Chapter IV: Apophthegms and Interludes

A thorough teacher takes himself seriously only insofar as he relates to his students, making them the measure of his seriousness.

The pursuit of 'knowledge for its own sake' is actually a final snare of morality, entrapping us within moral frameworks.

Knowledge would have little value if one did not need to overcome significant shame in pursuing it.

We dishonor God by not permitting him to sin, imposing a constraint on divine nature.

A person's tendency to allow himself to be degraded and exploited may reflect the diffidence of a god among mere humans.

Loving only one person is barbarous because it occurs at the expense of all others, and one should love God as well.

Memory and pride contradict each other over past actions, with pride eventually forcing memory to yield to its account.

One regards life carelessly if one fails to recognize the destructive hand that kills with leniency.

A person with character has a typical experience that recurs throughout his life.

To lack the eye of discernment is to regard the stars as above oneself rather than as part of one's domain.

What makes men great is not the strength of their sentiments but their duration over time.

By achieving his ideal, a person simultaneously surpasses it, moving beyond what he initially sought.

Many hide their capacities from others while calling this concealment their pride.

A man of genius becomes tolerable only if he also possesses gratitude and purity alongside his genius.

The degree and nature of a man's sensuality extends all the way to the highest altitudes of his spiritual life.

In peaceful conditions, a militant man turns his aggression inward and attacks himself.

Men use principles to dominate, justify, honor, reproach, or conceal their habits, so the same principles can serve fundamentally different purposes.

Even he who despises himself esteems himself by the very act of being a despiser.

A soul that is loved but does not itself love reveals its basest elements, its dregs rising to the surface.

The Delphic injunction 'Know thyself' may actually mean to cease being concerned with oneself and become objective, a truth exemplified by Socrates and the scientific man.

One must be cautious about salting truth too much lest it becomes so bitter it no longer quenches thirst.

Demanding sympathy for all would constitute harshness and tyranny toward one's neighbor.

When a house is on fire, instinct makes one forget dinner, but one later recovers it from the ashes.

A woman learns to hate in proportion as she forgets how to charm.

Though man and woman experience the same emotions, they do so at different tempos, causing perpetual mutual misunderstanding.

Behind women's personal vanity lies an impersonal scorn for womanhood itself.

One can grant the spirit many liberties by firmly fettering and imprisoning the heart, though this paradox is difficult for others to believe.

One should become suspicious of very clever persons when they become embarrassed.

Dreadful experiences raise the question of whether the one who experiences them might not be something dreadful as well.

Melancholy men become temporarily lighter precisely through what weighs others down—hatred and love.

Someone so cold that one burns oneself touching him is misread by many as red-hot.

Most people have at some point sacrificed themselves for their good name.

Affability contains no hatred of men but precisely for that reason reveals great contempt for them.

Maturity in man means reacquiring the seriousness that one possessed as a child at play.

Being ashamed of one's immorality is a step toward ultimately being ashamed of one's morality as well.

One should leave life as Ulysses departed from Nausicaa—with blessing rather than with love.

What appear to be great men are merely actors performing their own ideals.

Training one's conscience makes it kiss while biting, combining affection with injury.

The disappointed one sought an echo but heard only praise instead.

We all pretend to ourselves that we are simpler than we actually are, thereby relaxing away from genuine connection with others.

A discerning person might regard himself in the present age as the animalization of God.

Discovering that one is loved should disenchant the lover, raising uncomfortable questions about the beloved's modesty, stupidity, or motives.

When everything turns out best and one loves every fate, the danger lies in the question of who would accept being one's fate.

It is not the Christians' love of humanity but rather their impotence in love that prevents them from burning heretics.

The pious fraud of traditional belief is more repugnant to free spirits than impious fraud, revealing their lack of judgment and unfreedom.

Through music, passions enjoy themselves in their own expression.

A sign of strong character is the ability to shut one's ear to even the best counterarguments once a resolution is taken, occasionally amounting to a will to stupidity.

There are no inherently moral phenomena, only moral interpretations imposed on otherwise neutral phenomena.

Criminals often fail to measure up to their own deeds, choosing to diminish or misrepresent them.

Defense attorneys rarely possess the artistic skill to present the beautiful terribleness of a deed to the criminal's advantage.

Vanity is most difficult to wound precisely when pride has been wounded.

Those preordained to contemplation rather than belief find all believers too noisy and obtrusive, and guard against them.

To win someone's favor, one should present oneself as embarrassed before them.

Women's perspectives are spoiled from the outset by immense expectations regarding sexual love combined with coyness about those expectations.

When neither love nor hatred is at stake, women's play becomes mediocre.

Life's greatest epochs occur when we have the courage to rebaptize our badness as the best in us.

The will to overcome an emotion is ultimately just the will of one or more other emotions.

There is an innocence in admiration possessed by those who have not yet conceived that they themselves might be admired.

Excessive loathing of dirt can paradoxically prevent us from cleaning ourselves by serving as a self-justifying stance.

Sensuality often accelerates the growth of love excessively, leaving its root weak and easily uprooted.

