Mirage Memorable Quotes

Nietzsche was to reiterate this, long after the Greeks—which proves in passing that their message preserves an actuality such as can still be found in modern philosophy: the ultimate end of human life is what Nietzsche calls amor fati, or “love of one’s fate.” To embrace everything that is the case, our destiny—which, in essence, means the present moment, considered as the highest form of wisdom, and the only form that can rid us of what Spinoza (whom Nietzsche regarded as “a brother”) named, equally memorably, the “sad passions”: fear, hatred, guilt, remorse, those corrupters of the soul that bog us down in mirages of the past or of the future. Only our reconciliation to the present, to the present moment—in Greek, the kairos—can, for Nietzsche, as for Greek culture as a whole, lead to proper serenity, to the “innocence of becoming,” in other words to salvation, understood not in its religious meaning but in the sense of discovering ourselves as saved, finally, from those fears that diminish existence, stunting and shriveling it.