Endangered Languages Famous Quotes

So a certain feeling of inferiority and inefficiency, which was always present in Nietzsche, is back of that language, causing him to choose the big words in order to hit the goal. For to him the world was always exceedingly dull, nobody had ears or eyes or a feeling heart, so he had to knock at the doors with a sledgehammer. But when people locked the doors, he attacked them with such fearful words that they became frightened. His contemporary Jakob Burckhardt, the famous historian, grew quite afraid when he read Zarathustra — as I know from people in Basel who were acquainted with them both. It was uncanny to him; it was the language that overcame him. He shut the door to Nietzsche because he was too troublesome, he made too big a noise. And one always has the impression in reading Zarathustra, that it does not really reach people. Nietzsche felt that too and therefore he increased the weight of it in order to make it sink in. If he would only wait, be a bit more patient, a bit less noisy, then it would sink in; certain passages in Zarathustra are of supreme beauty, but others are in very bad taste, and the effect of the whole is somewhat endangered by that style. Jung, C. G.. Nietzsche's Zarathustra: Notes of the Seminar given in 1934-1939. Two Volumes: 1-2, unabridged (Jung Seminars) (p. 29-30). Princeton University Press