Sign in with Facebook
❧TհܱDZ's Reviews > Human, All Too Human: A Book for Free Spirits
Human, All Too Human: A Book for Free Spirits
by
__________
Drunk with the odour of blossoms. (1.29)
While there may be much talk about people, there is none at all about man. (1.35)
No one is accountable for his deeds, no one for his nature; to judge is the same thing as to be unjust. This also applies when the individual judges himself. The proposition is as clear as daylight, and yet here everyone prefers to retreat back into the shadows and untruth: from fear of the consequences. (1.39)
One can promise actions but not feelings; for the latter are involuntary. He who promises someone he will always love him or always hate him or always be faithful to him, promises something that does not reside in his power. (1.58)
There are not a few people (perhaps it is even most people) who, in order to maintain in themselves a sense of self-respect and a certain efficiency in action, are obliged to disparage and diminish in their minds all the other people they know. (1.63)
Vanity enriches.—How poor the human spirit would be without vanity! (1.79)
Men are not ashamed of thinking something dirty, but they are when they imagine they are credited with this dirty thought. (1.84)
Socrates and Plato are right: whatever man does he always does the good, that is to say: that which seems to him good (useful) according to the relative degree of his intellect, the measure of his rationality. (1.102)
At the sight of a waterfall we think we see in the countless carvings, twisting, and breaking of the waves capriciousness and freedom of will; but everything here is necessary, every motion mathematically calculable. So it is too in the case of human actions; if one were all-knowing, one would be able to calculate every individual action, likewise every advance in knowledge, every error, every piece of wickedness. The actor himself, to be sure, is fixed in the illusion of free will; if for one moment the wheel of the world were to stand still, and there were an all-knowing, calculating intelligence there to make use of this pause, it could narrate the future of every creature to the remotest ages and describe every track along which this wheel had yet to roll. The actor’s description regarding himself, the assumption of free-will, is itself part of the mechanism it would have to compute. (1.106)
It is easier to relinquish a desire altogether than enjoy it in moderation. (1.139)
We all think that a work of art, an artist, is proved to be of high quality if it seizes hold on us and profoundly moves us. But for this to be so our own high quality in judgement and sensibility would first have to have been proved. (1.161)
The reader and the author often fail to understand one another because the author knows his theme too well and almost finds it boring, so that he dispenses with the examples and illustrations of which he knows hundreds; the reader, however, is unfamiliar with the subject and can easily find it ill-established if examples and illustrations are withheld from him. (1.202)
One can clearly observe this decline from decade to decade if one keeps an eye on the public behaviour, which is plainly growing more and more plebeian. (1.250)
Why is knowledge, the element of the scholar and philosopher, associated with pleasure? Firstly and above all, because one here becomes conscious of one’s strength; for the same reason, that is to say, that gymnastic exercises are pleasurably even when there are no spectators. Secondly, because in the course of acquiring knowledge one goes beyond former conceptions and their advocates and is victor over them, or at least believes oneself to be., Thirdly, because through a new piece of knowledge, however small, we become superior to all and feel ourselves as the only ones who in this matter know aright., These three causes of pleasure are the most important, though there are many other subsidiary causes, according to the nature of the man who acquires knowledge. (1.252)
The value of having for a time rigorously pursued a rigorous science does not derive precisely from the results obtained from it: for in relation to the ocean of things worth knowing these will be a mere vanishing droplet. But there will eventuate an increase in energy, in reasoning capacity, in toughness of endurance; one will have learned how to achieve an objective by the appropriate means. To this extent it is invaluable, with regard to everything one will afterwards do, once to have been a man of science. (1.256)
Men overvalue everything big and conspicuous. (1.260)
He who has furnished his instrument with only two strings—like the scholars, who apart from the drive to knowledge have only an acquired religious drive—cannot understand those men who are able to play on more strings than two. It lies in the nature of higher, many-stringed culture that it should always be falsely interpreted by the lower; as happens, for example, when art is counted a disguised form of religiousness. Indeed, people who are only religious understand even science as a seeking on the part of the religious feeling, just as the deaf-and-dumb do not know what music is if it is not visible movement. (1.281)
