What an annoying book! Lots of exclaiming! It's kind of written like this! And it's got some racism and sexism! There are some interesting ideas here, but I did have to remind myself that I am mining philosophy for ideas, and it's ok to disregard (and hate) other aspects of a thinker/philosophy.
"A people is a detour of nature to get to 6 or 7 men."
"When associating with scholars and artists we easily miscalculate in opposite directions: behind a remarkable scholar one finds, not infrequently, a mediocre man, and behind a mediocre artist quite often -- a very remarkable man."
"Whatever is done from love always occurs beyond good and evil."
"Madness is rare in individuals -- but in groups, parties, nations, and ages it is the rule."
"In a man devoted to knowledge, pity seems almost ridiculous, like delicate hands on a cyclops."
"From love of man one occasionally embraces someone at random (because one cannot embrace all): but one must not tell him this."
"Blessed are the forgetful: for they get over their stupidities too."
"Even if nothing else today has any future, our laughter may have a future."
"As in the realm of stars the orbit of a planet is in some cases determined by two suns; as in certain cases suns of different colors shine near a single planet, sometimes with red light, sometimes with green light, and then occasionally illuminating the planet at the same time and flooding it with colors -- so we modern men are determined, thanks to the complicated mechanics of our "starry sky", by different moralities; our actions shine alernately in different colors, they are rarely univocal -- and there are cases enough in which we perform actions of many colors.""
"The discipline of suffering, of great suffering -- do you not know that only this discipline has created all enhancements of man so far? That tension of the soul in unhappiness which cultivates its strength, its shudders face-to-face with great ruin, its inventiveness and courage in enduring, persevering, interpreting, and exploiting suffering, and whatever has been granted to it of profundity, secret, mask, spirit, cunning, greatness -- was it not granted to it through suffering, through the discipline of great suffering? In man there is material, fragment, excess, clay, dirt, nonsense, chaos; but in man there is also creator, form-giver, hammer hardness, spectator divinity, and seventh day."
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