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The collection / 368 fragments

Love.

Explore passages mentioning love. 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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368 results · Page 15 of 16Play this collection ▷
02c. 1872 AD
Another type of Love for one's Neighbour.—Everything that is agitated, noisy, fitful, and nervous forms a contrast to the great passion which, glowing in the heart of man like a quiet and gloomy flame, and gathering about it all that is flaming and ardent, gives to man the appearance of coldness and indifference, and stamps a certain impassiveness on his features. Such men are occasionally capable of showing their love for their neighbour, but this love is different from that of sociable people who are anxious to please. It is a mild, contemplative, and calm amiability: these people, as it were, look out of the windows of the castle which serves them as a stronghold, and consequently as a prison; for the outlook into the far distance, the open air, and a different world is so pleasant for them!
Friedrich Nietzsche / quote
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03c. 1872 AD
Love and Truthfulness.—Through our love we have become dire offenders against truth, and even habitual dissimulators and thieves, who give out more things as true than seem to us to be true. On this account the thinker must from time to time drive away those whom he loves (not necessarily those who love him), so that they may show their sting and wickedness, and cease to tempt him. Consequently the kindness of the thinker will have its waning and waxing moon.
Friedrich Nietzsche / quote
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04c. 1872 AD
Against the Waste of Love.—Do we not blush when we surprise ourselves in a state of violent aversion? Well, then, we should also blush when we find ourselves possessed of strong affections on account of the injustice contained in them. More: there are people who feel their hearts weighed down and oppressed when some one gives them the benefit of his love and sympathy to the extent that he deprives others of a share. The tone of his voice reveals to us the fact that we have been specially selected and preferred! but, alas! I am not thankful for being thus selected: I experience within myself a certain feeling of resentment against him who wishes to distinguish me in this way—he shall not love me at the expense of others! I shall always try to look after myself and to endure myself, and my heart is often filled to overflowing, and with some reason. To such a man nothing ought to be given of which others stand so greatly in need.
Friedrich Nietzsche / quote
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05c. 1872 AD
Friendship.—The objection to a philosophic life that it renders us useless to our friends would never have arisen in a modern mind: it belongs rather to classical antiquity. Antiquity knew the stronger bonds of friendship, meditated upon it, and almost took it to the grave with it. This is the advantage it has over us: we, on the other hand, can point to our idealisation of sexual love. All the great excellencies of ancient humanity owed their stability to the fact that man was standing side by side with man, and that no woman was allowed to put forward the claim of being the nearest and highest, nay even sole object of his love, as the feeling of passion would teach. Perhaps our trees do not grow so high now owing to the ivy and the vines that cling round them.
Friedrich Nietzsche / quote
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07c. 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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08c. 1872 AD
“Love Equalises.”—Love wishes to spare the other to whom it devotes itself any feeling of strangeness: as a consequence it is permeated with disguise and simulation; it keeps on deceiving continuously, and feigns an equality which in reality does not exist. And all this is done so instinctively that women who love deny this simulation and constant tender trickery, and have even the audacity to assert that love equalises (in other words that it performs a miracle)! This phenomenon is a simple matter if one of the two permits himself or herself to be loved, and does not deem it necessary to feign, but leaves this to the other. No drama, however, could offer a more intricate and confused instance than when both persons are passionately in love with one another; for in this case both are anxious to surrender and to endeavour to conform to the other, and finally they are both at a loss to know what to imitate and what to feign. The beautiful madness of this spectacle is too good for this world, and too subtle for human eyes.
Friedrich Nietzsche / quote
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09c. 1872 AD
Not Concealing One's Virtues.—I love those men who are as transparent as water, and who, to use Pope's expression, hide not from view the turbid bottom of their stream. Even they, however, possess a certain vanity, though of a rare and more sublimated kind: some of them would wish us to see nothing but the mud, and to take no notice of the clearness of the water which enables us to look right to the bottom. No less a man than Gautama Buddha has imagined the vanity of these few in the formula, “Let your sins appear before men, and conceal your virtues.” But this would exhibit a disagreeable spectacle to the world—it would be a sin against good taste.
