German Philosopher Nietzsche Quotes

Don’t underestimate the power of vision and direction. These are irresistible forces, able to transform what might appear to be unconquerable obstacles into traversable pathways and expanding opportunities. Strengthen the individual. Start with yourself. Take care with yourself. Define who you are. Refine your personality. Choose your destination and articulate your Being. As the great nineteenth-century German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche so brilliantly noted, “He whose life has a why can bear almost any how.

The German philosopher Nietzsche taught us that “the most common form of human stupidity is forgetting what one is trying to do.

To my surprise, I find the most relevant commentary on a marriage that continues into the sunset years comes from the radical German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche, who, in an atypically practical frame of mind, wrote, 'When marrying, ask yourself this question: Do you believe that you will be able to converse well with this person into your old age? Everthing else in marriage is transitory.

The German philosopher Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche, who had syphilis, said that only a person of deep faith could afford the luxury of religious skepticism. Humanists, by and large educated, comfortably middle-class persons with rewarding lives like mine, find rapture enough in secular knowledge and hope. Most people can't.

I can’t really do much with Nietzsche. He is more an artist than a philosopher; he doesn’t have the crystal-clear understanding of Schopenhauer. Of course, I value Nietzsche as a genius. He writes possibly the most beautiful language that German literature has to offer us today, but he is not my guide.

Whoever has a why to live can bear almost any how,” as the German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche declared.

Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche (October 15, 1844 – August 25, 1900) was a German philosopher. His writing included critiques of religion, morality, contemporary culture, philosophy, and science, using a distinctive style and displaying a fondness for aphorism. Nietzsche's influence remains substantial within and beyond philosophy, notably in existentialism and postmodernism. Nietzsche began his career as a philologist before turning to philosophy. At the age of 24 he became Professor of Classical Philology at the University of Basel, but resigned in 1879 due to health problems, which would plague him for most of his life. In 1889 he exhibited symptoms of a serious mental illness, living out his remaining years in the care of his mother and sister until his death in 1900.

As the great nineteenth-century German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche so brilliantly noted, “He whose life has a why can bear almost any how.”61

Strengthen the individual. Start with yourself. Take care with yourself. Define who you are. Refine your personality. Choose your destination and articulate your Being. As the great nineteenth-century German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche so brilliantly noted, “He whose life has a why can bear almost any how.

Thus Spoke Zarathustra (German: Also sprach Zarathustra, sometimes translated Thus Spake Zarathustra), subtitled A Book for All and None (Ein Buch für Alle und Keinen), is a written work by German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche, composed in four parts between 1883 and 1885. Much of the work deals with ideas such as the "eternal recurrence of the same", the parable on the "death of God", and the "prophecy" of the Overman, which were first introduced in The Gay Science. Described by Nietzsche himself as "the deepest ever written", the book is a dense and esoteric treatise on philosophy and morality, featuring as protagonist a fictionalized Zarathustra. A central irony of the text is that the style of the Bible is used by Nietzsche to present ideas of his which fundamentally oppose Judaeo-Christian morality and tradition.

Don’t fight with monsters, for you can become one. If you look into the abyss for long enough, the abyss looks into you.” “What are you talking about?” Elsa bursts out, secretly pleased that the woman speaks to her as if Elsa is not a child. “Sorry, that’s . . . that was Nietzsche. He was a German philosopher. It’s . . . ah, I’m probably misquoting him. But I think it could mean that if you hate the one who hates, you could risk becoming like the one you hate.” Elsa

Nietzsche, like Goethe, held no high opinion of the German people,* and in other ways, too, the outpourings of this megalomaniacal genius differ from those of the chauvinistic German thinkers of the nineteenth century. Indeed, he regarded most German philosophers, including Fichte and Hegel, as “unconscious swindlers.” He poked fun at the “Tartuffery of old Kant.” The Germans, he wrote in Ecce Homo, “have no conception how vile they are,” and he came to the conclusion that “wheresoever Germany penetrated, she ruins culture.” He thought that Christians, as much as Jews, were responsible for the “slave morality” prevalent in the world;

German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche so brilliantly noted, “He whose life has a why can bear almost any how.

