Friedrich Nietzsche

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“ We are not subtle enough to perceive the probably absolute flow of becoming; the permanent exists only thanks to our coarse organs which summarize things and reduce them to common levels, when in fact nothing exists in that form. The tree is at each instant a new thing; we assert form because we do not grasp the subtlety of an absolute moment.”

“For what purpose humanity is there should not even concern us: why you are there, that you should ask yourself: and if you have no ready answer, then set for yourself goals, high and noble goals, and perish in pursuit of them! I know of no better life purpose than to perish in attempting the great and the impossible...” (unpublished note from 1873)

“Woe to you if homesickness for the land overcome you . . . when there is no longer any land!” (The Joyful Wisdom, para. 124).

“What have we done, in unchaining this earth from its sun? Whence is it rolling now? . . . Have we not thrown ourselves into a continuous fall? . . . Are we not straying as across an infinite nothingness? Do we not feel the breath of the void?” (The Joyful Wisdom)

The truth of language is but “a mobile army of metaphors, metonyms, and anthropomorphisms—in short, a sum of human relations, which have been enhanced, transposed, and embellished poetically and rhetorically, and which after long use seem firm, canonical, and obligatory to a people: truths are illusions about which one has forgotten that this is what they are” (“On Truth and Lie in an Extra-Moral Sense,” in The Portable Nietzsche, ed. and Trans. Walter Kaufmann [1954] 46-7).

“Whoever fights monsters should see to it that in the process he does not become a monster. And when you look into an abyss, the abyss also looks into you.” (Beyond Good and Evil, 147)

“My dear friend, what is this our life? A boat that swims in the sea, and all one knows for certain about it is that one day it will capsize. Here we are, two good old boats that have been faithful neighbors, and above all your hand has done its best to keep me from ‘capsizing’! Let us then continue our voyage—each for the other’s sake, for a long time yet, a long time!” (Letter to Franz Overbeck, November 14, 1881)

“The world, as far as we can know it, is our own nervous activity, nothing more.” (KGW V-1.766)

“Finally we grasp it: a thing is a sum of excitatons in us: because we however are not firm solids, so too is a thing no firm sum.” (KGW V-1.767)

“Parmenides said ‘one cannot think that which is not"’ —we are at the other end and say ‘that which can be thought must surely be a fiction.’ Thought has no grip on the real, but rather only on — ” (KGW VIII-3, p. 124)

“All of these highest products of German art have been born so much out of the depths of the German spirit that they have become simultaneously the sharpest protest against the Jews. One can scarcely imagine anything more anti-Semitic than the Beethoven symphonies and Don Juan, Faust and Werther, the Meistersinger and Ring of the Nibelungen.”

“We want to inherit all ancient morality, not start again. All of our activity is only morality turning against the older forms.”

“We’re forced to be conquerors because we no longer have a country we want to remain in. A secret confidence impels us, confidence stronger than our negations. Our very strength doesn’t allow us to stay on this ancient soil.”

Nietzsche on traveling

“Where one must travel.—Direct self-observation does not by any means suffice for self-knowledge. We need history, inasmuch as the past wells up in us in hundreds of ways. Indeed we ourselves are nothing other than what we sense at each instant of that onward flow. For even when we wish to go down to the stream of our apparently ownmost, most personal essence, Heraclitus’s statement holds true: one does not step twice into the same river.—The maxim has by now grown stale; yet it is as nourishing and energizing as ever. So too is the maxim that in order to understand history one must search for the living remnants of historical epochs—and do so by traveling, as the venerable Herodotus traveled to sundry nations. . . . It is quite probable that the last three centuries, in all the hues and refracted colors of their civilization, live on, quite close to us: they only have to be discovered. . . . Most assuredly, in remote places, in rarely penetrated mountain valleys, self-contained communities manifesting a much older sensibility can be more readily preserved. That is where we have to go looking for them. . . . Whoever after long practice has become a hundred-eyed Argos in this art of traveling will finally rejoin his Io—I mean his ego—everywhere, and will rediscover the travel-adventure of this transformative and evolving ego in Egypt and Greece, Byzantium and Rome, France and Germany, in the periods of the migratory or the sedentary peoples, in the Renaissance and Reformation, in one's own homeland and abroad, and indeed in the sea, the vegetation, and the mountains.” (Human, All-Too-Human).

