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The collection / 566 fragments

Justice.

Explore passages mentioning justice, just. Topic suggestions use transparent word matching, not scholarly classification. Editorial meanings and lexical matches are discovery aids, not independent authentication of a quotation.

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01c. 1872 AD
The Darkening of the Heavens.—Do you know the vengeance of those timid people who behave in society just as if they had stolen their limbs? The vengeance of the humble, Christian-like souls who just manage to slink quietly through the world? The vengeance of those who always judge hastily, and are as hastily said to be in the wrong? The vengeance of all classes of drunkards, for whom the morning is always the most miserable part of the day? and also of all kinds of invalids and sick and depressed people who have no longer the courage to become healthy? The number of these petty vengeful people, and, even more, the number of their petty acts of revenge, is incalculable. The air around us is continually whizzing with the discharged arrows of their malignity, so that the sun and the sky of their lives become darkened thereby,—and, alas! not only theirs, but more often ours and other men's: and this is worse than the frequent wounds which they make on our skins and hearts. Do we not occasionally deny the existence of the sun and sky merely because we have not seen them for so long?—Well then, solitude! because of this, solitude!
Friedrich Nietzsche / quote
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02c. 1872 AD
A Fable.—The Don Juan of knowledge—no philosopher or poet has yet succeeded in discovering him. He is wanting in love for the things he recognises, but he possesses wit, a lust for the hunting after knowledge, and the intrigues in connection with it, and he finds enjoyment in all these, even up to the highest and most distant stars of knowledge—until at last there is nothing left for him to pursue but the absolutely injurious side of knowledge, just as the drunkard who ends by drinking absinthe and aquafortis. That is why last of all he feels a longing for hell, for this is the final knowledge which seduces him. Perhaps even this would disappoint him, as all things do which one knows! and then he would have to stand still for all eternity, a victim to eternal deception, and transformed into his enemy, the Stony Guest, who longs for an evening meal of knowledge which will never more fall to his share! for the whole world of things will not have another mouthful left to offer to these hungry men.
Friedrich Nietzsche / quote
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06c. 1872 AD
Freed from Scepticism.— A. Some men emerge from a general moral scepticism bad-tempered and feeble, corroded, worm-eaten, and even partly consumed—but I on the other hand, more courageous and healthier than ever, and with my instincts conquered once more. Where a strong wind blows, where the waves are rolling angrily, and where more than usual danger is to be faced, there I feel happy. I did not become a worm, although I often had to work and dig like a worm. B. You have just ceased to be a sceptic; for you deny! A. And in doing so I have learnt to say yea again.
Friedrich Nietzsche / quote
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07c. 1872 AD
Seeking one's Company.—Are we then looking for too much when we seek the company of men who have grown mild, agreeable to the taste, and nutritive, like chestnuts which have been put into the fire and taken out just at the right moment? Of men who expect little from life, and prefer to accept this little as a present rather than as a merit of their own, as if it were carried to them by birds and bees? Of men who are too proud ever to feel themselves rewarded, and too serious in their passion for knowledge and honesty to have time for or pleasure in fame? Such men we should call philosophers; but they themselves will always find some more modest designation.
Friedrich Nietzsche / quote
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08c. 1872 AD
The Necessary Desiccation of Everything Good.—What! must we conceive of a work exactly in the spirit of the age that has produced it? but we experience greater delight and surprise, and get more information out of it when we do not conceive it in this spirit! Have you not remarked that every new and good work, so long as it is exposed to the damp air of its own age is least valuable—just because it still has about it all the odour of the market, of opposition, of modern ideas, and of all that is transient from day to day? Later on, however, it dries up, its “actuality” dies away: and then only does it obtain its deep lustre and its perfume—and also, if it is destined for it, the calm eye of eternity.
Friedrich Nietzsche / quote
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09c. 1872 AD
The Jealousy of the Lonely Ones.—This is the difference between sociable and solitary natures, provided that both possess an intellect: the former are satisfied, or nearly satisfied, with almost anything whatever; from the moment that their minds have discovered a communicable and happy version of it they will be reconciled even with the devil himself! But the lonely souls have their silent rapture, and their speechless agony about a thing: they hate the ingenious and brilliant display of their inmost problems as much as they dislike to see the women they love too loudly dressed—they watch her mournfully in such a case, as if they were just beginning to suspect that she was desirous of pleasing others. This is the jealousy which all lonely thinkers and passionate dreamers exhibit with regard to the esprit.
