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FRIEDRICH WILHELM NIETZSCHE

OF ECCE HOMO

(from WHY I AM SO CLEVER)

a masterpiece of Narcissitic proportion. Thank you, FD.

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-God is a too palpably clumsy solution of things; a solution which shows a lack of delicacy towards us thinkers at bottom he is really no more than a coarse and rude prohibition of us: ye shall not think!

-In order to believe that the drinking of wine was exhilarating, Ishould have had to be a Christian - in other words, I should have had to believe in what, to my mind, is an absurdity.

-...that a blunder in the choice of locality and climate is able not only to alienate a man from his actual duty, but also to withhold it from him altogether, so that he never even comes face to face with it.

-Ever so slight a tendency to laziness...once it has become a habit, is quite sufficient to make something mediocre, something "German" out of a genius...

-The tempo of the body's function is closely bound up with the agility or the clumsiness of the spirit's feet.

-During the time that I am deeply absorbed in my work, no books are found within my reach; it would never occur to me to allow anyone to speak or even to think in my presence.

-It is not perhaps in my nature to read much, and of all sorts: a library makes me ill. Neither is it in my nature to love much or many kinds of things. Suspicion or even hostility toward new books is much more akin to my instinctive feeling than "toleration,"...

-I believe only in French culture, and regard evrything else in Europe which calls itself "culture" as a misunderstanding. I do not even take the German kind into consideration.

-Wherever Germany extends her sway, she ruins culture.

-"God's only excuse is that He does not exist..." I myself have said somewhere - What has been the greatest objection to Life hitherto? God...

-I search through all the kingdoms of antiquity or of modern times for anything to resemble his sweet and passionate music. He possessed that divine wickedness, without which perfection itself becomes unthinkable to me - I estimate the value of men... according to the extent to which they are unable to conceive of a god who has not a dash of the satyr in him.

-The great poet draws his creations only from out of his own reality. This is so to such an extent, that often after a lapse of time he can longer endure his own work... After casting a glance between the pages of my Zarathustra, I pace my room to and fro for half an hour at a time, unable to overcome an insufferable fit of tears.

-It is not doubt, but certitude that drives one mad. But in order to feel this, one must be profound, one must be an abyss, a philosopher... We all fear truth... And, to make a confession...

-Suppose I had christened my Zarathustra with a name not my own - let us say with Richard Wagner's name - the acumen of two thousand years would have not sufficed to guess that the author of Human, all-too-Human was the visionary of Zarathustra.

-WE CANNOT BE ANYTHING LESS THAN REVOLUTIONARIES -