"The presence of a thought is like the presence of a lover."
"I am afraid we are not rid of God because we still have faith in grammar."
Nietzsche, Twilight of the Idols
#nietzsche
#language
"One chooses dialectic only when one has no other means. One knows that one arouses mistrust with it, that it is not very persuasive. Nothing is easier to erase than a dialectical effect: the experience of every meeting at which there are speeches proves this. It can only be self-defense for those who no longer have other weapons. One must have to enforce one’s right: until one reaches that point, one makes no use of it."
Nietzsche, Twilight of the Idols
#nietzsche
#dialectics
"All that philosophers have handled for thousands of years have been concept-mummies; nothing real escaped their grasp alive."
Nietzsche, Twilight of the Idols
#nietzsche
#philosophers
"It is a self-deception on the part of philosophers and moralists if they believe that they are extricating themselves from decadence when they merely wage war against it. Extrication lies beyond their strength: what they choose as a means, as salvation, is itself but another expression of decadence; they change its expression, but they do not get rid of decadence itself."
Nietzsche, Twilight of the Idols
#nietzsche
#decadence
"
When one considers how vast and how close to us is the problem of existence—this equivocal, tortured, fleeting, dream-like existence of ours—so vast and so close that a man no sooner discovers it than it overshadows and obscures all other problems and aims; and when one sees how all [people], with few and rare exceptions, have no clear consciousness of the problem, [..] and live on, taking no thought but for the passing day and the hardly longer span of their own personal future, either expressly discarding the problem or else over-ready to come to terms with it by adopting some system of popular metaphysics and letting it satisfy them; [..] man may be said to be a thinking being only in a very remote sense, and henceforth feel no special surprise at any trait of human thoughtlessness or folly.
If Nature had meant man to think, she would not have given him ears.
"
