Quotes from Twilight of the Idols/The Anti-Christ

“Thus the man who is responsive to artistic stimuli reacts to the reality of dreams as does the philosopher to the reality of existence; he observes closely, and he enjoys his observation: for it is out of these images that he interprets life, out of these processes that he trains himself for life.”
― Friedrich Nietzsche, quote from Twilight of the Idols/The Anti-Christ

“Reason" in language - oh, what an old deceptive female she is! I am afraid we are not rid of God because we still have faith in grammar.”
― Friedrich Nietzsche, quote from Twilight of the Idols/The Anti-Christ

“Life is at an end where the kingdom of God begins”
― Friedrich Nietzsche, quote from Twilight of the Idols/The Anti-Christ

“It was only Christianity, with resentment against life in its foundations, which made sexuality something impure: it threw filth on the beginning, on the prerequisite of our life”
― Friedrich Nietzsche, quote from Twilight of the Idols/The Anti-Christ

“So long as the priest, that denier, calumniator and poisoner of life by profession, still counts as a higher kind of human being, there can be no answer to the question: what is truth? One has already stood truth on its head when the conscious advocate of denial and nothingness counts as the representative of ‘truth”
― Friedrich Nietzsche, quote from Twilight of the Idols/The Anti-Christ

“Are you genuine? or just a play-actor? A representative? it the actual thing represented?-Ultimately you are even just an imitation play-actor....Second question for the conscience.”
― Friedrich Nietzsche, quote from Twilight of the Idols/The Anti-Christ

“The true world -- we have abolished. What world has remained? The apparent one perhaps? But no! With the true world we have also abolished the apparent one.”
― Friedrich Nietzsche, quote from Twilight of the Idols/The Anti-Christ

“One is necessary, one is a piece of fate, one belongs to the whole, one is the whole – there exists nothing which could judge, measure, compare, condemn our being, for that would be to judge, measure, compare, condemn the whole…But nothing exists apart from the whole!”
― Friedrich Nietzsche, quote from Twilight of the Idols/The Anti-Christ

“Neither can such a doctrine argue: it simply does not understand that other doctrines exist, can exist, it simply does not know how to imagine an opinion contrary to its own”
― Friedrich Nietzsche, quote from Twilight of the Idols/The Anti-Christ

“Is the world really beautified by the fact that man thinks it beautiful? He has humanized it, that is all.”
― Friedrich Nietzsche, quote from Twilight of the Idols/The Anti-Christ

“Dante, or the hyena that writes poetry in tombs.”
― Friedrich Nietzsche, quote from Twilight of the Idols/The Anti-Christ

“(Broad daylight; breakfast; return of cheerfulness and bons sens; Plato blushes for shame; all free spirits run riot.)”
― Friedrich Nietzsche, quote from Twilight of the Idols/The Anti-Christ

“To stay cheerful when involved in a gloomy and exceedingly responsible business is no inconsiderable art: yet what could be more necessary than cheerfulness? Nothing succeeds in which high spirits play no part. Only excess of strength is proof of strength.”
― Friedrich Nietzsche, quote from Twilight of the Idols/The Anti-Christ

“By saying 'God sees into the heart' it denies the deepest and the highest desires of life and takes God for the enemy of life. The saint in whom God takes pleasure is the ideal castrate. Life is at an end where the kingdom of God begins.”
― Friedrich Nietzsche, quote from Twilight of the Idols/The Anti-Christ

“In this condition one enriches everything out of one's own abundance: what one sees, what one desires, one sees swollen, pressing, strong, over laden with energy. The man in this condition transforms things until they mirror his power - until they are reflections of his perfections”
― Friedrich Nietzsche, quote from Twilight of the Idols/The Anti-Christ

“It is unworthy of great spirits to spread abroad the agitation they feel”
― Friedrich Nietzsche, quote from Twilight of the Idols/The Anti-Christ

“Moral for psychologists. -- Not to go in for backstairs psychology. Never to observe in order to observe! That gives a false perspective, leads to squinting and something forced and exaggerated. Experience as the wish to experience does not succeed. One must not eye oneself while having an experience; else the eye becomes "an evil eye." A born psychologist guards instinctively against seeing in order to see; the same is true of the born painter. He never works "from nature"; he leaves it to his instinct, to his camera obscura, to sift through and express the "case," "nature," that which is "experienced." He is conscious only of what is general, of the conclusion, the result: he does not know arbitrary abstractions from an individual case.
What happens when one proceeds differently? For example, if, in the manner of the Parisian novelists, one goes in for backstairs psychology and deals in gossip, wholesale and retail? Then one lies in wait for reality, as it were, and every evening one brings home a handful of curiosities. But note what finally comes of all this: a heap of splotches, a mosaic at best, but in any case something added together, something restless, a mess of screaming colors. The worst in this respect is accomplished by the Goncourts; they do not put three sentences together without really hurting the eye, the psychologist's eye. Nature, estimated artistically, is no model. It exaggerates, it distorts, it leaves gaps. Nature is chance. To study "from nature" seems to me to be a bad sign: it betrays submission, weakness, fatalism; this lying in the dust before petit faits [little facts] is unworthy of a whole artist. To see what is--that is the mark of another kind of spirit, the anti-artistic, the factual. One must know who one is.

Toward a psychology of the artist. -- If there is to be art, if there is to be any aesthetic doing and seeing, one physiological condition is indispensable: frenzy. Frenzy must first have enhanced the excitability of the whole machine; else there is no art. All kinds of frenzy, however diversely conditioned, have the strength to accomplish this: above all, the frenzy of sexual excitement, this most ancient and original form of frenzy. Also the frenzy that follows all great cravings, all strong affects; the frenzy of feasts, contests, feats of daring, victory, all extreme movement; the frenzy of cruelty; the frenzy in destruction, the frenzy under certain meteorological influences, as for example the frenzy of spring; or under the influence of narcotics; and finally the frenzy of will, the frenzy of an overcharged and swollen will. What is essential in such frenzy is the feeling of increased strength and fullness. Out of this feeling one lends to things, one forces them to accept from us, one violates them--this process is called idealizing. Let us get rid of a prejudice here: idealizing does not consist, as is commonly held, in subtracting or discounting the petty and inconsequential. What is decisive is rather a tremendous drive to bring out the main features so that the others disappear in the process.

In this state one enriches everything out of one's own fullness: whatever one sees, whatever one wills, is seen swelled, taut, strong, overloaded with strength. A man in this state transforms things until they mirror his power--until they are reflections of his perfection. This having to transform into perfection is--art. Even everything that he is not yet, becomes for him an occasion of joy in himself; in art man enjoys himself as perfection.”
― Friedrich Nietzsche, quote from Twilight of the Idols/The Anti-Christ

“It is in this sense that Nietzsche is driven, against many explicit resolutions to the contrary, to be a No-sayer. For what the décadents who surround him are doing is to say No where they should be saying Yes, where they should be Dionysian; and what is leading them to this life-denying perversity, mostly of course unconsciously, is that they subscribe to a set of values that puts the central features of *this* world at a discount. Where they find suffering, they immediately look for someone to blame, and end up hating themselves, or generalize that into a hatred of "human nature". They look for "peace of mind", using it as a blanket term and failing to see the diversity of states, some of them desirable and some of them the reverse, which that term covers. They confuse cause and effect, thinking that the connection between virtue and happiness is that the former leads to the latter, whereas in fact the reverse is the case. They have, in Nietzsche's cruelly accurate phrase, "the vulgar ambition to possess generous feelings" ("Expeditions of an Untimely Man, number 6). They confuse breeding fine men with taming them. Throughout the major part of Twilight this devastating list of our vulgarities continues.”
― Friedrich Nietzsche, quote from Twilight of the Idols/The Anti-Christ

“We have abolished the real world: what world is left? The apparent world perhaps? . . . But no! with the real world we have also abolished the apparent world.”
― Friedrich Nietzsche, quote from Twilight of the Idols/The Anti-Christ

“İnsanlara gönül indirmek, yüreğinin kapılarını herkese açık tutmak, liberal bir tavırdır, ama yalnızca liberal. S e ç k i n bir konukseverliğe yetkin olan yürekler, sıkı sıkıya çekilmiş perdelerinden ve örtülmüş panjurlarından anlaşılırlar: en iyi odalarını boş tutarlar. Neden mi? -"gönül indirmenin" söz konusu o l m a d ı ğ ı konukları bekledikleri için...”
― Friedrich Nietzsche, quote from Twilight of the Idols/The Anti-Christ

“Sudovi, vrednosni sudovi o životu, za ili protiv, ne mogu naposletku nikada biti istiniti: oni imaju vrednost samo kao simptomi, oni dolaze u obzir samo kao simptomi - takvi sudovi su sami po sebi budalaštine.”
― Friedrich Nietzsche, quote from Twilight of the Idols/The Anti-Christ