Engadine, Switzerland: “Of all the places on earth, I feel best here in the Engadine. To be sure, the attacks come to me here as they do everywhere else; yet they are milder by far, much more humane. I am continuously calmed here, none of the pressure that I feel everywhere else. Here all excessive stimulation ceases for me. I would beg of humankind, ‘Preserve for me but three or four months of summer in the Engadine, otherwise I really cannot bear life any longer.’ . . . Yet the Engadine summer is so short, and by September’s end I will return to Genoa. I have never had such tranquillity, and the paths, woods, lakes, and meadows are as though made for me; the prices are not altogether beyond my means. . . . The place is called Sils-Maria. Please keep the name a secret from my friends and acquaintances; I don't want any visitors.” (Letter to his sister Elisabeth, July 7, 1881)

Sils-Maria, Switzerland: “Now, my dear and good friend! The August sun shines over our heads, the year is fugitive, it grows quieter and more peaceful on the mountains and in the woods. Thoughts have been looming on my horizon the like of which I have never seen—I don't want to say a word about them, I want to preserve an unruffled calm in myself. It seems I shall have to live several years longer. Oh, my friend sometimes the realization runs through my head that I am actually living a supremely dangerous life: for I belong among those machines that can explode! The intensities of my feeling make me shudder and laugh aloud—already on several occasions I was unable to leave my room for the ridiculous reason that my eyes were inflamed—from what? On each occasion I had been weeping excessively during my hikes the day before; no, not sentimental tears, but tears of exultation; during which I sang and muttered nonsense, filled to the brim with my new vision, which I am the first of all human beings to have.” (Letter to Heinrich Köselitz, August 14, 1881)

Recoaro, Italy: “As far as landscape is concerned, Recoaro is one of my most beautiful experiences. I literally chased after its beauty, and expended a great deal of energy and enthusiasm on it. The beauty of nature, like every other kind of beauty, is quite jealous; it demands that one serve it alone.” (Letter to Heinrich Köselitz, June 23, 1881)

Zarathustra in Rapallo: “The following winter [1882-83] I lived near that charming, quiet bay that intervenes between Chiavari and the foothills of Portofino, the Bay of Rapallo [Tigullio], not far from Genoa. My health was not the best; the winter was cold and excessively rainy; a small albergo, fronting directly on the sea, a happenstance that made sleep impossible during the nights when the sea was high, in all respects offered the very opposite of everything my heart desired. Nevertheless, and well-nigh as evidence for my statement that everything decisive originates ‘despite all,’ it was during this winter and under these unfavorable circumstances that my Zarathustra came to be. In the morning I would ascend in a southerly direction along the splendid road that leads high up to Zoagli, a road that passes through pines and offers a view far out over the sea. In the afternoon, when my health permitted, I would walk around the entire Bay of Santa Margherita and over the hills all the way to the tip of Portofino. . . . On these two paths, the first entire part of Zarathustra, and above all the figure of Zarathustra himself as a type, came to me. Or, rather, he overcame me.” (Ecce Homo)

Nice: “I’ve tested Munich, Florence, Genoa—but nothing suits my old head like this Nice, minus a couple of months in Sils-Maria. At all events, I am told that the summer here is more refreshing than at any place in the interior of Germany (the evenings with sea breeze, the nights cool). The air is incomparable, the strength it gives one (and also the light that fills the sky) not to be found anywhere else in Europe. Finally I should mention that one can live here cheaply, very cheaply, and that the place is large enough in scope to permit every degree of concealment to a hermit. The altogether select things of nature, such as the forest paths on the closest hill, or on the St. Jean Peninsula, I have all to myself. Similarly the entire Promenade (about a forty-five minute walk) is splendidly free, inasmuch as people visit for only a few hours during the day. . . . One is so ‘un-German’ here: I can't emphasize that strongly enough” (Letter to Heinrich Köselitz, November 24, 1885)

Zarathustra in Nice: “The following winter [1883-84], under the halcyon skies of Nice, which glistened above me for the first time in my life, I discovered the third part of Zarathustra—and the book was finished. Scarcely a year for the composition of the whole. Many concealed spots and many heights in the landscape of Nice have become sacrosanct to me because of unforgettable moments there. That decisive part of the third book, ‘Of Old and New Tablets,’ was composed on the difficult and steep ascent from the railway station at Èze to the marvelous Moorish eagle’s nest overhead. My muscle tone was always greatest when my creative energies flowed most abundantly. The body is spirited—let us leave the ‘soul’ out of play. . . . One could often have spotted me dancing: at that time I could wander through the mountains for seven or eight hours at a time without tiring. I slept well. I laughed a lot—I was fit as I could be, and I was patient.” (Ecce Homo)

Ever-holier mountains: “I draw circles and sacred boundaries about me; fewer and fewer climb with me up higher and higher mountains.—I am building a mountain chain out of ever-holier mountains.” (“Of Old and New Tablets,” Thus Spoke Zarathustra)

“It is my fourth winter in this place, my seventh on this coast: that is the way my health wants it, for it is stupid as well as demanding, ready to make mischief as soon as the occasioning circumstances pile up. Nice and the Engadine: that is the circle dance this old nag cannot escape. . . . To be sure, there can be no more beautiful season in Nice than the current one: the sky blindingly white, the sea tropical blue, and in the night a moonlight that makes the gas lanterns feel ashamed, for they flush red. And here once again I perambulate, as so many times before, thinking my kinds of thoughts, ebon thoughts” (Letter to Malwida von Meysenbug, December 13, 1886)