Epictetus, Seneca, and Plutarch are little read now, that work and industry—formerly adherents of the great goddess health—sometimes seem to rage like an epidemic. Because time for thinking and quietness in thinking are lacking, one no longer ponders deviant views: one contents oneself with hating them. (1.282)
We quite often encounter copies of significant men; and, as also in the case of paintings, most people prefer the copies to the originals. (1.294)
When entering into a marriage one ought to ask oneself: do you believe you are going to enjoy talking with this woman up into your old age? Everything else in marriage is transitory, but most of the time you are together will be devoted to conversation. (1.406)
If one sets aside the demands of custom for a moment, one might very well consider whether nature and reason do not dictate that a man ought to have two marriages, perhaps in the following form. At first, at the age of twenty-two, he would marry a girl older than him who is intellectually and morally his superior and who can lead him through the perils of the twenties (ambition, hatred, self-contempt, passions of all kinds). Later, her love would pass over wholly into the motherly, and she would not merely endure it but actively encourage it if, in his thirties, the man should enter into an alliance with a young girl whose education he would himself take in hand—For the twenties marriage is a necessary institution, for the thirties a useful but not a necessary one: in later life it is often harmful and promotes the spiritual retrogression of the man. (1.421)
. . . broadens his egoism in respect of duration and enables him seriously to pursue objectives that transcend his individual lifespan. (1.455)
That we place more value on satisfaction of vanity than on any other form of well-being (security, accommodation, pleasure of all kinds) is demonstrated to a ludicrous degree in the act that, quite apart from any political reasons, everyone desires the abolition of slavery and abominates the idea of reducing people to this condition: whereas everyone must at the same time realize that slaves live in every respect more happily and in greater security than the modern worker, and that the work done by slaves is very little work compared with that done by the ‘worker�. One protests in the name of ‘human dignity�: but that, expressed more simply, is that precious vanity which feels being unequal, being publicly rated lower, as the hardest lot. � The Cynic thinks differently, because he despises honour: � and thus Diogenes was for a time a slave and private tutor. (1.457)
He who directs his passion upon causes (the sciences, the common weal, cultural interests, the arts) deprives his passion for people of much of its fire. (1.487)
Young people love what is strange and interesting, regardless of whether it is true or false. More mature spirits love in truth that which is strange and interesting in it. Heads fully mature, finally, love truth also where it appears plain and simple and is boring to ordinary people: they have noticed that truth is accustomed to impart its highest spiritual possessions with an air of simplicity. (1.609)
The tone in which young people speak, praise, blame, poeticise displeases their elders because it is too loud and yet at the same time hollow and indistinct, like a sound in a vaunt that acquires such volume through the emptiness surrounding it: for most of what young people think does not proceed from the abundance of their own nature but is a resonance and echo of what has been thought, said praised, and blamed in their presence. (1.613)
Belief in truth begins with doubt as to all truths believed hitherto. (2.1.20)
At all times arrogance has rightly been designated the ‘vice of the intellectual’—yet without the motive power of this vice truth and the respect accorded to it would be miserable accommodated on this earth. (2.1.26)
Farce of many of the industrious.—Through an excess of exertion they gain for themselves time, and afterwards have no idea what to do with it except to count the hours until is has expired. (2.1.47)
Every good book is written for a definite reader and those like him, and for just this reason will be viewed unfavourably by all other readers, the great majority: which is why its reputation rests on a narrow basis and can be erected only slowly—The mediocre and bad book is so because it tries to please many and does please them. (2.1.158)
They themselves are not educated: how should they be able to educate? (2.1.181)
We can distinguish five grades of traveller: those of the first and lowest grade are those who travel and, instead of seeing, are themselves seen—they are as though blind; next come those who actually see the world; the third experience something as a consequence of what they have seen; the fourth absorb into themselves what they have experienced and bear it away with them; lastly there re a few men of the highest energy whom after they have experienced and absorbed all they have seen, necessarily have to body it forth again out of themselves in works and actions as soon as they have returned home—It is like these five species of traveller that all men travel through the whole journey of life, the lowest purely passive, the highest those who transform into action and exhaust everything they experience. (2.1.228)