Friedrich Nietzsche / quote
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10c. 1872 AD
But we do not Believe you.—You would fain pass for psychologists, but we shall not allow it! Are we not to notice that you pretend to be more experienced, profound, passionate, and perfect than you actually are?—just as we notice in yonder painter that there is a trifling presumptuousness in his manner of wielding the brush, and in yonder musician that he brings forward his theme with the desire to make it appear superior to what it really is. Have you experienced history within yourselves, commotions, earthquakes, long and profound sadness, and sudden flashes of happiness? Have you acted foolishly with great and little fools? Have you really undergone the delusions and woe of the good people? and also the woe and the peculiar happiness of the most evil? Then you may speak to me of morality, but not otherwise!
Friedrich Nietzsche / quote
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11c. 1872 AD
What we are Free to do.—We can act as the gardeners of our impulses, and—which few people know—we may cultivate the seeds of anger, pity, vanity, or excessive brooding, and make these things fecund and productive, just as we can train a beautiful plant to grow along trellis-work. We may do this with the good or bad taste of a gardener, and as it were, in the French, English, Dutch, or Chinese style. We may let nature take its own course, only trimming and embellishing a little here and there; and finally, without any knowledge or consideration, we may even allow the plants to spring up in accordance with their own natural growth and limitations, and fight out their battle among themselves,—nay, we can even take delight in such chaos, though we may possibly have a hard time with it! All this is at our option: but how many know that it is? Do not the majority of people believe in themselves as complete and perfect facts? and have not the great philosophers set their seal on this prejudice through their doctrine of the unchangeability of character?
Friedrich Nietzsche / quote
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12c. 1872 AD
Letting our Happiness also Shine.—In the same way as painters are unable to reproduce the deep brilliant hue of the natural sky, and are compelled to use all the colours they require for their landscapes a few shades deeper than nature has made them—just as they, by means of this trick, succeed in approaching the brilliancy and harmony of nature's own hues, so also must poets and philosophers, for whom the luminous rays of happiness are inaccessible, endeavour to find an expedient. By picturing all things a shade or two darker than they really are, their light, in which they excel, will produce almost exactly the same effect as the sunlight, and will resemble the light of true happiness.—The pessimist, on the other hand, who paints all things in the blackest and most sombre hues, only makes use of bright flames, lightning, celestial glories, and everything that possesses a glaring, dazzling power, and bewilders our eyes: to him light only serves the purpose of increasing the horror, and of making us look upon things as being more dreadful than they really are.
Friedrich Nietzsche / quote
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13c. 1872 AD
The Illusion of the Moral Order of the Universe.—There is no “eternal justice” which requires that every fault shall be atoned and paid for,—the belief that such a justice existed was a terrible delusion, and useful only to a limited extent; just as it is also a delusion that everything is guilt which is felt as such. It is not the things themselves, but the opinions about things that do not exist, which have been such a source of trouble to mankind.
Friedrich Nietzsche / quote
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14c. 1872 AD
Across the Plank.—One must be able to dissimulate in intercourse with persons who are ashamed of their feelings; they take a sudden aversion to anyone who surprises them in a state of tenderness, or of enthusiastic and high-running feeling, as if he had seen their secrets. If one wants to be kind to them in such moments one should make them laugh, or say some kind of cold, playful wickedness:—their feeling thereby congeals, and they are again self-possessed. But I give the moral before the story.—We were once on a time so near one another in the course of our lives, that nothing more seemed to hinder our friendship and fraternity, and there was merely a small plank between us. While you were just about to step on it, I asked you: "Do you want to come across the plank to me?" But then you did not want to come any longer; and when I again entreated, you were silent. Since then mountains and torrents, and whatever separates and alienates, have interposed between us, and even if we wanted to come to one another, we could no longer do so! When, however, you now remember that small plank, you have no longer words,—but merely sobs and amazement.
Friedrich Nietzsche / quote
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15c. 1872 AD
Dignity of Folly.—Several millenniums further on in the path of the last century!—and in everything that man does the highest prudence will be exhibited: but just thereby prudence will have lost all its dignity. It will then, sure enough, be necessary to be prudent, but it will also be so usual and common, that a more fastidious taste will feel this necessity as vulgarity. And just as a tyranny of truth and science would be in a position to raise the value of falsehood, a tyranny of prudence could force into prominence a new species of nobleness. To be noble—that might then mean, perhaps, to be capable of follies.