Friedrich Nietzsche / quote
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10c. 1872 AD
The Settled and the Free.—It is only in the Underworld that we catch a glimpse of that gloomy background of all that bliss of adventure which forms an everlasting halo around Ulysses and his like, rivalling the eternal phosphorescence of the sea,—that background which we can never forget: the mother of Ulysses died of grief and yearning for her child. The one is driven on from place to place, and the heart of the other, the tender stay-at-home friend, breaks through it—so it always is. Affliction breaks the hearts of those who live to see that those whom they love best are deserting their former views and faith,—it is a tragedy brought about by the free spirits,—a tragedy which, indeed, occasionally comes to their own knowledge. Then, perhaps, they too, like Ulysses, will be forced to descend among the dead to get rid of their sorrow and to relieve their affliction.
Friedrich Nietzsche / quote
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13c. 1872 AD
The Mistresses of the Masters—A powerful contralto voice, as we occasionally hear it in the theatre, raises suddenly for us the curtain on possibilities in which we usually do not believe; all at once we are convinced that somewhere in the world there may be women with high, heroic, royal souls, capable and prepared for magnificent remonstrances, resolutions, and self-sacrifices, capable and prepared for domination over men, because in them the best in man, superior to sex, has become a corporeal ideal. To be sure, it is not the intention of the theatre that such voices should give such a conception of women; they are usually intended to represent the ideal male lover, for example, a Romeo; but, to judge by my experience, the theatre regularly miscalculates here, and the musician also, who expects such effects from such a voice. People do not believe in these lovers; these voices still contain a tinge of the motherly and housewifely character, and most of all when love is in their tone.
Friedrich Nietzsche / quote
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14c. 1872 AD
Mothers.—Animals think differently from men with respect to females; with them the female is regarded as the productive being. There is no paternal love among them, but there is such a thing as love of the children of a beloved, and habituation to them. In the young, the females find gratification for their lust of dominion; the young are a property, an occupation, something quite comprehensible to them, with which they can chatter: all this conjointly is maternal love,—it is to be compared to the love of the artist for his work. Pregnancy has made the females gentler, more expectant, more timid, more submissively inclined; and similarly intellectual pregnancy engenders the character of the contemplative, who are allied to women in character:—they are the masculine mothers.—Among animals the masculine sex is regarded as the beautiful sex.
Friedrich Nietzsche / quote
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16c. 1872 AD
Spoken in Parable.—A Jesus Christ was only possible in a Jewish landscape—I mean in one over which the gloomy and sublime thunder-cloud of the angry Jehovah hung continually. Here only was the rare, sudden flashing of a single sunbeam through the dreadful, universal and continuous nocturnal-day regarded as a miracle of "love," as a beam of the most unmerited "grace." Here only could Christ dream of his rainbow and celestial ladder on which God descended to man; everywhere else the clear weather and the sun were considered the rule and the commonplace.
Friedrich Nietzsche / quote
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22c. 1872 AD
For the New Year.—I still live, I still think; I must still live, for I must still think. Sum, ergo cogito: cogito, ergo sum. To-day everyone takes the liberty of expressing his wish and his favourite thought: well, I also mean to tell what I have wished for myself to-day, and what thought first crossed my mind this year,—a thought which ought to be the basis, the pledge and the sweetening of all my future life! I want more and more to perceive the necessary characters in things as the beautiful:—I shall thus be one of those who beautify things. Amor fati: let that henceforth be my love! I do not want to wage war with the ugly. I do not want to accuse, I do not want even to accuse the accusers. Looking aside, let that be my sole negation! And all in all, to sum up: I wish to be at any time hereafter only a yea-sayer!
Friedrich Nietzsche / quote
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24c. 1842 AD
Let me feel that I am to be a lover. I am to see to it that the world is better for me, and to find my reward in the act. Love would put a new face on this weary old world in which we dwell as pagans and enemies too long; and it would warm the heart to see how fast the vain diplomacy of statesmen, the impotence of armies and navies and lines of defence, would be superseded by this unarmed child. This great, overgrown, dead Christendom of ours still keeps alive at least the name of a lover of mankind. But one day all men will be lovers: and every calamity will be dissolved in the universal sunshine.
Ralph Waldo Emerson / quote
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