Of him who surrenders himself to events there remains less and less. (2.1.315)
What significance can we then accord the press as it is now, with its daily expenses diture of lung power on exclaiming, deafening, inciting, shocling—is it anything more than the permanent false alarm that leads ears and senses off in the wrong direction? (2.1.321)
The bad acquires esteem by being imitated, the good loses it—especially in art. (2.1.381)
We possess the conscience of an industrious age: and this conscience does not permit us to bestow our best hours and mornings on art, however grand and worthy this art may be,. To us art counts as a leisure, a recreational activity: we devote to it the remnants of our time and energies. (2.2.170)
A little garden, figs, little cheeses and in addition three or four good friends—these were the sensual pleasures of Epicurus. (2.2.192)
An excellent quotation can annihilate entire pages, indeed an entire book, in that it warns the reader and seems to cry out to him: ‘Beware, I am the jewel and around me there is lead, pallid, ignominious lead!� Every word, every idea, wants to dwell only in its own company: that is the moral of high style. (2.2.111)
by
The people no doubt possess something that might be called an artistic need, but it is small and cheap to satisfy. The refuse of art is at bottom all that is required: we should honestly admit that to ourselves. Just consider, for instance, the kind of songs and tunes the most vigorous, soundest and most naive strata of our populace nowadays take true delight in, dwelling among shepherds, cowherds, farmers, huntsmen, soldiers, seamen, and then supply yourself with an answer. And in the small town, in precisely the homes that are the seat of those civic virtues inherited from of old, do they not love, indeed dote on the very worst music in any way produced today? Whoever talks of a profound need for art, of an unfilled desire for art, on the part of the people as it is, is either raving or lying . . . Nowadays it is only in exceptional men that there exists an artistic need of an exalted kind. (2.1.169)
Active men are generally wanting in the higher activity: I mean that of the individual. They are active as officials, businessmen, scholars, that is to say as generic creatures, but not as distinct individual and unique human beings; in this regard they are lazy. —It is the misfortune of the active that their activity is always a little irrational. One ought not to ask the cash-amassing banker, for example, what the purpose of his restless activity is: it is irrational. The active roll as the stone rolls, in obedience to the stupidity of the laws of mechanics—As at all times, so now too, men are divided into the slaves and the free; for he who does not have two-thirds of his day to himself is a slave, let him be what he may otherwise: statesman, businessman, official, scholar. (1.283)
__________
If someone obstinately and for a long time wants to appear something it is in the end hard for him to be anything else. The profession of almost every man, even that of the artist, begins with hypocrisy, with an imitation from without, with a copying of what is most effective. He who is always wearing a mask of friendly countenance must finally acquire a power over benevolent moods without which the impression of friendliness cannot be obtained—and finally these acquire power over him, he is benevolent. (1.51)
There is one thing one has to have: either a cheerful disposition by nature or a disposition made cheerful by art and knowledge. (1.486)
__________
Drunk with the odour of blossoms. (1.29)
While there may be much talk about people, there is none at all about man. (1.35)
No one is accountable for his deeds, no one for his nature; to judge is the same thing as to be unjust. This also applies when the individual judges himself. The proposition is as clear as daylight, and yet here everyone prefers to retreat back into the shadows and untruth: from fear of the consequences. (1.39)
One can promise actions but not feelings; for the latter are involuntary. He who promises someone he will always love him or always hate him or always be faithful to him, promises something that does not reside in his power. (1.58)
There are not a few people (perhaps it is even most people) who, in order to maintain in themselves a sense of self-respect and a certain efficiency in action, are obliged to disparage and diminish in their minds all the other people they know. (1.63)
Vanity enriches.—How poor the human spirit would be without vanity! (1.79)
Men are not ashamed of thinking something dirty, but they are when they imagine they are credited with this dirty thought. (1.84)
Socrates and Plato are right: whatever man does he always does the good, that is to say: that which seems to him good (useful) according to the relative degree of his intellect, the measure of his rationality. (1.102)