Lee Mellon told me that he was born in Meridian, Mississippi, and grew up in Florida, Virginia, and North Carolina, 'Near Asheville,' he said. 'That's Thomas Wolfe country.' 'Yeah,' I said. Lee Mellon didn't have any Southern accent. 'You don't have much of a Southern accent,' I said. 'That's right, Jesse. I read a lot of Nietzsche, Schopenhauer and Kant when I was a kid,' Lee Mellon said. I guess in some strange way that was supposed to get rid of a Southern accent. Lee Mellon thought so, anyway. I couldn't argue because I had never tried a Southern accent against the German philosophers.

Sorry, that’s . . . that was Nietzsche. He was a German philosopher. It’s . . . ah, I’m probably misquoting him. But I think it could mean that if you hate the one who hates, you could risk becoming like the one you hate.

It was the mutual study of the Spear and the significance of its legend and their strikingly opposite views about it which finally parted these inseperable friends -- the master musician (Wagner) and the cynnical philosopher (Nietzsche). A parting which led them both to experience a bitter and pathetic lonliness, and later a growing hatred and contempt for one another which spilled over into a stormy controversy to shatter the emerging Pan-Germanic mystic-pagan idealism to its very foundations.

Well, there is a piece of famous advice, grand advice even if it is German, to forget what you can't bear. The strong can forget, can shut out history. Very good. Even if it is self-flattery to speak of strength--these aesthetic philosophers, they take a posture, but power sweeps postures away. Still, it's true you can't go on transposing one nightmare into another, Nietzsche was certainly right about that. The tender-minded must harden themselves. Is this world nothing but a barren lump of coke? No, no, but what sometimes seems a system of prevention, a denial of what every human being knows. I love my children, but I am the world to them, and bring them nightmares. I had this child by my enemy. And I love her. The sight of her, the odor of her hair, this minute, makes me tremble with love. Isn't it mysterious how I love the child of my enemy? But a man doesn't need happiness for himself. No, he can put up with any amount of torment--with recollections, with his own familiar evils, despair. And this is the unwritten history of man, his unseen, negative accomplishment, his power to do without gratification for himself provided there is something great, something into which his being, and all beings can go. He does not need meaning as long as such intensity has scope. Because then it is self-evident; it is meaning.

The Germans think that strength must reveal itself in hardness and cruelty; then they submit with fervor and admiration: they are suddenly rid of their pitiful weakness and their sensitivity for every naught, and they devoutly enjoy terror. That there is strength in mildness and stillness, they do not believe easily. They miss strength in Goethe …!—XI, 112.

The powerful, as Nietzsche points out expressly, have no need to prove their might either to themselves or to others by oppressing or hurting others; if they do hurt others, they do so incidentally in the process of using their power creatively; they hurt others 'without thinking of it'. A good illustration of the manner in which the person who has power may hurt another person incidentally without without the express wish of doing so would be Goethe, whose loves Nietzsche probably had to learn by heart, like most other students Goethe — as German teachers like to point out — broke Friederike's heart by lavishing his love upon her and then not marrying her. Goethe, however, had no thought of seeing the poor girl suffer. Only the weak need to convince themselves and others of their might by inflicting hurt; the truly powerful are not concerned with others but act out of a fullness and overflow.

The quarrel between Hume and Rousseau is symbolic: Rousseau was mad but influential, Hume was sane but had no followers. Subsequent British empiricists rejected his scepticism without refuting it; Rousseau and his followers agreed with Hume that no belief is based on reason, but thought the heart superior to reason, and allowed it to lead them to convictions very different from those that Hume retained in practice. German philosophers, from Kant to Hegel, had not assimilated Hume’s arguments. I say this deliberately, in spite of the belief which many philosophers share with Kant, that his Critique of Pure Reason answered Hume. In fact, these philosophers—at least Kant and Hegel—represent a pre-Humian type of rationalism, and can be refuted by Humian arguments. The philosophers who cannot be refuted in this way are those who do not pretend to be rational, such as Rousseau, Schopenhauer, and Nietzsche. The growth of unreason throughout the nineteenth century and what has passed of the twentieth is a natural sequel to Hume’s destruction of empiricism.