Friedrich Nietzsche / quote
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16c. 1872 AD
Injuring with ones best Qualities.—Out strong points sometimes drive us so far forward that we cannot any longer endure our weaknesses, and we perish by them: we also perhaps see this result beforehand, but nevertheless do not want it to be otherwise. We then become hard towards that which would fain be spared in us, and our pitilessness is also our greatness. Such an experience, which must in the end cost us our Hie, is a symbol of the collective effect of great men upon others and upon their epoch:—it is just with their best abilities, with that which only they can do, that they destroy much that is weak, uncertain, evolving, and willing, and are thereby injurious. Indeed, the case may happen in which, taken on the whole, they only do injury, because their best is accepted and drunk up as it were solely by those who lose their understanding and their egoism by it, as by too strong a beverage; they become so intoxicated that they go breaking their limbs on all the wrong roads where their drunkenness drives them.
Friedrich Nietzsche / quote
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17c. 1872 AD
Heresy and Witchcraft.—To think otherwise than is customary—that is by no means so much the activity of a better intellect, as the activity of strong, wicked inclinations,—severing, isolating, refractory, mischief-loving, malicious inclinations. Heresy is the counterpart of witchcraft, and is certainly just as little a merely harmless affair, or a thing worthy of honour in itself. Heretics and sorcerers are two kinds of bad men; they have it in common that they also feel themselves wicked; their unconquerable delight is to attack and injure whatever rules,—whether it be men or opinions. The Reformation, a kind of duplication of the spirit of the Middle Ages at a time when it had no longer a good conscience, produced both of these kinds of people in the greatest profusion.
Friedrich Nietzsche / quote
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18c. 1872 AD
Earnestness for the Truth.—Earnest for the truth! What different things men understand by these words! Just the same opinions, and modes of demonstration and testing which a thinker regards as a frivolity in himself, to which he has succumbed with shame at one time or other,—just the same opinions may give to an artist, who comes in contact with them and accepts them temporarily, the consciousness that the profoundest earnestness for the truth has now taken hold of him, and that it is worthy of admiration that, although an artist, he at the same time exhibits the most ardent desire for the antithesis of the apparent. It is thus possible that a person may, just by his pathos of earnestness, betray how superficially and sparingly his intellect has hitherto operated in the domain of knowledge.—And is not everything that we consider important our betrayer? It shows where our motives lie, and where our motives are altogether lacking.
Friedrich Nietzsche / quote
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19c. 1872 AD
Two Orators.—Of these two orators the one arrives at a full understanding of his case only when he yields himself to emotion; it is only this that pumps sufficient blood and heat into his brain to compel his high intellectuality to reveal itself The other attempts, indeed, now and then to do the same: to state his case sonorously, vehemently, and spiritedly with the aid of emotion,—but usually with bad success. He then very soon speaks obscurely and confusedly; he exaggerates, makes omissions, and excites suspicion of the justice of his case: indeed, he himself feels this suspicion, and the sudden changes into the coldest and most repulsive tones (which raise a doubt in the hearer as to his passionateness being genuine) are thereby explicable. With him emotion always drowns the spirit; perhaps because it is stronger than in the former. But he is at the height of his power when he resists the impetuous storm of his feeling, and as it were scorns it; it is then only that his spirit emerges fully from its concealment, a spirit logical, mocking and playful, but nevertheless awe-inspiring.
Friedrich Nietzsche / quote
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20c. 1872 AD
The Germans as Artists.—When once a German actually experiences passion (and not only, as is usual, the mere inclination to it), he then behaves just as he must do in passion, and does not think further of his behaviour. The truth is, however, that he then behaves very awkwardly and uglily, and as if destitute of rhythm and melody; so that onlookers are pained or moved thereby, but nothing more—unless he elevate himself to the sublimity and enrapturedness of which certain passions are capable. Then even the German becomes beautiful. The consciousness of the height at which beauty begins to shed its charm even over Germans, forces German artists to the height and the super-height, and to the extravagances of passion: they have an actual, profound longing, therefore, to get beyond, or at least to look beyond the ugliness and awkwardness—into a better, easier, more southern, more sunny world. And thus their convulsions are often merely indications that they would like to dance: these poor bears in whom hidden nymphs and satyrs, and sometimes still higher divinities, carry on their game!
Friedrich Nietzsche / quote
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22c. 1872 AD
No Altruism!/—I see in many men an excessive impulse and delight in wanting to be a function; they strive after it, and have the keenest scent for all those positions in which precisely they themselves can be functions. 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 / quote
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23c. 1872 AD
The Error of Christ.—The founder of Christianity thought there was nothing from which men suffered so much as from their sins:—it was his error, the error of him who felt himself without sin, to whom experience was lacking in this respect! It was thus that his soul filled with that marvellous, fantastic pity which had reference to a trouble that even among his own people, the inventors of sin, was rarely a great trouble! But Christians understood subsequently how to do justice to their master, and how to sanctify his error into a "truth."
Friedrich Nietzsche / quote
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