At the sight of a waterfall we think we see in the countless carvings, twisting, and breaking of the waves capriciousness and freedom of will; but everything here is necessary, every motion mathematically calculable. So it is too in the case of human actions; if one were all-knowing, one would be able to calculate every individual action, likewise every advance in knowledge, every error, every piece of wickedness. The actor himself, to be sure, is fixed in the illusion of free will; if for one moment the wheel of the world were to stand still, and there were an all-knowing, calculating intelligence there to make use of this pause, it could narrate the future of every creature to the remotest ages and describe every track along which this wheel had yet to roll. The actor’s description regarding himself, the assumption of free-will, is itself part of the mechanism it would have to compute. (1.106)
It is easier to relinquish a desire altogether than enjoy it in moderation. (1.139)
We all think that a work of art, an artist, is proved to be of high quality if it seizes hold on us and profoundly moves us. But for this to be so our own high quality in judgement and sensibility would first have to have been proved. (1.161)
The reader and the author often fail to understand one another because the author knows his theme too well and almost finds it boring, so that he dispenses with the examples and illustrations of which he knows hundreds; the reader, however, is unfamiliar with the subject and can easily find it ill-established if examples and illustrations are withheld from him. (1.202)
One can clearly observe this decline from decade to decade if one keeps an eye on the public behaviour, which is plainly growing more and more plebeian. (1.250)
Why is knowledge, the element of the scholar and philosopher, associated with pleasure? Firstly and above all, because one here becomes conscious of one’s strength; for the same reason, that is to say, that gymnastic exercises are pleasurably even when there are no spectators. Secondly, because in the course of acquiring knowledge one goes beyond former conceptions and their advocates and is victor over them, or at least believes oneself to be., Thirdly, because through a new piece of knowledge, however small, we become superior to all and feel ourselves as the only ones who in this matter know aright., These three causes of pleasure are the most important, though there are many other subsidiary causes, according to the nature of the man who acquires knowledge. (1.252)
The value of having for a time rigorously pursued a rigorous science does not derive precisely from the results obtained from it: for in relation to the ocean of things worth knowing these will be a mere vanishing droplet. But there will eventuate an increase in energy, in reasoning capacity, in toughness of endurance; one will have learned how to achieve an objective by the appropriate means. To this extent it is invaluable, with regard to everything one will afterwards do, once to have been a man of science. (1.256)
Men overvalue everything big and conspicuous. (1.260)
He who has furnished his instrument with only two strings—like the scholars, who apart from the drive to knowledge have only an acquired religious drive—cannot understand those men who are able to play on more strings than two. It lies in the nature of higher, many-stringed culture that it should always be falsely interpreted by the lower; as happens, for example, when art is counted a disguised form of religiousness. Indeed, people who are only religious understand even science as a seeking on the part of the religious feeling, just as the deaf-and-dumb do not know what music is if it is not visible movement. (1.281)
Epictetus, Seneca, and Plutarch are little read now, that work and industry—formerly adherents of the great goddess health—sometimes seem to rage like an epidemic. Because time for thinking and quietness in thinking are lacking, one no longer ponders deviant views: one contents oneself with hating them. (1.282)
We quite often encounter copies of significant men; and, as also in the case of paintings, most people prefer the copies to the originals. (1.294)
When entering into a marriage one ought to ask oneself: do you believe you are going to enjoy talking with this woman up into your old age? Everything else in marriage is transitory, but most of the time you are together will be devoted to conversation. (1.406)
If one sets aside the demands of custom for a moment, one might very well consider whether nature and reason do not dictate that a man ought to have two marriages, perhaps in the following form. At first, at the age of twenty-two, he would marry a girl older than him who is intellectually and morally his superior and who can lead him through the perils of the twenties (ambition, hatred, self-contempt, passions of all kinds). Later, her love would pass over wholly into the motherly, and she would not merely endure it but actively encourage it if, in his thirties, the man should enter into an alliance with a young girl whose education he would himself take in hand—For the twenties marriage is a necessary institution, for the thirties a useful but not a necessary one: in later life it is often harmful and promotes the spiritual retrogression of the man. (1.421)