It is curious that God learned Greek when wanting to write but did not learn it well.

Rejoicing at praise is often merely politeness of heart rather than genuine vanity.

Even concubinage has been corrupted by the institution of marriage.

One who exults at the stake triumphs not over pain but because he does not feel pain where he expected it.

When forced to change an opinion about someone, we heavily blame them for the inconvenience their changed nature causes us.

A nation is nature's detour to create six or seven great men, and then to circumvent them.

True women regard science as hostile to their sense of shame, feeling it violates their privacy and dignity.

The more abstract the truth one wishes to teach, the more one must appeal to the senses.

The devil has the most extensive perspectives for God and keeps far away from him, being effectively God's oldest friend of knowledge.

What a person truly is becomes apparent only when talent decreases and he ceases to display what he can do, since talent is an adornment that conceals.

The sexes deceive themselves about each other because they honor and love only themselves or their own ideal; thus men expect peaceable women though women are essentially unpeaceable.

One is punished best for one's virtues.

He who cannot find his ideal lives more frivolously and shamelessly than the man without any ideal.

All trustworthiness, good conscience, and evidence of truth originate from the senses.

Pharisaism is not a corruption of goodness but rather an essential condition of being good.

Good conversation originates when one person seeks an accoucheur for his thoughts while the other seeks someone to assist.

One often finds a mediocre man behind a remarkable scholar, but frequently finds a remarkable man behind a mediocre artist.

Whether awake or dreaming, we invent and imagine the people with whom we interact, then immediately forget this.

In revenge and in love, woman is more barbarous than man.

Advice is presented as a riddle suggesting one must bite the band first to keep it from breaking.

The belly's needs are the reason man does not readily imagine himself to be God.

A chaste utterance holds that in true love it is the soul that envelops the body.

Our vanity wishes what we do best to pass as our most difficult achievement, which explains the origins of many moral systems.

When women have scholarly inclinations, something is generally wrong with their sexual nature; barrenness itself conduces to virility of taste.

Women possess genius for adornment because they have the instinct for the secondary role.

Fighting monsters risks becoming a monster, and gazing long into an abyss causes the abyss to gaze back into oneself.

From old Florentine novels and life: women, whether good or bad, need the stick.

Women excel at seducing others to a favorable opinion of them and then believing implicitly in that opinion.

What an age considers evil is usually an untimely echo of what was previously considered good, an atavism of old ideals.

Around a hero, life becomes tragedy; around a demigod it becomes satyr-play; and around God it becomes something unnamed, perhaps a world.

One must not only possess a talent but also have permission from others to possess it.

Both ancient and modern serpents say that where the tree of knowledge is, paradise is always found.

That which is done out of love always takes place beyond good and evil.

Signs of health include objection, evasion, joyous distrust, and love of irony, while everything absolute belongs to pathology.

The sense of the tragic increases and decreases with sensuousness.

While insanity in individuals is rare, in groups, parties, nations, and epochs it is the rule.

The thought of suicide provides great consolation for getting through many difficult nights.

Both reason and conscience submit to the strongest impulse, the tyrant within us.

While one must repay good and ill, there is no logical reason to repay the specific person who did good or ill.

One no longer loves one's knowledge sufficiently after communicating it to others.

Poets behave shamelessly toward their experiences by exploiting them.

Every nation thinks not of others as neighbors but as the neighbors of their neighbors.

Love reveals the noble and hidden qualities of a lover, making him appear exceptional, which can deceive regarding his normal character.

Jesus told the Jews that the law was for servants and taught them to love God as his son, suggesting sons of God have nothing to do with morals.

A shepherd always needs a bellwether or must occasionally be one himself, serving as the model for the group.

While one may lie with words, the accompanying grimace nevertheless reveals the truth.

For vigorous men, intimacy is a matter of shame and something precious.

Christianity poisoned Eros, who did not die but degenerated into Vice.

Talking much about oneself can be a means of concealing oneself.

Praise is more obtrusive than blame.

Pity has an almost ridiculous effect on a man of knowledge, like tender hands on a Cyclops.

One occasionally embraces someone out of love for all humanity because one cannot embrace all, but this truth must never be confessed to that individual.

One does not hate as long as one disesteems, but only when one esteems someone as equal or superior.

Utilitarians, like others, love the useful only as a vehicle for their inclinations and find the noise of its wheels unbearable.

Ultimately, one loves one's own desires rather than the things desired.

Others' vanity is counter to our taste only when it conflicts with our own vanity.

Perhaps no one has ever been sufficiently truthful regarding what truthfulness actually is.

We do not believe in the follies of clever men, which represents a forfeiture of human rights.

The consequences of our actions seize us by the forelock without regard for whether we have reformed in the meantime.

There is an innocence in lying that is the sign of good faith in a cause.

It is inhuman to bless when one is being cursed.

The familiarity of superiors emitters one because such familiarity cannot be returned.

One is affected not by being deceived but by the inability to believe in someone afterward.

There is a haughtiness of kindness that appears wicked.

When asked why one dislikes someone, the honest answer might be that one is not a match for them.