Torino, Italy: “I have discovered Torino. . . . Torino is not a well-known city, is it? The educated German travels right on by it. Granted my hardness of heart in the face of everything that education commends, I have established Torino as my third residence, with Sils-Maria as the first and Nice as the second. Four months at each place: in the case of Torino it is two months in the spring and two in the fall. Odd! What convinces me is the air, the dry air which is the same in all three places, and for the same meteorological reasons: snow-capped mountains to the north and west. That is the calculation that has brought me here, and I am enchanted! Even on the very warm days—and we have had such already—that famous Zephyr blows, of which I had heard only the poets speak (without believing them: pack of liars!). The nights are cool. From the middle of the city you can see the snow.” (Letter to Reinhart von Seydlitz, May 13, 1888)

Torino, a city beyond good and evil: “This is a city I can use now! That is crystal clear to me, and it was so from the very first moment. . . . What a worthy and serious city! Not at all a metropolis, not at all modern, as I had feared: rather, it is city of seventeenth-century royalty, which has but one commanding taste in all things, that of the court and the nobles. Aristocratic tranquillity in everything has been preserved. There is no wretched faubourg. There is a unity of taste, down to the colors (the whole city is yellow or reddish brown). And for the feet as well as the eyes it is a classic spot! What safety, what sidewalks, not to mention the omnibus and the trams, which are miraculously arranged here! . . . What solemn and earnest piazzas! And the palaces are built without pretension, the streets clean and well made—everything far more dignified than I expected! The most beautiful cafés I've ever seen. These arcades are necessary here, given the changeable weather: yet they are spacious, not at all oppressive. Evenings on the bridge over the (river) Po: splendid! (“Beyond good and evil!” Nietzsche's Letters)

Nietzsche's Travels:

• Krell, David Farrell and Donald L. Bates. The Good European: Nietzsche’s Work Sites in Word and Image. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1997

German Abbreviations

GT Geburt der Tragödie
UBDS David Strauss
UBHL Vom Nutzen und Nachteil der Historie
UBSE Schopenhauer als Erzieher
UBRW Richard Wagner in Bayreuth
MAMI Menschliches, Allzumenschliches I
MAMII Menschliches, Allzumenschliches II
M Morgenröte
FW Fröhliche Wissenschaft
IM Idyllen aus Messina
Z Also sprach Zarathustra
JGB Jenseits von Gut und Böse
GM Zur Genealogie der Moral
EH Ecce Homo
GD Götzendämmerung
FWag Der Fall Wagner
AC Der Antichrist
DD Dionysis-Dithyramben
NcW Nietzsche contra Wagner

The following table summarizes the abbreviations used for individual titles of the unpublished work of Nietzsche's years in Basel:

GMD Zwei öffentliche Vorträge über die griechische
Tragödie. Erster Vortrag: Das griechische Musikdrama
ST Zwei öffentliche Vorträge über die griechische
Tragödie. Zweiter Vortrag: Socrates und die Tragoedie
DW Die dionysische Weltanschauung
GG Die Geburt des tragischen Gedankens
SGT Sokrates und die griechische Tragoedie
BA Ueber die Zukunft unserer Bildungsanstalten
CV Fünf Vorreden zu fünf ungeschriebenen Büchern
NJ Ein Neujahrswort an den Herausgebern der Wochenschrift „Im
neuen Reich”
PHG Die Philosophie im tragischen Zeitalter der Griechen
WL Ueber Wahrheit und Lüge im aussermoralischen Sinne
MD Mahnruf an die Deutschen
K Kritische Studienausgabe, Bd. 14
C Kritische Studienausgabe, Bd. 15

English Abbreviations

A = The Antichrist
AOM = Assorted Opinions and Maxims
BGE = Beyond Good and Evil
BT = The Birth of Tragedy
CW = The Case of Wagner
D = Daybreak / Dawn
DS = David Strauss, the Writer and the Confessor
EH = Ecce Homo ["Wise," "Clever," "Books," "Destiny"]
FEI = "On the Future of our Educational Institutions"
GM = On the Genealogy of Morals
GOA = Nietzsches Werke (Grossoktavausgabe)
GS = The Gay Science / Joyful Wisdom
HL = On the Use and Disadvantage of History for Life
HC = "Homer's Contest"
HCP = "Homer and Classical Philology"
HH = Human, All Too Human
KGB = Briefwechsel: Kritische Gesamtausgabe
KGW = Kritische Gesamtausgabe Werke
KSA = Kritische Studienausgabe
LR = "Lectures on Rhetoric"
MA = Nietzsches Gesammelte Werke (Musarionausgabe)
NCW = Nietzsche contra Wagner
PPP = Pre-Platonic Philosophers
PTA = Philosophy in the Tragic Age of the Greeks
RWB = Richard Wagner in Bayreuth
SE = Schopenhauer as Educator
TI = Twilight of the Idols ["Maxims," "Socrates," "Reason," "World," "Morality," "Errors," "Improvers," "Germans," "Skirmishes," "Ancients," "Hammer"]
TL = "On Truth and Lies in an Extra?moral Sense"
UM = Untimely Meditations / Thoughts Out of Season
WDB = Werke in drei Bänden (Ed. Karl Schlechta)
WP = The Will to Power
WPh = "We Philologists"
WS = The Wanderer and his Shadow
Z = Thus Spoke Zarathustra