’s essential gift, and proclaimed the auto-destruction of any possible rhetoric to be construed out of their work.

True freedom, from a Nietzche, Kristnamurti and Camus perspective, had everything to do with ‘freedom from the known’, which included the new 'known' of 'freedm from the known' they were speaking.

The individual, doing violence to all 'his known’, as Nietzche, Krisnamurti and Camus had done, such that there is an availability to life, such that spirit instead of ego is present, and such that the possible and profound ‘impersonal’ true nature of the universe reveals a little more of itself.

He, more than anyone else, took the shoots of the ‘self-righteous’ Sophists and Pharisees of the day, caused a ‘break’ in conventions, and paved the way, such that past, contemporary and future contributors to what were to become the Existentialism, and postmodernism currents, would have sufficient legitimacy to be heard.

Without the Nietzche ‘buldozer’, there would not have been a dialectical foundation to hear Husserl, Heidegger, Sarte, Camus, Krisnamurti, etc., and no place for us today to express a legitimate notion of ‘full existence’ free, to a degree, of dogmatic religions, imposed ‘faiths’, pre-thought beliefs, and installed orthodoxies.

Like him or not, Nietzche would rejoice if he heard your heartfelt accusations that ‘his word’, ...

... was full of ‘errors’.

OK, OK, OK,

I'm sorry!!!

Next time I promise, I'll just post a quote.

Yes, backlashes occur.

Yes, stop gaps are manufactured into constructive contrivances as never before. But why?

Marxist-Leninist thought was spawned in the vacuum created by the silence of awe srtuck minds not harbored by the weary seeking relief from toil, but by men seeking a construct of inarguable contrivances that would employ the weariness of exhausted minds seeking solice more than content and character.

Some mental machinations are severly retarded by idle ego.

Jmo don ya no....

'wouldee' my friend,

You should know this: ...


'... poor and weak diversionary attacks, end up reinforcing the very subjects they attempting to diffame...'


If anyting, your 'Marxist-Leninist' analogy is right in line with the time tested tactics of 'religions', and as such, if Nietzsche had lived long enough to see it, he would have denounced the infamy of Marx-Lenin 'ism's, just as he had done the religions while alive and kicking.

So, while I realise you don't like Nietzsche, you have him to thank for a big share of your 'combative' and 'rebelious' rhetoric.

Now, isn't that ironic!!!