My formula for greatness in human beings is amor fati: that one wants to change nothing, neither forwards, nor backwards, nor in a...ll eternity. Not merely to endure necessity, still less to hide it--all idealism is mendacity in the face of necessity--but rather to love it.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
The lonely Earth amid the balls That hurry through the eternal halls,... A makeweight flying to the void, Supplemental asteroid, Or compensatory spark, Shoots across the neutral Dark.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Amor fati: that shall henceforth be my love! I do not want to wage war against the ugly. I do not want to accuse--I do not even wa...nt to accuse those who accuse. Let looking away be my only denial! And all in all and on the whole: I want someday to be purely and simply a Yes-sayer!LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
It is interesting to observe with what singular unanimity the farthest sundered nations and generations consent to give completene...ss and roundness to an ancient fable, of which they indistinctly appreciate the beauty or the truth. By a faint and dream-like effort, though it be only by the vote of a scientific body, the dullest posterity slowly add some trait to the mythus. As when astronomers call the lately discovered planet Neptune; or the asteroid Astræa,... for the slightest recognition of poetic worth is significant. By such slow aggregation has mythology grown from the first.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
You never see animals going through the absurd and often horrible fooleries of magic and religion.... Dogs do not ritually urinate... in the hope of persuading heaven to do the same and send down rain. Asses do not bray a liturgy to cloudless skies. Nor do cats attempt, by abstinence from cat's meat, to wheedle the feline spirits into benevolence. Only man behaves with such gratuitous folly. It is the price he has to pay for being intelligent but not, as yet, quite intelligent enough.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »