When Nietzsche Wept

Despair is the price one pays for self-awareness. Look deeply into life, and you'll always find despair.

If we climb high enough, we will reach a height from which tragedy ceases to look tragic.

It is wrong to bear children out of need, wrong to use a child to alleviate loneliness, wrong to provide purpose in life by reproducing another copy of oneself. It is wrong also to seek immortality by spewing one's germ into the future as though sperm contains your consciousness!

I dream of a love that is more than two people craving to possess one another.

Life is a spark between two identical voids, the darkness before birth and the one after death.

The spirit of a man is constructed out of his choices.

I should have become an "I" before I became a "we".

One thing I feel clear about is that it's important not to let your life live you. Otherwise, you end up at forty feeling you haven't really lived. What have I learned? Perhaps to live now, so that at fifty I won't look back upon my forties with regret.

It is easier, far easier, to obey another than to command oneself.

Marriage and its entourage of possession and jealousy enslave the spirit.

Dissect your motives deeper! You will find that no one has ever done anything wholly for others. All actions are self-directed, all service is self-serving, all love self-loving.

Live when you live! Death loses its terror if one dies when one has consummated one's life! If one does not live in the right time, then one can never die at the right time.

To build children you must first be built yourself. Otherwise, you’ll seek children out of animal needs, or loneliness, or to patch the holes in yourself. Your task as a parent is to produce not another self, another Josef, but something higher. It’s to produce a creator.

Not to take possession of your life plan is to let your existence be an accident.

Time cannot be broken; that is our greatest burden. And our greatest challenge is to live in spite of that burden.

There was a time in our lives when we were so close that nothing seemed to obstruct our friendship and brotherhood, and only a small footbridge separated us. Just as you were about to step on it, I asked you "Do you want to cross the footbridge to me?" - Immediately you did not want to anymore; and when I asked you again you remained silent. Since then mountains and torrential rivers and whatever separates and alienates have been cast between us, and even if we wanted to get together, we couldn't. But when you now think of that little footbridge, words fail you and you sob and marvel.

I must stop him from being one of those who call themselves good because they have no claws.

Ask yourself, 'Who are the secure ones, the comfortable, the eternally cheerful?' I'll tell you the answer: only those with dull vision-the common people and the children

eternal recurrence means that every time you choose an action you must be willing to choose it for all eternity. And it is the same for every action not made, every stillborn thought, every choice avoided. And all unlived life will remain bulging inside you, unlived through all eternity. And the unheeded voice of your conscience will cry out to you forever.

More in love with desire than with the desired!

I now believe that fears are not born of darkness; rather, fears are like the stars--always there, but obscured by the glare of daylight.

Some cannot loosen their own chains and can nonetheless redeem their friends.   You must be ready to burn yourself in your own flame: how could you become new, if you had not first become ashes? —Thus Spake Zarathustra

Marriage should be no prison, but a garden in which something higher is cultivated.

Again, Nietzsche thumbed through his notes, and then read, “ ‘One must have chaos and frenzy within oneself to give birth to a dancing star.

A cosmic perspective always attenuates tragedy. If we climb high enough, we will reach a height from which tragedy ceases to look tragic.

For one can never really be helped by another; one must find the strength to help oneself.