All truly great thoughts are conceived by walking." by Friedrich Nietzsche (1844-1900) German-Swiss philosopher and writer. Elizabeth Bennet: I'm very fond of walking. Mr. Darcy: Yes... yes I know. (from Pride & Prejudice) A man’s mind plans his way [as he journeys through life], But the Lord directs his steps and establishes them. (from the Bible, Proverbs 16:9 AMP) This is how we know what love is, Jesus Christ laid down his life for us. And we ought to lay down our lives for our brothers and sisters. (from the Bible, 1 John 3:16 NIV)

Apart from a few explanations that are not the subject of this essay, the strange and terrifying growth of the modern State can be considered as the logical conclusion of inordinate technical and philosophical ambitions, foreign to the true spirit of rebellion, but which nevertheless gave birth to the revolutionary spirit of our time. The prophetic dream of Marx and the over-inspired predictions of Hegel or of Nietzsche ended by conjuring up, after the city of God had been razed to the ground, a rational or irrational State, which in both cases, however, was founded on terror. In actual fact, the Fascist revolutions of the twentieth century do not merit the title of revolution. They lacked the ambition of universality. Mussolini and Hitler, of course, tried to build an empire, and the National Socialist ideologists were bent, explicitly, on world domination. But the difference between them and the classic revolutionary movement is that, of the nihilist inheritance, they chose to deify the irrational, and the irrational alone, instead of deifying reason. In this way they renounced their claim to universality. And yet Mussolini makes use of Hegel, and Hitler of Nietzsche; and both illustrate, historically, some of the prophecies of German ideology. In this respect they belong to the history of rebellion and of nihilism. They were the first to construct a State on the concept that everything is meaningless and that history is only written in terms of the hazards of force. The consequences were not long in appearing.

And of course if you ill-treat the body, it can throw you out of the house entirely, out of your body. It is like ill-treating objects. You know, objects are inanimate things; they lie about heavily, have no legs or wings, and people are often quite impatient with them. For instance, this book would like it very much better, I am sure, if it were lying near the center of the table where it is safe, but I have put it on the edge. It is an awkward position for that poor creature of a book. It may fall down and get injured. If I am impatient, if I touch them in an awkward way, it is a lamentable plight for the poor objects. Then they take their revenge on me. Because I illtreat them they turn against me and become contradictory in a peculiar way. I say, "Oh, these damned objects, dead things, despicable!"- and instantly they take on life. They begin to behave as if they were animated living things. You will then observe what the German philosopher tells about the die Tücke des Objekts. And the more you curse them, the more you use speech figures which insinuate life into them. For instance, "Where has that book hidden itself now? It has walked off and concealed itself somewhere." Or, "The devil is in that watch, where has it gone ?"Objects really take on dangerous qualities with people who are particularly impatient with them: they jump into your eyes, they bite your legs, they creep onto a chair and stick up a point upon which you sit-such things. Jung, C. G.. Nietzsche's Zarathustra: Notes of the Seminar given in 1934-1939. Two Volumes: 1-2, unabridged (Jung Seminars) (p. 351-352)

But I believe that the Industrial Revolution, including developments leading to this revolution, barely capture what was unique about Western culture. While other cultures were unique in their own customs, languages, beliefs, and historical experiences, the West was uniquely exceptional in exhibiting in a continuous way the greatest degree of creativity, novelty, and expansionary dynamics. I trace the uniqueness of the West back to the aristocratic warlike culture of Indo-European speakers as early as the 4th millennium BC. Their aristocratic libertarian culture was already unique and quite innovative in initiating the most mobile way of life in prehistoric times, starting with the domestication and riding of horses and the invention of chariot warfare. So were the ancient Greeks in their discovery of logos and its link with the order of the world, dialectical reason, the invention of prose, tragedy, citizen politics, and face-to-face infantry battle. The Roman creation of a secular system of republican governance anchored on autonomous principles of judicial reasoning was in and of itself unique. The incessant wars and conquests of the Roman legions, together with their many military innovations and engineering skills, were one of the most vital illustrations of spatial expansionism in history. The fusion of Christianity and the Greco-Roman intellectual and administrative heritage, coupled with the cultivation of Catholicism (the first rational theology in history), was a unique phenomenon. The medieval invention of universities — in which a secular education could flourish and even articles of faith were open to criticism and rational analysis, in an effort to arrive at the truth — was exceptional. The list of epoch-making transformation in Europe is endless: the Renaissance, the Age of Discovery, the Scientific Revolution(s), the Military Revolution(s), the Cartographic Revolution, the Spanish Golden Age, the Printing Revolution, the Enlightenment, the Romantic Era, the German Philosophical Revolutions from Kant to Hegel to Nietzsche to Heidegger.

