The Portable Nietzsche (9 page)

In 1879 Nietzsche brought out another collection of aphorisms under this title, as a sequel to
Human, All-Too-Human
, published the year before.

 

[77]

Dissipation.
The mother of dissipation is not joy but joylessness.

 

[95]

“
Love
.” The most subtle artifice that distinguishes Christianity from other religions is a word: it speaks of
love
. Thus it became the lyrical religion (whereas in both their other creations the Semites presented the world with heroic-epic religions). There is something so ambiguous and suggestive about the word love, something that speaks to memory and to hope, that even the lowest intelligence and the coldest heart still feel something of the glimmer of this word. The cleverest woman and the most vulgar man recall the relatively least selfish moments of their whole life, even if Eros has taken only a low flight with them; and for those countless ones who
miss
love, whether from their parents or their children or their beloved, and especially for people with sublimated sexuality, Christianity has always been a find.

 

[129]

Readers of aphorisms
. The worst readers of aphorisms are the author's friends if they are intent on guessing back from the general to the particular instance to which the aphorism owes its origin; for with such pot-peeking they reduce the author's whole effort to nothing; so that they deservedly gain, not a philosophic outlook or instruction, but—at best, or at worst—nothing more than the satisfaction of vulgar curiosity.

 

[141]

Sign of rank
. All poets and writers who are in love with the superlative want more than they are capable of.

 

[202]

Jokes.
A joke is the epigram on the death of a feeling.

 

[231]

Humaneness in friendship and mastership.
“If thou wilt go toward morning, then I will go toward evening”: to feel this way is a high sign of humaneness in a closer association: without this feeling, every friendship, every discipleship and pupilship, becomes at one time or another hypocrisy.

 

[248]

Way to a Christian virtue.
Learning from one's enemies is the best way toward loving them; for it makes us grateful to them.

 

[271]

Every philosophy is the philosophy of some stage of life
. The stage of life at which a philosopher found his doctrine reverberates through it; he cannot prevent this, however far above time and hour he may feel. Thus Schopenhauer's philosophy remains the reflection of ardent and melancholy
youth
—it is no way of thinking for older people. And Plato's philosophy recalls the middle thirties, when a cold and a hot torrent often roar toward each other, so that a mist and tender little clouds form—and under favorable circumstances and the rays of the sun, an enchanting rainbow.

 

[301]

The party man
. The true party man learns no longer —he only experiences and judges; while Solon, who was never a party man but pursued his goal alongside and above the parties, or against them, is characteristically the father of that plain maxim in which the health and inexhaustibility of Athens is contained: “I grow old and always continue to learn.”

 

[357]

Unfaithfulness, a condition of mastership.
Nothing avails: every master has but one disciple, and that one becomes unfaithful to him, for he too is destined for mastership.

 

[408]

The journey to Hades.
I too have been in the underworld, like Odysseus, and I shall yet return there often; and not only sheep have I sacrificed to be able to talk with a few of the dead, but I have not spared my own blood. Four pairs did not deny themselves to me as I sacrificed: Epicurus and Montaigne, Goethe and Spinoza, Plato and Rousseau, Pascal and Schopenhauer. With these I must come to terms when I have long wandered by myself; they shall tell me whether I am right or wrong; to them I want to listen when, in the process, they tell each other whether they are right or wrong. . . .

This collection of aphorisms was first published in 1880, as the final sequel to
Human, All-Too-Human
.

 

[38]

The bite of conscience
. The bite of conscience, like the bite of a dog into a stone, is a stupidity.

 

[48]

Prohibitions without reasons
. A prohibition, the reason for which we do not understand or admit, is almost a command not only for the stubborn but also for those who thirst for knowledge: one risks an experiment to find out
why
the prohibition was pronounced. Moral prohibitions, like those of the Decalogue, are suitable only for an age of subjugated reason: now, such a prohibition as “Thou shalt not kill” or “Thou shalt not commit adultery,” presented without reasons, would have a harmful rather than a useful effect.

 

[85]

The persecutor of God
. Paul thought up the idea, and Calvin re-thought it, that for innumerable people damnation has been decreed from eternity, and that this beautiful world plan was instituted to reveal the glory of God: heaven and hell and humanity are thus supposed to exist—to satisfy the vanity of God! What cruel and insatiable vanity must have flared in the soul of the man who thought this up first, or second. Paul has remained Saul after all—the persecutor of God.

 

[86]

Socrates
. If all goes well, the time will come when, to develop oneself morally-rationally, one will take up the memorabilia of Socrates rather than the Bible, and when Montaigne and Horace will be employed as precursors and guides to the understanding of the simplest and most imperishable mediator-sage, Socrates. The roads of the most divergent philosophic ways of life lead back to him; at bottom they are the ways of life of the different temperaments, determined by reason and habit, and in all cases pointing with their peaks to joy in life and in one's own self—from which one might well infer that the most characteristic feature of Socrates was that he shared in all temperaments. Above the founder of Christianity, Socrates is distinguished by the gay kind of seriousness and that
wisdom full of pranks
which constitute the best state of the soul of man. Moreover, he had the greater intelligence.

 

[124]

The Faust idea
. A little seamstress is seduced and made unhappy; a great scholar in all four branches of learning is the evildoer. Surely that could not have happened without supernatural interference? No, of course not! Without the aid of the incarnate devil the great scholar could never have accomplished this.

Should this really be the greatest German “tragic idea,” as is said among Germans? But for Goethe even this idea was still too terrible. His mild heart could not help putting the little seamstress, “the good soul who forgot herself but once,” close to the saints after her involuntary death; indeed, by a trick played on the devil at the decisive moment, he even brought the great scholar to heaven at just the right time—“the good man” with the “darkling aspiration”! And there, in heaven, the lovers find each other again.

