"The falseness of a judgment is for us not necessarily an objection to a judgment.... The question is to what extent it is life-promoting, life-preserving, species-preserving, perhaps even species-cultivating.... [W]ithout accepting the fictions of logic, without measuring reality against the purely invented world of the unconditional and self- identical, without a constant falsification of the world by means of numbers, man could not live.... To recognize untruth as a condition of life -- that certainly means resisting accustomed value feelings in a dangerous way; and a philosophy that risks this would by that token alone place itself beyond good and evil." "For all the value that the true, the truthful, the selfless may deserve, it would still be possible that a higher and more fundamental value for life might have to be ascribed to deception, selfishness, and lust. It might even be possible that what constitutes the value of these good and revered things is precisely that they are insidiously related, tied to, and involved with these wicked, seemingly opposite things -- maybe even one with them in essence." "[M]ost of the conscious thinking of a philosopher is secretly guided and forced into certain channels by his instincts. Behind all logic and its seeming sovereignty of movement, too, there stand valuations or, more clearly, physiological demands for the preservation of a certain type of life." "Why make a principle of what you yourself are and must be?" - Friedrich Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil "What is it that the common people take for 'knowledge'? Nothing more than this: Something strange is to be reduced to something _familiar_." "What is familiar means what we are used to so that we no longer marvel at it, our everyday, some rule in which we are stuck, anything at all in which we feel at home. Look, isn't our need for knowledge precisely this need for the familiar, the will to uncover under everything strange, unusual, and questionable something that no longer disturbs us? Is it not the _instinct of fear_ that bids us to know? And is the jubilation of those who attain knowledge not the jubilation over the restoration of a sense of security?" "Error of errors! What is familiar is what we are used to; and what we are used to is most difficult to 'know' -- that is, to see as a problem; that is, to see as strange, as distant, as 'outside us.'" "[Wisdom] is a screen behind which the philosopher saves himself because he has become weary, old, cold, hard -- as a premonition that the end is near, like the prudence animals have before they die: they go off by themselves, become still, choose solitude, hide in caves, and become _wise_." - Friedrich Nietzsche (1844-1900), The Gay Science Friedrich Nietzsche Resources on the Web: Nietzsche Bibliography: http://philosophysearch.com/books/nietzsche/ Nietzsche's Labyrinth: http://www.macromind.org/maps/nz/ A site devoted to Friedrich Nietzsche, featuring the texts The Antichrist, Human All Too Human, and The Dawn (Daybreak). This site also features links to Nietzsche commentary, genealogy, and subsequent investigations prompted by his thought. The Perspectives of Nietzsche: http://www.pitt.edu/~wbcurry/nietzsche.html An extensive collection of quotations organized by topic and including full citations. "If philosophy ever manifested itself as helpful, redeeming, or prophylactic, it was in a healthy culture. The sick, it made ever sicker." "Whoever concerns himself with the Greeks should be ever mindful that an unrestrained thirst for knowledge for its own sake barbarizes men just as much as hatred of knowledge." "Philosophy leaps ahead on tiny toe-holds; hope and intuition lend wings to its feet. Calculating reason lumbers heavily behind, looking for better footholds, for reason too wants to reach that alluring goal which its divine comrade has long since reached." "Ordinary people fancy they see something rigid, complete and permanent; in truth, however, light and dark, bitter and sweet are attached to each other and interlocked at any given moment like wrestlers of whom sometimes the one, sometimes the other is on top." "The strife of the opposites gives birth to all that comes-to-be; the definite qualities which look permanent to us express but the momentary ascendancy of one partner." - Friedrich Nietzsche (1844-1900), Philosophy in the Tragic Age of the Greeks "This is a mistake which I seem to make eternally, that I imagine the sufferings of others as far greater than they really are. Ever since my childhood, the proposition 'my greatest dangers lie in pity' has been confirmed again and again." "It seems to me that a human being with the very best of intentions can do immeasurable harm, if he is immodest enough to wish to profit those whose spirit and will are concealed from him." "The will to a _system_: in a philosopher, morally speaking, a subtle corruption, a disease of the character; amorally speaking, his will to pose as more stupid than he is -- more stupid, that means: stronger, simpler, more commanding, less educated, more masterful, more tyrannical." - Friedrich Nietzsche (1844-1900), Letters (1884-85) "There is no more dangerous error than that of mistaking the effect for the cause: I call it the real corruption of reason." "People have believed at all times that they knew what a cause is; but whence did we take our knowledge - or more precisely, our faith that we had such knowledge? From the realm of the famous "inner facts," of which not a single one has so far proved to be factual." "Today we no longer have any pity for the concept of "free will": we know only too well what it really is - the foulest of all theologians' artifices, aimed at making mankind "responsible" in their sense, that is, dependent upon them." -Friedrich Nietzsche (1844-1900), Twilight of the Idols