The German philosopher Nietzsche said that there are many more unhappy marriages than unhappy people. It isn't lack of love which makes for unhappy marriages, but lack of friendship within the marriage. Friendship is far more demanding than marriage, which is, after all, only a contract dealing with property and inheritance (from 'Bell of the Desert' by Alan Gold)

There are, then, no easy answers to the questions raised by a thinker who may best be understood in performative terms. Their texts may be trying to provoke the reader to respond by, for example, saying something which the author does not actually believe. In that case, objecting to the argument merely means that one falls into the trap set by the text, in the way one looks silly by taking something seriously that is meant as a joke. One strategy is to accept that much of what is happening in Nietzsche's texts is indeed more performance than argument, but to look very carefully at the moments when performance gives way to assertion of a kind that cannot be construed as ironic or as merely performative. A further strategy is to keep in mind the ideological context of his writing. Although the Nietzsche of after the BT cannot be considered as a German nationalist, his elitism and his tendency to regard social issues as though they were biological issues - for example in relation to the idea that societies and cultures can become 'sick' - are very much part of reactionary thought in the second half of the nineteenth century. Such ideas fed into Nazism and other anti-democratic movements in the twentieth century, and are neither Nietzsche's creation, nor of any serious philosophical interest.

A Hegelian might then argue that this indeterminacy of being is precisely the point: it is only when being becomes something via social interchange that it is conceptually significant. Hegel's conception would seem compatible with an essentially left-wing conception of the centrality of social and political perspectives, rather than merely philosophical ones. Why, then, do Feuerbach and the other Young Hegelians come to oppose Hegel? For the most significant German thinkers after Hegel, from Feuerbach, to Nietzsche, Heidegger and Habermas himself, the very understanding of the task of philosophy in modernity becomes an issue because of the demise of Hegel's emphatic conception of the status of philosophy. If philosophy no longer can, or should, play a decisive systematizing role in modernity, what are the alternatives for dealing with what had formerly been seen as philosophical issues? One way of considering the perceived dangers of Hegel's approach to philosophy is in sociopolitical terms. The idea is that Hegel's philosophy subordinates real people to abstractions. This is precisely what Marx thinks that modern capitalism also does to them, by giving money, the abstract medium through which value is exchanged in society, precedence over people.

The German philosopher Nietzsche taught us that “the most common form of human stupidity is forgetting what one is trying to do.” In

nineteenth-century German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche so brilliantly noted, “He whose life has a why can bear almost any how.”61

Don’t underestimate the power of vision and direction. These are irresistible forces, able to transform what might appear to be unconquerable obstacles into traversable pathways and expanding opportunities. Strengthen the individual. Start with yourself. Take care with yourself. Define who you are. Refine your personality. Choose your destination and articulate your Being. As the great nineteenth-century German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche so brilliantly noted, “He whose life has a why can bear almost any how.”61

Though Buddhism adopted large numbers of deities from other religions, it is essentially atheistic. The German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche (1844–1900) praised Buddhism as a religion that had done away with the concept of God. Buddhist deities do not by any means represent the highest existence; they are thought of as standing below the Buddha, protecting the Buddha and the Dharma. Gods are above the realm of human beings, but the buddha-realm is above all existences, and it is human beings, not the gods, that are able to reach this state. It is not easy, for it takes enormous amounts of religious training, but theoretically human beings are able to surpass the gods.

