~~~~
link
~~~~

Star Friendship

We were friends, and have become strangers to each other.
But this is as it I ought to be, and we do not want either
to conceal or obscure the fact, as if we had to be ashamed of it.

We are two ships, each of which has its goal and its
course. We may, to be sure, cross one another in our
paths, and celebrate a feast together as we did
before. Then, the gallant ships lay quietly in one
harbor and in one sunshine, so that it might have
been thought they were already at their destination
and that they had had one goal.

But then the almighty strength of our tasks forced us
apart once more into different seas and into different
zones, and perhaps we shall never see one another
again. Or perhaps we may see one another, but not
recognise one another again. The different seas and
suns have altered us!

That we had to become strangers to one another is
the law to which we are subject: just by that shall
we become more sacred to one another! Just by that
shall the thought of our former friendship become
holier.

There is probably some immense, invisible curve
and stellar orbit in which our courses and goals, so
widely different, may be comprehended as small
stages of the way. Let us raise ourselves to this
thought! But our lives are too short, and our power of
vision too limited for us to be more than friends in
this sublime possibility.

Let us then believe in our star friendship, even if we
should be compelled not to be earth friends.

~~~~~~~~~~

"Bound heart, free spirit
- if one binds one's heart firmly and imprisons it,
one can allow one's spirit many liberties:
I have said that before, but no one believes it
if he does not already know it..."

~~~~~~~~~~

The great epochs of our life are the occasions when
we gain the courage to rebaptize our evil qualities
as our best qualities.

~~~~~~~~~~

What we do in dreams, we also do when we are awake:
we invent and fabricate the person with whome we associate-
and immediately forget we have done so.

~~~~~~~~~~

Not that you lied to me but that I no longer believe you-
that is what has distressed me.

~~~~~~~~~~

You may lie with your mouth, but with the mouth you make
as you do so you none the less tell the truth.

~~~~~~~~~~

Go away from me and guard yourselves against Zarathustra!
And better still: be ashamed of him! Perhaps he has deceived you.
One repays a teacher badly if one remains a pupil. Now I bid you to lose me and find yourselves, and only when you have all denied me will I return to you.

~~~~~~~~~~

The lonely one offers his hand too quickly to whomever he encounters.
To some people you may never give your hand, only a paw:
and I desire that your paw should also have claws.

~~~~~~~~~~

There are women who, however you may search them,
prove to have no content but are purely masks.
The man who associates with such almost spectral,
necessarily unsatisfied beings is to be commiserated with,
yet it is precisely they who are able to arouse the desire
of the man most strongly: he seeks for her soul -- and goes on seeking.

~~~~~~~~~~

Sometimes it requires only a stronger pair of spectacles
to cure the lover, and he who had the imagination to
picture a face, a figure twenty years older would perhaps
pass through life very undisturbed.

~~~~~~~~~~

There is not enough love and goodness in the world for us
to be permitted to give any of it away to imaginary things.

~~~~~~~~~~

What, if some day or night a demon were to steal after you
into your loneliest loneliness and say to you:
"This life as you now live it and have lived it,
you will have to live once more and innumerable times more;
and there will be nothing new in it, but every pain and
every joy and every thought and sigh and everything unutterably
small or great in your life will have to return to you, all in
the same succession and sequence - even this spider and this
moonlight between the trees, and even this moment and I myself.
The eternal hourglass of existence is turned upside down again
and again, and you with it, speck of dust!"Would you not throw
yourself down and gnash your teeth and curse the demon who spoke thus?...
Or how well disposed would you have to become to yourself and
to life to crave nothing more fervently than this ultimate
eternal confirmation and seal?

~~~~~~~~~~

"Magnanimity and related matters. - Those paradoxical phenomena,
like the sudden chill in the behaviour of an emotional person,
or the humour of a melancholic, and above all magnanimity as a
sudden renunciation of revenge or of the satisfaction of envy,
appear in people who harbour a powerful centrifugal force and
experience sudden satiety and sudden nausea.

Their satisfactions are so quick and strong that they are
followed instantly by weariness and aversion and a flight into the
opposite taste. In this opposite, the cramp of feeling is resolved -
in one person by a sudden chill, in another by laughter, in a third
person by tears of self-sacrifice.

The magnanimous person - or at least the type of magnanimity that
has always been considered most impressive - appears to me as an
extremely vengeful person who beholds satisfaction so close at hand
and who draws it so fully and thoroughly to the last drop,
in anticipation, that a tremendous and quick nausea follows this
quick orgy, and he now rises 'above himself', as they say, and forgives
his enemy, and even blesses and honors him.

With this violence against himself, with this scorn for his lust for
revenge that a moment ago was still so powerful, he merely yields to a
new impulse that has now attained power over him (nausea), and he does
this just as impatiently and orgiastically as he anticipated a moment
earlier the delight in revenge, draining it in his imagination.
Magnanimity contains the same degree of egoism as does revenge,
but egoism of a different quality."

~~~~~~~~~~ ~~~~~~~~~~