"Success has always been the biggest liar - and the ‘work’ itself is a success."

Quotes from Nietzsche on success, honesty and being dangerous + brief commentary

• “If someday our honesty should nevertheless grow tired and sigh and stretch its limbs and think us too harsh and wish to have it better, easier, softer, like a pleasant vice: let us remain harsh, we last stoics!”

  • Sometimes, you have to be cruel to be kind.

• “It is very important that as few people as possible reflect on morality - and thus it is very important that morality should never become interesting!”

  • This is essentially the opposite of what the modern West is doing now. Moral righteousness, particularly public moral righteousness, has never been valued more than it is today. 

• “People should learn to understand cruelty differently and open their eyes; people should finally learn to be impatient, so that presumptuous, fat errors no longer wander about, virtuous and cheeky, like the errors concerning tragedy, for example, that have been fattened up by old and new philosophers.”

  • Being disagreeable, which often coexists with impatience, is an underrated trait. Nothing would be achieved if we were all too patient. I have found that giving yourself less time to do something you have been avoiding, no matter how trivial, is an underrated strategy. Action beats inaction. 

• “We have to get rid of that foolish psychology of earlier times that held that cruelty arises only at the sight of another person’s suffering; there is also abundant, over-abundant pleasure in our own suffering, in making ourselves suffer.”

• “The same new conditions that typically give rise to ordinary and mediocre men (serviceable, industrious, diversely useful and handy herd animal men) are also those most suited to producing exceptional men of the most dangerous and attractive qualities.”

• “Each people has its own hypocrisy, which it calls its virtues, we do not know what is best for ourselves - we cannot know it.”

  • This is why some of the best pieces of advice I have received often involve copying what people have done in the past. We do not know ourselves very well, and therefore it’s hard for us to know what we want and need. To look at what works for others and to apply that to your own life can be very beneficial. 

• “To refrain from injuring, abusing, or exploiting one another; to equate another person’ will with our own: in a certain crude sense this can develop into good manners between individuals, if the preconditions are in place. But if we were to try to take this principle further and possibly even make it the basic principle of society, it would immediately be revealed for what it is: a will to deny life.”

• “Life itself in its essence means appropriating, injuring, overpowering those who are foreign and weaker; oppression, harshness, forcing one’s own forms on others, incorporation, and at the very least, at the very mildest, exploitation.” 

• “The ability and duty to feel enduring gratitude or vengefulness (both only within a circle of equals), subtlety in the forms of retribution, a refined concept of friendship, a certain need for enemies (as drainage channels for the emotions of envy, combativeness arrogance - in essence, in order to be a good friend): these are the typical signs of a noble morality.”

• “The more a psychologist turns to the more select cases and people, the greater his danger of being suffocated by his pity: he needs harshness and cheerfulness more than other people do.”

  • I have great respect for the great clinicians of the past 100 years. I loved reading Carl Rogers’ On Becoming a Person. It did appear to me that the level of patience and forgiveness he expected of himself was quite extraordinary. It is probably partially why he is so profoundly remembered.

• “Success has always been the biggest liar - and the ‘work’ itself is a success; a great statesman, a conqueror, an explorer is disguised to the point of unrecognizability by his creations; it is the ‘work’, whether of an artist or of a philosopher, that first invents the creator, the one who is said to have created it.”

  • One of the many things I have realized once I started this newsletter is that the ‘success’ of something isn’t always immediately self-evident. I can post something which initially receives little attention, and then in a week or a month be inundated with praise about that same post. The beauty of writing on the internet is that whatever you post is an asset - it can be incredibly valuable to somebody, but that value may not be immediately observable.