“A well-constituted human being, a ‘happy one’, must perform certain actions and instinctively shrinks from other actions, he transports the order of which he is the physiological representative into his relations with other human beings and with things. In a formula: his virtue is the consequence of his happiness…Everything good is instinct—and consequently easy, necessary, free. Effort is an objection.”
― Friedrich Nietzsche, quote from Twilight of the Idols/The Anti-Christ

“Let us look one another in the face. We are Hyperboreans—we know well enough how much out of the way we live. 'Neither by land nor sea shalt thou find the road to the Hyperboreans': Pindar already knew that of us. Beyond the North, beyond the ice, beyond death—our life, our happiness.... We have discovered happiness, we know the road, we have found the exit out of whole millennia of labyrinth. Who else has found it? Modern man perhaps? 'I know not which way to turn; I am everything that knows not which way to turn,' sighs modern man.... It was from this modernity that we were ill—from lazy peace, from cowardly compromise, from the whole virtuous uncleanliness of modern Yes and No. This tolerance and largeur of heart which 'forgives' everything because it 'Understands' everything is sirocco to us. Better to live among ice than among modern virtues and other south winds! ...We were brave enough, we spared neither ourselves nor others: but for long we did not know where to apply our courage. We became gloomy, we were called fatalists. Our fatality—was the plenitude, the tension, the blocking-up of our forces. We thirsted for lightning and action, of all things we kept ourselves furthest from the happiness of the weaklings, from 'resignation'.... There was a thunderstorm in our air, the nature which we are grew dark—for we had no road. Formula of our happiness: a Yes, a No, a straight line, a goal...”
― Friedrich Nietzsche, quote from Twilight of the Idols/The Anti-Christ

“One is in a state of hope because the basic physiological feeling is once again strong and rich; one trusts in God because the feeling of fullness and strength gives a sense of rest. Morality and religion belong entirely to the psychology of error: in every single case, cause and effect are confused; or truth is confused with the effects of believing something to be true; or a state of consciousness is confused with its physiological origins.”
― Friedrich Nietzsche, quote from Twilight of the Idols/The Anti-Christ

“The harshest daylight, rationality at any cost, life bright, cold, circumspect, conscious, without instinct, in opposition to the instincts, has itself been no more than a form of sickness, another form of sickness – and by no means a way back to ‘virtue’, to ‘health’, to happiness…. To have to combat one’s instincts – that is the formula for décadence: as long as life is ascending, happiness and instinct are one. –”
― Friedrich Nietzsche, quote from Twilight of the Idols/The Anti-Christ

“where is the deceiver to be found?’ – ‘We’ve got it,’ they cry in delight, ‘it is the senses! These senses, which are so immoral as well, it is they which deceive us about the real world. Moral: escape from sense-deception, from becoming, from history, from falsehood – history is nothing but belief in the senses, belief in falsehood.”
― Friedrich Nietzsche, quote from Twilight of the Idols/The Anti-Christ

“I set apart with high reverence the name of Heraclitus. When the rest of the philosopher crowd rejected the evidence of the senses because these showed plurality and change, he rejected their evidence because they showed things as if they possessed duration and unity.”
― Friedrich Nietzsche, quote from Twilight of the Idols/The Anti-Christ

“Reason’ is the cause of our falsification of the evidence of the senses. In so far as the senses show becoming, passing away, change, they do not lie.… But Heraclitus will always be right in this, that being is an empty fiction. The ‘apparent’ world is the only one: the ‘real’ world has only been lyingly added…”
― Friedrich Nietzsche, quote from Twilight of the Idols/The Anti-Christ

“The great human being is a finale; the great age — the Renaissance, for example — is a finale. The genius, in work and deed, is necessarily a squanderer: that he squanders himself, that is his greatness! The instinct of self-preservation is suspended, as it were: the overpowering pressure of outflowing forces forbids him any such care or caution. People call this 'self-sacrifice' and praise his 'heroism,' his indifference to his own well-being, his devotion to an idea, a great cause, a fatherland: without exception, misunderstandings. He flows out, he overflows, he uses himself up, he does not spare himself — and this is a calamitous involuntary fatality, no less than a river's flooding the land. Yet, because much is owed to such explosives, much has also been given them in return: for example, a kind of higher morality. After all, that is the way of human gratitude: it misunderstands its benefactors.”
― Friedrich Nietzsche, quote from Twilight of the Idols/The Anti-Christ

“He fascinated because he touched on the agonal instinct of the Hellenes – he introduced a variation into the wrestling-matches among the youths and young men. Socrates was also a great erotic.”
― Friedrich Nietzsche, quote from Twilight of the Idols/The Anti-Christ

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