The suggestion that eternal recurrence might be proved as a theorem of physics, rather than as a religious or philosophical doctrine, seems to have occurred at about the same time to the German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche and the French mathematician Henri Poincaré. Nietzsche encountered the idea of recurrence on his studies of classical philology, and again in a book by Heine. It was not until 1881 that he began to take it seriously, however, and then he devoted several years to studying physics in order to find a scientific-sounding formulation of it. Poincaré on the other hand, was led to the subject by his attempts to complete Poisson's proof of the stability of the solar system, though he was also concerned with the difficulty of explaining irreversibility by mechanical models such as Helmholtz's monocyclic systems. Poincaré's theorem belongs to the history of theoretical physics, Nietzsche's speculations to the history of philosophical culture, and they are not usually discussed in the same context. Yet I find it necessary to consider them together since it was just at the end of the 19th century that developments in science were strongly coupled to the philosophical-cultural background. Both Nietzsche and Poincaré were trying, though in very different ways, to attack the "materialist" or "mechanist" view of the universe.

Friedrich Nietzsche, the German philosopher, said that what he resented in most Christians was what he perceived as a constant underlying resentment: (1) a denied resentment toward God for demanding sacrifice, (2) toward others for not appreciating our sacrifice, (3) sacrificing as much as we sacrifice, (4) and a resentment toward others for not having to do it!

All truly great thoughts are conceived by walking." by Friedrich Nietzsche (1844-1900) German-Swiss philosopher and writer.

In the interview, Roger reflected how the German philosopher Nietzsche said a man can undergo torture if he knows the why of his life. But I, here at Dachau, learned something far greater. I learned to know the Who of my life. He was enough to sustain me then, and is enough to sustain me still

Nietzsche, never knowingly outdone in philosophical rudeness, looks down on the ‘indefatigable, inevitable English utilitarians’, ‘with derision, though not without pity’, because they lack ‘creative powers and artistic conscience’. Like Marx, he deplores what he regards as self-deceived universal pretences of a parochial outlook. The utilitarians promote ‘English morality’, not realizing that the alleged ‘happiness of the greatest number’ is in reality ‘the happiness of England’ (1886: §§225, 228). ‘One has to be English to be capable of believing that human beings always seek their own advantage’ (1906: §930). Well, it certainly helps! On the other hand, it may help to be German if one is to hold, with Nietzsche, that the ‘blond Arian beasts’ should promote neither the happiness of the greatest number, nor even their own happiness, but strive heroically and selflessly to wreak as much death and destruction as possible.

With a big enough why you can overcome any how. Friedrich Nietzsche, the German philosopher and poet, famously wrote, “He who has a why to live for can bear almost any how.” This phrase harbors an important truth about human behavior. If your motivation and desire are great enough (that is, why you are acting), you’ll take action even when it is quite difficult. Great craving can power great action—even when friction is high.

Don’t underestimate the power of vision and direction. These are irresistible forces, able to transform what might appear to be unconquerable obstacles into traversable pathways and expanding opportunities. Strengthen the individual. Start with yourself. Take care with yourself. Define who you are. Refine your personality. Choose your destination and articulate your Being. As the great nineteenth-century German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche so brilliantly noted, “He whose life has a why can bear almost any how.”61 You could help direct the world, on its careening trajectory, a bit more toward Heaven and a bit more away from Hell. Once having understood Hell, researched it, so to speak—particularly your own individual Hell—you could decide against going there or creating that. You could aim elsewhere. You could, in fact, devote your life to this. That would give you a Meaning, with a capital M. That would justify your miserable existence. That would atone for your sinful nature, and replace your shame and self-consciousness with the natural pride and forthright confidence of someone who has learned once again to walk with God in the Garden.

I must confess that often, when I have tried to read the most popularly effective of German philosophical writers, Nietzsche, I have felt like throwing the book across the room. He is a boiling pot of enthusiasms and animosities, which he pours out volubly, skilfully, and eloquently. If he were content to label these outpourings " Prejudices," as Mr. Mencken so truly and candidly labels his own, one could accept them in the spirit in which they were offered ; there is no more interesting reading than the aired prejudices of a brilliant writer. But he obviously takes them for something more and something better ; he gakes them as philosophy instead of what they largely are, pseudo-Isaian prophesying, incoherent and unreasoned Sibylline oracles.

