1.9 KiB
From Ecce Homo
"Why do I know more than other people? Why, in general, and I so clever? I have never pondered over questions that are not really questions.I have never wasted my strength. I have no expertise, for instance, of actual religious difficulties."
"I am quite unacquainted with atheism as a result, and still less as an event: with me it is instinctive. I am too inquisitive, too skeptical, too arrogant, to let myself be satisfied with an obvious and crass solution of things. God is such an obvious and crass solution; a solution which is a sheer indelicacy to us thinkers-at bottom. He is really nothing but a coarse commandment against us: ye shall not think!"
"God's only excuse is that He does not exist"
"The scholar devotes all his energy to affirming or denying or critisizing matter which has already been thought out-he no longer thinks himself…In him the instinct of selfdefense has decayed, otherwise he would defend himself against books."
"I am the reverse of a heroic nature. To "will" something, to "strive" after something, to have a "purpose" or a "desire" in my mind - I know none of these things from experience"
"I have not the slightest wish that anything should be, different than it is"
"Even to suffer from solitude is an objection-the only thing I have always suffered from is "multitude," the infinite variety of my own soul. At the absurdly tender age of seven, I already knew that no human speech should ever reach me."
"My formula for greatness in man is amor fati: that a man should wish to have nothing altered, either in the future, the past, or for all eternity. Not only must he endure necessity, and on no account conceal it-all idealism is falsehood in the face of necessity-but he must love it…."