Quotes by Philologists - Page 13

The levelling of the European man is the great process which cannot be obstructed; it should even be accelerated. The necessity of cleaving gulfs, distance, order of rank, is therefore imperative —not the necessity of retarding this process. This homogenizing species requires justification as soon as it is attained: its justification is that it lies in serving a higher and sovereign race which stands upon the former and can raise itself this task only by doing this. Not merely a race of masters whose sole task is to rule, but a race with its own sphere of life, with an overflow of energy for beauty, bravery, culture, and manners, even for the most abstract thought; a yea-saying race that may grant itself every great luxury —strong enough to have no need of the tyranny of the virtue-imperative, rich enough to have no need of economy or pedantry; beyond good and evil; a hothouse for rare and exceptional plants.
Friedrich Nietzsche
The conviction reigns that it is only through the sacrifices and accomplishments of the ancestors that the tribe exists--and that one has to pay them back with sacrifices and accomplishments; one thus recognizes a debt that constantly grows greater, since these forebears never cease, in their continued existence as powerful spirits, to accord the tribe new advantages and new strength.
Friedrich Nietzsche
Like a last signpost to the other path, Napoleon appeared, the most isolated and late-born man there has even been, and in him the problem of the noble ideal as such made flesh--one might well ponder what kind of problem it is; Napoleon this synthesis of the inhuman and the superhuman
Friedrich Nietzsche
The person who expects to understand history must submerge himself in it, must get rid of patriotism, as well as bitterness. And especially in studying a historic life that consists in insecurity must the historian rid himself of all insecurity. He must accept the totality of the data in all their fullness, the noble with the paltry, thinking of how the two interlock.
Américo Castro
Some men are born posthumously.
Friedrich Nietzsche
Some men are born posthumously.
Friedrich Nietzsche
All truly great thoughts are conceived while walking.
Friedrich Nietzsche
A good vocabulary is not acquired by reading books written according to some notion of the vocabulary of one's age group. It comes from reading books above one.
J.R.R. Tolkien
Just as little as a reader today reads all of the individual words (let alone syllables) on a page—rather he picks about five words at random out of twenty and "guesses" at the meaning that probably belongs to these five words—just as little do we see a tree exactly and completely with reference to leaves, twigs, color, and form; it is so very much easier for us to simply improvise some approximation of a tree. Even in the midst of the strangest experiences we will still do the same: we make up the major part of the experience and can scarcely be forced not to contemplate some event as its "inventors." All this means: basically and from time immemorial we are—accustomed to lying. Or to put it more virtuously and hypocritically, in short, more pleasantly: one is much more of an artist than one knows.
Friedrich Nietzsche
The worst readers are those who behave like plundering troops: they take away a few things they can use, dirty and confound the remainder, and revile the whole.
Friedrich Nietzsche
Art as the single superior counter-force against all will to negation of life, art as the anti-Christian, anti-Buddhist, anti-Nihilist par excellence.
Friedrich Nietzsche
[N]othing is more easily corrupted than an artist.
Friedrich Nietzsche
That is an artist as I love artists, modest in his needs: he really wants only two things, his bread and his art - panem et Circen.
Friedrich Nietzsche
Art is essentially the affirmation, the blessing, and the deification of existence.
Friedrich Nietzsche
For art to exist, for any sort of aesthetic activity or perception to exist, a certain physiological precondition is indispensable: intoxication.
Friedrich Nietzsche
If you know the why, you can live any how.
Friedrich Nietzsche
We have art in order not to die of the truth.
Friedrich Nietzsche
You must have chaos within you to give birth to a dancing star.
Friedrich Nietzsche
He did not falter, as long as there was a path that led toward his goal.
J.R.R. Tolkien
He has led us in here against our fears, but he will lead us out again, at whatever cost to himself.
J.R.R. Tolkien
Who art thou then, O my soul!" (and here [Zarathustra] became frightened, for a sunbeam shot down from heaven upon his face.""O heaven above me," said he sighing, and sat upright, "thou gazest at me? Thou hearkenest unto my strange soul?When wilt thou drink this drop of dew that fell down upon all earthly things—when wilt thou drink this strange soul——When, thou well of eternity! thou joyous, awful, noontide abyss! when wilt thou drink my soul back into thee?