That pattern can be defined in a number of ways, but most fundamentally it is a conflict between those forces that Freud called the superego and the id. The superego – the self’s “harsh master,” Freud called it – is the angel guarding the door to Eden with a flaming sword; its archetypal religious expression is Christianity, that most social of all religions, which asks each individual to consider all others before himself. The id – the primordial raw power of instinct itself – is the force that sends us around to the back of Eden, looking for another entrance; its archetypal religious expression is Dionysianism, the cult of deliriant drugs that burst into Athens from somewhere in the East during Greece’s prehistoric period, approximately between 1000-900 BC. The German philosopher Nietzsche said that history is coming, in our time, to take the form of a final conflict between Christ and Dionysus, and that certainly seems to be the case in America today. The Reverend Billy Graham, the classic “pale Christian,” sits as an adviser to Presidents, while Dr. Timothy Leary, the Dionysian spirit of dope and ecstasy is sentenced to 40 years and flees into exile, only to be recaptured.

When you observe a cue, but do not desire to change your state, you are content with the current situation. Happiness is not about the achievement of pleasure (which is joy or satisfaction), but about the lack of desire. It arrives when you have no urge to feel differently. Happiness is the state you enter when you no longer want to change your state. However, happiness is fleeting because a new desire always comes along. As Caed Budris says, “Happiness is the space between one desire being fulfilled and a new desire forming.” Likewise, suffering is the space between craving a change in state and getting it. It is the idea of pleasure that we chase. We seek the image of pleasure that we generate in our minds. At the time of action, we do not know what it will be like to attain that image (or even if it will satisfy us). The feeling of satisfaction only comes afterward. This is what the Austrian neurologist Victor Frankl meant when he said that happiness cannot be pursued, it must ensue. Desire is pursued. Pleasure ensues from action. Peace occurs when you don’t turn your observations into problems. The first step in any behavior is observation. You notice a cue, a bit of information, an event. If you do not desire to act on what you observe, then you are at peace. Craving is about wanting to fix everything. Observation without craving is the realization that you do not need to fix anything. Your desires are not running rampant. You do not crave a change in state. Your mind does not generate a problem for you to solve. You’re simply observing and existing. With a big enough why you can overcome any how. Friedrich Nietzsche, the German philosopher and poet, famously wrote, “He who has a why to live for can bear almost any how.” This phrase harbors an important truth about human behavior. If your motivation and desire are great enough (that is, why you are acting), you’ll take action even when it is quite difficult. Great craving can power great action—even when friction is high. Being curious is better than being smart. Being motivated and curious counts for more than being smart because it leads to action. Being smart will never deliver results on its own because it doesn’t get you to act. It is desire, not intelligence, that prompts behavior. As Naval Ravikant says, “The trick to doing anything is first cultivating a desire for it.

As the great nineteenth-century German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche so brilliantly noted, “He whose life has a why can bear almost any how.

conviction is the enemy of truth" as the German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche stated.

This was the background for Benn's harsh objections. Versed in the arguments put forward by Philosophical Anthropology, Benn was anything but a concerned humanist; he was not irritated by the denial of man's higher status but by Uexkiill's putative blindness to man's fundamentally problematic nature. This critique of Uexkull (which will resurface time and again) is a kind of speciesism in a minor key that tries to reclaim a special place for humans not as the masters but as the misfits of creation. There are always faint echoes of Kierkegaard: somehow, we are special because we are broken, lost, abandoned, or derelict incomplete beings. (Alternately, "unfinished" humans may be labeled as evolutionary to-do projects that await completion.) Uexkiill's "jovial" theory appears to be devoid of tragedy. There is—to span the extremes of the German pantheon—too much Goethe and too little Nietzsche. Heaping insult upon insult, Benn acknowledged the similarity between Uexkull and Goethe but then added that in Goethe's time this type of harmonious leveling of differences may have been "worthy of a great man," but nowadays it revealed nothing other than the "primary joviality of the biologist and insect specialist.