Goethe once said that his nature was too conciliatory for the truly tragic.

 

[217]

Classical and romantic.
The classically disposed spirits no less than those romantically inclined—as these two species always exist—carry a vision of the future: but the former out of a strength of their time; the latter, out of its weakness.

 

[239]

Why beggars still live.
If all alms were given only from pity, all beggars would have starved long ago.

 

[240]

Why beggars still live.
The greatest giver of alms is cowardice.

 

[261]

Letter
. A letter is an unannounced visit; the mailman, the mediator of impolite incursions. One ought to have one hour in every eight days for receiving letters, and then take a bath.

 

[267]

There are no educators
. As a thinker, one should speak only of self-education. The education of youth by others is either an experiment, conducted on one as yet unknown and unknowable, or a leveling on principle, to make the new character, whatever it may be, conform to the habits and customs that prevail: in both cases, therefore, something unworthy of the thinker—the work of parents and teachers, whom an audaciously honest person has called
nos ennemis naturels.

One day, when in the opinion of the world one has long been educated, one discovers oneself: that is where the task of the thinker begins; now the time has come to invoke his aid—not as an educator but as one who has educated himself and thus has experience.

 

[282]

The teacher a necessary evil
. As few people as possible between the productive spirits and the hungering, receiving spirits! For the intermediaries falsify the nourishment almost automatically when they mediate it: then, as a reward for their mediation, they want too much for themselves, which is thus taken away from the original productive spirits; namely, interest, admiration, time, money, and other things. Hence one should consider the teacher, no less than the shopkeeper, a necessary evil, an evil to be kept as small as possible. If the trouble in the German situation today has perhaps its main reason in the fact that too many people live by trade and want to live well (and thus seek to cut the producer's prices as much as possible while at the same time raising the prices to the consumer, in order to derive an advantage from the greatest possible damage to both), then one can certainly find a main reason for the spiritual troubles in the surplus of teachers: on their account, one learns so little and so badly.

 

[284]

The means to real peace
. No government admits any more that it keeps an army to satisfy occasionally the desire for conquest. Rather the army is supposed to serve for defense, and one invokes the morality that approves of self-defense. But this implies one's own morality and the neighbor's immorality; for the neighbor must be thought of as eager to attack and conquer if our state must think of means of self-defense. Moreover, the reasons we give for requiring an army imply that our neighbor, who denies the desire for conquest just as much as does our own state, and who, for his part, also keeps an army only for reasons of self-defense, is a hypocrite and a cunning criminal who would like nothing better than to overpower a harmless and awkward victim without any fight. Thus all states are now ranged against each other: they presuppose their neighbor's bad disposition and their own good disposition. This presupposition, however, is
inhumane
, as bad as war and worse. At bottom, indeed, it is itself the challenge and the cause of wars, because, as I have said, it attributes immorality to the neighbor and thus provokes a hostile disposition and act. We must abjure the doctrine of the army as a means of self-defense just as completely as the desire for conquests.

And perhaps the great day will come when a people, distinguished by wars and victories and by the highest development of a military order and intelligence, and accustomed to make the heaviest sacrifices for these things, will exclaim of its own free will, “We break the sword,” and will smash its entire military establishment down to its lowest foundations.
Rendering oneself unarmed when one had been the best-armed,
out of a height of feeling—that is the means to real peace, which must always rest on a peace of mind; whereas the so-called armed peace, as it now exists in all countries, is the absence of peace of mind. One trusts neither oneself nor one's neighbor and, half from hatred, half from fear, does not lay down arms. Rather perish than hate and fear, and
twice rather perish than make oneself hated and feared
—this must someday become the highest maxim for every single common-wealth too.

Our liberal representatives, as is well known, lack the time for reflecting on the nature of man: else they would know that they work in vain when they work for a “gradual decrease of the military burden.” Rather, only when this kind of need has become greatest will the kind of god be nearest who alone can help here. The tree of war-glory can only be destroyed all at once, by a stroke of lightning: but lightning, as indeed you know, comes from a cloud—and from up high.

(Naumburg, November 14, 1879)

. . . My mother read to me: Gogol, Lermontov, Bret Harte, M. Twain, E. A. Poe. If you do not yet know the latest book by Twain,
The Adventures of Tom Sawyer
, it would be a pleasure for me to make you a little present of it. . . .

A girl who surrenders her virginity to a man who has not firs sworn solemnly before witnesses that he will not leave her again for the rest of her life not only is considered imprudent but is also called immoral. She did not follow the
mores
; she was not only imprudent but also disobedient, for she knew what the mores commanded. Where the mores command differently, the conduct of the girl in such a case would not be called immoral either; in fact, there are regions where it is considered moral to lose one's virginity before marriage. Thus the reproach is really directed against disobedience: it is this that is immoral. Is this sufficient? Such a girl is considered contemptible—but what kind of disobedience is it that one despises? (Imprudence is not despised.) One says of her: she could not control herself, that is why she was disobedient against the mores; thus it is the blindness of the desire that one despises, the animal in the girl. With this in mind, one also says: she is unchaste; by this one could not mean that she is doing what the lawfully wedded wife does, too, without being called unchaste. The mores are then seen to demand that one bear the displeasure of unsatisfied desire, that the desire be able to
wait
. To be immoral means therefore, in this case, not to be able to bear a displeasure despite the thought of the power that makes the rules.
A feeling is supposed to be subdued by a thought
—more precisely, by the thought of fear (whether it be fear of the sacred mores or of the punishment and shame threatened by the mores). In itself, it is not at all shameful, but natural and fair, that a desire be satisfied immediately. Therefore what is really contemptible in this girl is the
weakness of her fear
. Being moral means being highly accessible to fear. Fear is the power by which the community is preserved.