Friedrich Nietzsche
Our way is upward, from the species across to the super-species. But the degenerate mind which says ‘All for me’ is a horror to us.
Friedrich Nietzsche
Besides this I place another equally obvious confirmation of my view that opera is based on the same principles as our Alexandrian culture. Opera is the birth of the theoretical man, the critical layman, not of the artist: one of the most surprising facts in the history of all the arts. It was the demand of throughly unmusical hearers that before everything else the words must be understood, so that according to them a rebirth of music is to be expected only when some mode of singing has been discovered in which textword lords it over counterpoint like master over servant: For the words, it is argued, are as much nobler than the accompanying harmonic system as the soul is nobler than the body.
Friedrich Nietzsche
What is happening to me happens to all fruits that grow ripe. It is the honey in my veins that makes my blood thicker, and my soul quieter.
Friedrich Nietzsche
Whoever fights monsters should see to it that in the process he does not become a monster. And if you gaze long enough into an abyss, the abyss will gaze back into you.
Friedrich Nietzsche
There have been two great narcotics in European civilisation: Christianity and alcohol.
Friedrich Nietzsche
Christianity gave Eros poison to drink; he did not die of it, certainly, but degenerated to Vice.
Friedrich Nietzsche
Dangerous Helpfulness. There are people who want to make men's lives more difficult for no other reason than afterwards to offer them their prescriptions for making life easier -- their Christianity, for example.
Friedrich Nietzsche
The word "Christianity" is already a misunderstanding; in reality there has been only one Christian, and he died on the cross.
Friedrich Nietzsche
In Christianity neither morality nor religion come into contact with reality at any point.
Friedrich Nietzsche
I shall eat anyone who tries to steal my singing, springing lark!
Jacob Grimm
Their faces were as a rule good-natured rather than beautiful.
J.R.R. Tolkien
Nightingales sang about her wherever she went.
J.R.R. Tolkien
The sons of Dior and Nimloth were Elured and Elurin; and a daughter also was born to them, and she was named Elwing, which is Star-spray, for she was born on a night of stars, whose light glittered in the spray of the waterfall of Lanthir Lamath beside her father's house.
J.R.R. Tolkien
As the light upon the leaves of trees, as the voice of clear waters, as the stars above the mists of the world, such was her glory and her loveliness; and in her face was a shining light.
J.R.R. Tolkien
Is the world really beautified by the fact that man thinks it beautiful? He has humanized it, that is all.
Friedrich Nietzsche
hitherto we have been permitted to seek beauty only in the morally good - a fact which sufficiently accounts for our having found so little of it and having had to seek about for imaginary beauties without backbone! - As surely as the wicked enjoy a hundred kinds of happiness of which the virtuous have no inkling, so too they possess a hundred kinds of beauty: and many of them have not yet been discovered.
Friedrich Nietzsche
It is disgraceful for a philosopher to say: the good and the beautiful are one; if he adds 'also the true', one ought to beat him. Truth is ugly. We possess art lest we perish of the truth.
Friedrich Nietzsche
The slow arrow of beauty. The most noble kind of beauty is that which does not carry us away suddenly, whose attacks are not violent or intoxicating (this kind easily awakens disgust), but rather the kind of beauty which infiltrates slowly, which we carry along with us almost unnoticed, and meet up with again in dreams; finally, after it has for a long time lain modestly in our heart, it takes complete possession of us, filling our eyes with tears, our hearts with longing. What do we long for when we see beauty? To be beautiful. We think much happiness must be connected with it. But that is an error.
Friedrich Nietzsche
Love's cruel notion. - Every great love brings with it the cruel idea of killingthe object of that love, so that he may be removed once and for all fromthe wicked game of change: for love dreads change more than it doesdestruction.
Friedrich Nietzsche
Man is something that shall be overcome.Man is a rope,tied between beast and overman - a rope over an abyss.What is great in man is that he is a bridge and not an end.