. . . broadens his egoism in respect of duration and enables him seriously to pursue objectives that transcend his individual lifespan. (1.455)
That we place more value on satisfaction of vanity than on any other form of well-being (security, accommodation, pleasure of all kinds) is demonstrated to a ludicrous degree in the act that, quite apart from any political reasons, everyone desires the abolition of slavery and abominates the idea of reducing people to this condition: whereas everyone must at the same time realize that slaves live in every respect more happily and in greater security than the modern worker, and that the work done by slaves is very little work compared with that done by the ‘worker�. One protests in the name of ‘human dignity�: but that, expressed more simply, is that precious vanity which feels being unequal, being publicly rated lower, as the hardest lot. � The Cynic thinks differently, because he despises honour: � and thus Diogenes was for a time a slave and private tutor. (1.457)
He who directs his passion upon causes (the sciences, the common weal, cultural interests, the arts) deprives his passion for people of much of its fire. (1.487)
Young people love what is strange and interesting, regardless of whether it is true or false. More mature spirits love in truth that which is strange and interesting in it. Heads fully mature, finally, love truth also where it appears plain and simple and is boring to ordinary people: they have noticed that truth is accustomed to impart its highest spiritual possessions with an air of simplicity. (1.609)
The tone in which young people speak, praise, blame, poeticise displeases their elders because it is too loud and yet at the same time hollow and indistinct, like a sound in a vaunt that acquires such volume through the emptiness surrounding it: for most of what young people think does not proceed from the abundance of their own nature but is a resonance and echo of what has been thought, said praised, and blamed in their presence. (1.613)
Belief in truth begins with doubt as to all truths believed hitherto. (2.1.20)
At all times arrogance has rightly been designated the ‘vice of the intellectual’—yet without the motive power of this vice truth and the respect accorded to it would be miserable accommodated on this earth. (2.1.26)
Farce of many of the industrious.—Through an excess of exertion they gain for themselves time, and afterwards have no idea what to do with it except to count the hours until is has expired. (2.1.47)
Every good book is written for a definite reader and those like him, and for just this reason will be viewed unfavourably by all other readers, the great majority: which is why its reputation rests on a narrow basis and can be erected only slowly—The mediocre and bad book is so because it tries to please many and does please them. (2.1.158)
They themselves are not educated: how should they be able to educate? (2.1.181)
We can distinguish five grades of traveller: those of the first and lowest grade are those who travel and, instead of seeing, are themselves seen—they are as though blind; next come those who actually see the world; the third experience something as a consequence of what they have seen; the fourth absorb into themselves what they have experienced and bear it away with them; lastly there re a few men of the highest energy whom after they have experienced and absorbed all they have seen, necessarily have to body it forth again out of themselves in works and actions as soon as they have returned home—It is like these five species of traveller that all men travel through the whole journey of life, the lowest purely passive, the highest those who transform into action and exhaust everything they experience. (2.1.228)
Of him who surrenders himself to events there remains less and less. (2.1.315)
What significance can we then accord the press as it is now, with its daily expenses diture of lung power on exclaiming, deafening, inciting, shocling—is it anything more than the permanent false alarm that leads ears and senses off in the wrong direction? (2.1.321)
The bad acquires esteem by being imitated, the good loses it—especially in art. (2.1.381)
We possess the conscience of an industrious age: and this conscience does not permit us to bestow our best hours and mornings on art, however grand and worthy this art may be,. To us art counts as a leisure, a recreational activity: we devote to it the remnants of our time and energies. (2.2.170)
A little garden, figs, little cheeses and in addition three or four good friends—these were the sensual pleasures of Epicurus. (2.2.192)
An excellent quotation can annihilate entire pages, indeed an entire book, in that it warns the reader and seems to cry out to him: ‘Beware, I am the jewel and around me there is lead, pallid, ignominious lead!� Every word, every idea, wants to dwell only in its own company: that is the moral of high style. (2.2.111)
Sign into ŷ to see if any of your friends have read
Human, All Too Human.
