Quotes from Walter Kaufmann

The Germans think that strength must reveal itself in hardness and cruelty; then they submit with fervor and admiration: they are suddenly rid of their pitiful weakness and their sensitivity for every naught, and they devoutly enjoy terror. That there is strength in mildness and stillness, they do not believe easily. They miss strength in Goethe …!—XI, 112.

When it is founded on decision, love is no longer an unreliably moving passion, but the fulfillment to which alone real Being reveals itself.

What distinguishes knowledge is not certainty but evidence.

when Nietzsche's fame had begun to spread rapidly, she climbed on the bandwagon. She acquired the sole rights to all his writings, including even the letters that he had sent to others. She sued those who published material to which she could claim a right.

The refusal to belong to any school of thought, the repudiation of the adequacy of any body of beliefs whatever, and especially of systems, and a marked dissatisfaction with traditional philosophy as superficial, academic, and remote from life—that is the heart of existentialism.

He's poodlishly ridiculous.

And man is capable of standing superhuman suffering if only he feels sure that there is some point and purpose to it, while much less pain will seem intolerable of devoid of meaning.

Nietzsche says: "Nicht nur fort sollst du dich pflanzen sondern hinauf"—you should propagate yourself not only onward but upward: procreation need not be a senseless continuation of an essentially meaningless story and an addition of more and more zeros—it can really be a creation.

The point is not at all that you are found interesting or fascinating instead of being seen as a fellow I. The shock is rather that you are not found interesting or fascinating at all: you are not recognized as an object any more than a subject. You are accepted, if at all, as one to be spoken at and spoken of; but when you are spoken of, the lord of every story will be I.

Romanticism yearns for deliverance from the cross of the Here and Now: it is willing to face anything but the facts.

We cannot begin to discover the mind as long as we ignore the irrational and subterranean springs of behaviour as well as thought.

The different philosophic systems are to be considered as educational methods of the spirit: they have always developed one particular force of the spirit best by their one-sided demand to see things just so and not otherwise [XVI, 76].

The world needs less faith and more love and nobility.

he would be permitted to say to the moment "Abide, you are so fair!" And to share Goethe's faith - for it was no mere confidence in fame but a cosmic faith: "The traces of my earthly days/No aeons can impair.

But a solitary suffers terribly from any suspicion concerning the few people he loves—especially

In truth, there was only one Christian, and he died on the cross.—A 39.

Those who have never faced disease and suffering have no need of producing beauty

Time is the "moving image of eternity."12

A very popular error: having the courage of one's convictions; rather it is a matter of having the courage for an attack on one's convictions!!!

I am impassioned for independence; I sacrifice all for it … and am tortured more by all the smallest strings than others are by chains.—XXI, 88.

The priest knows only one great danger: that is science

Indeed, it is worth asking whether this is not a feature that is more often found than not in the greatest books. They do not mainly see to add to our knowledge: they do not disdain shocking us because what they most want to do is change us.

Indeed, it is worth asking whether this is not a feature that is more often found than not in the greatest books. They do not mainly seek to add to our knowledge: they do not disdain shocking us because what they most want to do is change us."

My lot is that I must be the first decent human being