Friedrich Nietzsche
A real man wants two things: danger and play. Therefore he wants woman as the most dangerous plaything. Man shall be educated for war, and woman for the recreation of the warrior: all else is folly.
Friedrich Nietzsche
Among such persons are those women who transform themselves into just that function of a man that is but weakly developed in him, and then become his purse, or his politics, or his social intercourse. Such beings maintain themselves best when they insert themselves in an alien organism; if they do not succeed they become vexed, irritated, and eat themselves up.
Friedrich Nietzsche
Men have hitherto treated women like birds which have strayed down to them from the heights; as something more delicate, more fragile, more savage, stranger, sweeter, soulful – but as something which has to be caged up so that it shall not fly away.
Friedrich Nietzsche
Of man there is little here: therefore do their women masculinize themselves. For only he who is man enough will save the woman in woman.
Friedrich Nietzsche
The happiness of man is: I will. The happiness of woman is: he wills. ‘Behold, just now the world became perfect!’—thus thinks every woman when she obeys out of entire love. And women must obey and find a depth for her surface. Surface is the disposition of woman: a mobile, stormy film over shallow water. Man’s disposition, however, is deep; his river roars in subterranean caves: woman feels his strength but does not comprehend it.
Friedrich Nietzsche
We have had enough of the old men and the money-counters!" And people further off took up the cry: "Up Bowman, and down with the moneybags,
J.R.R. Tolkien
We set no special value on the possession of a virtue until we percieve that it is entirely lacking in our adversary.
Friedrich Nietzsche
A thinking man never be a party man.
Friedrich Nietzsche
the most improper job of any man, even saints (who at any rate were at least unwilling to take it on), is bossing other men. Not one in a million is fit for it, and least of all those who seek the opportunity.
J.R.R. Tolkien
They made for his noise far quicker than he had expected. They were frightfully angry. Quite apart from the stones no spider has ever like being called Attercop, and Tomnoddy of course, is insulting to anybody.
J.R.R. Tolkien
philosophy is not suited for the masses, what they need is holiness.
Friedrich Nietzsche
There was a deep silence, only scraped on its surfaces by the faint quiver of empty seed-plumes, and broken grass-blades trembling in small air-movements they could not feel.'Not a bird!' said Sam mournfully.'No, no birds,' said Gollum. 'Nice birds!' He licked his teeth. 'No birds here. There are snakeses, wormses, things in the pools. Lots of things, lots of nasty things. No birds,' he ended sadly. Sam looked at him with distaste.
J.R.R. Tolkien
Today as always, men fall into two groups: slaves and free men. Whoever does not have two-thirds of his day for himself, is a slave, whatever he may be: a statesman, a businessman, an official, or a scholar.
Friedrich Nietzsche
Yes, I am here. And you are lucky to be here too after all the absurd things you've done since you left home.
J.R.R. Tolkien
Short cuts make long delays.
J.R.R. Tolkien
It breaks my heart. Better than your words, your eye tells me all your peril.You are not yet free, you still search for freedom. Your search has fatigued you and made you too wakeful.You long for the open heights, your soul thirsts for the stars. But your bad instincts too thirst for freedom. Your fierce dogs long for freedom; they bark for joy in their cellar when your spirit aspires to break open all prisons.To me you are still a prisoner who imagines freedom: ah, such prisoners of the soul become clever, but also deceitful and base.
Friedrich Nietzsche
I will not debate with you Dark Elf. By the swords of the Noldor alone are your sunless woods defended. Your freedom to wander there wild you owe to my kin and but for them long since you would have laboured in thraldom in the pits of Angband. And here I am King and whether you will it or will it not my doom is law. This choice is given to you: abide here or to die here and so also for your son.
J.R.R. Tolkien
Freedom is the will to be responsible for ourselves.
Friedrich Nietzsche
The grey-rain curtain turned all to silver glass and was rolled back, and he beheld white shores and beyond them a far green country under a swift sunrise.
J.R.R. Tolkien