Sign In »
Reading Progress
January 2, 2019
– Shelved
January 2, 2019
– Shelved as:
to-read
January 2, 2019
– Shelved as:
philosophy
April 20, 2019
–
Started Reading
April 20, 2019
–
2.8%
"Each [section], at some point, contains a collection of one-liners on a variety of sensitive topics guaranteed to offend almost everyone. —Richard Schacht, Introduction"
page
12
April 21, 2019
–
25.0%
"His bedcovers influence his sensibilities in various ways . . . Drunk with the odour of blossoms . . . A very seductive odour . . ."
page
107
April 22, 2019
–
37.62%
"When entering into a marriage one ought to ask oneself: do you believe you are going to enjoy talking with this woman up into your old age? Everything else in marriage is transitory, but most of the time you are together will be devoted to conversation.
__________
A marriage proves itself a good marriage by being able to endure an occasional ‘exception�."
page
161
__________
A marriage proves itself a good marriage by being able to endure an occasional ‘exception�."
April 24, 2019
–
48.83%
"There is one thing one has to have: either a cheerful disposition by nature or a disposition made cheerful by art and knowledge.
__________
Then I recalled the words of Plato and suddenly they spoke to my heart: Nothing human is worthy of being taken very seriously; nonetheless . . ."
page
209
__________
Then I recalled the words of Plato and suddenly they spoke to my heart: Nothing human is worthy of being taken very seriously; nonetheless . . ."
April 27, 2019
–
70.33%
"Farce of many of the industrious.�Through an excess of exertion they gain for themselves are time, and afterwards have no idea what to do with it except to count the hours until is has expired."
page
301
April 27, 2019
–
70.33%
"Farce of many of the industrious.�Through an excess of exertion they gain for themselves free time, and afterwards have no idea what to do with it except to count the hours until is has expired."
page
301
May 1, 2019
–
Finished Reading
It is easier to relinquish a desire altogether than enjoy it in moderation. (1.139)
Young people love what is strange and interesting, regardless of whether it is true or false. More mature spirits love in truth that which is strange and interesting in it. Heads fully mature, finally, love truth also where it appears plain and simple and is boring to ordinary people: they have noticed that truth is accustomed to impart its highest spiritual possessions with an air of simplicity. (1.609)
Every good book is written for a definite reader and those like him, and for just this reason will be viewed unfavourably by all other readers, the great majority: which is why its reputation rests on a narrow basis and can be erected only slowly—The mediocre and bad book is so because it tries to please many and does please them. (2.1.158)
What significance can we then accord the press as it is now, with its daily expenses diture of lung power on exclaiming, deafening, inciting, shocking—is it anything more than the permanent false alarm that leads ears and senses off in the wrong direction? (2.1.321)
A little garden, figs, little cheeses and in addition three or four good friends—these were the sensual pleasures of Epicurus. (2.2.192)