The powerful, as Nietzsche points out expressly, have no need to prove their might either to themselves or to others by oppressing or hurting others; if they do hurt others, they do so incidentally in the process of using their power creatively; they hurt others 'without thinking of it'. Only the weak man 'wishes to hurt and to see signs of suffering'. A good illustration of the manner in which the person who has power may hurt another person incidentally without without the express wish of doing so would be Goethe, whose loves Nietzsche probably had to learn by heart, like most other students Goethe — as German teachers like to point out — broke Friederike's heart by lavishing his love upon her and then not marrying her. Goethe, however, had no thought of seeing the poor girl suffer. Only the weak need to convince themselves and others of their might by inflicting hurt; the truly powerful are not concerned with others but act out of a fullness and overflow.

The powerful, as Nietzsche points out expressly, have no need to prove their might either to themselves or to others by oppressing or hurting others; if they do hurt others, they do so incidentally in the process of using their power creatively; they hurt others 'without thinking of it'. Only the weak man 'wishes to hurt and to see signs of suffering'. A good illustration of the manner in which the person who has power may hurt another person incidentally without the express wish of doing so would be Goethe, whose loves Nietzsche probably had to learn by heart, like most other students Goethe — as German teachers like to point out — broke Friederike's heart by lavishing his love upon her and then not marrying her. Goethe, however, had no thought of seeing the poor girl suffer. Only the weak need to convince themselves and others of their might by inflicting hurt; the truly powerful are not concerned with others but act out of a fullness and overflow.

All of these statist manifestations of Marx had rivals who tried to preserve Marx's revolutionary potential, to wield him as a hammer against these regimes, but, over time, they were marginalized and conquered, and sometimes, to add insult to injury, portrayed as Marx's enemies, both by the open anti-Marxists and those who used Marx to defend existing capitalist regimes. This same vulgarization was committed against Nietzsche by those Nazis who proclaimed the arrival of the Ubermensch in the Third Reich, even when this Ubermensch was characterized by two of Nietzsche's most hated things -- a German and an anti-Semite.

A document of legitimation cannot be transformative -- it must be as formal and static as the regime it is legitimating. Thus, many branches of radical thought are kept from growing, others are cut off, some bent and broken, and still others isolated. Through the formalizing processes of the German Social Democratic Party, the Second International, and finally the Soviet Union, Marx was transformed from a source of infinite self-transformation into a monument -- static in form and content. The turning of a thinker into a monument is equivalent to their death -- as it is in death that one's potentiality is cut off and it is finally said what one "was" -- reduced to bones, to the rigid and the inanimate. The thinker becomes a statue, and statues, as Lenin once reportedly said, are "for pigeons to shit on." If the statue is successfully established, its weight grows in accordance with its influence; and then, one must heed Zarathustra's warning to "be careful lest a statue fall and kill you!

German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche so brilliantly noted, “He whose life has a why can bear almost any how.”61

When you’re faced with too many demands, it’s easy to assume that the only answer must be to make better use of time, by becoming more efficient, driving yourself harder, or working for longer—as if you were a machine in the Industrial Revolution—instead of asking whether the demands themselves might be unreasonable. It grows alluring to try to multitask—that is, to use the same portion of time for two things at once, as the German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche was one of the first to notice: “One thinks with a watch in one’s hand,

With a big enough why you can overcome any how. Friedrich Nietzsche, the German philosopher and poet, famously wrote, “He who has a why to live for can bear almost any how.” This phrase harbors an important truth about human behavior. If your motivation and desire are great enough (that is, why you are acting), you’ll take action even when it is quite difficult. Great craving can power great action—even when friction is high. Being curious is better than being smart. Being motivated and curious counts for more than being smart because it leads to action. Being smart will never deliver results on its own because it doesn’t get you to act. It is desire, not intelligence, that prompts behavior. As Naval Ravikant says, “The trick to doing anything is first cultivating a desire for it.

Battle not with monsters, Lest ye become a monster. And if you gaze into the abyss, The abyss gazes back into you.” —Friedrich Nietzsche, German philosopher