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Happiness: being able to forget or, to express in a more learned fashion.Friedrich Nietzsche
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Without forgetting it is quite impossible to live at all.Friedrich Nietzsche
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One who cannot leave himself behind on the threshold of the moment and forget the past, who cannot stand on a single point, like a goddess of victory, without fear or giddiness, will never know what happiness is; and, worse still, will never do anything that makes others happy.Friedrich Nietzsche
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The beast lives unhistorically; for it 'goes into' the present, like a number, without leaving any curious remainder.Friedrich Nietzsche
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We suffer from the malady of words, and have no trust in any feeling that is not stamped with its special word.Friedrich Nietzsche
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And that discovery would betray the closely guarded secret of modern culture to the laughter of the world. For we moderns have nothing of our own. We only become worth notice by filling ourselves to overflowing with foreign customs, arts, philosophies, religions and sciences: we are wandering encyclopaedias, as an ancient Greek who had strayed into our time would probably call us. But the only value of an encyclopaedia lies in the inside, in the contents, not in what is written outside, in the binding or the wrapper. And so the whole of modern culture is essentially internal; the bookbinder prints something like this on the cover: “Manual of internal culture for external barbarians.” The opposition of inner and outer makes the outer side still more barbarous, as it would naturally be, when the outward growth of a rude people merely developed its primitive inner needs. For what means has nature of repressing too great a luxuriance from without? Only one, –to be affected by it as little as possible, to set it aside and stamp it out at the first opportunity. And so we have the custom of no longer taking real things seriously, we get the feeble personality on which the real and the permanent make so little impression. Men become at last more careless and accommodating in external matters, and the [Pg 34] considerable cleft between substance and form is widened; until they have no longer any feeling for barbarism, if only their memories be kept continually titillated, and there flow a constant stream of new things to be known, that can be neatly packed up in the cupboards of their memory.Friedrich Nietzsche
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The crowd of influences streaming on the young soul is so great, the clods of barbarism and violence flung at him so strange and overwhelming, that an assumed stupidity is his only refuge.Friedrich Nietzsche
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The great works are produced in such an ecstasy of love that they must always be unworthy of it, however great their worth otherwise.Friedrich Nietzsche
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Every past is worth condemning.Friedrich Nietzsche
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The power of gradually losing all feeling of strangeness or astonishment, and finally being pleased at anything, is called the historical sense or historical culture.Friedrich Nietzsche
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... a thing can only live through a pious illusion.Friedrich Nietzsche
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There is something the child sees that he does not see; something the child hears that he does not hear; and this something is the most important thing of all. Because he does not understand it, his understanding is more childish than the child's and more simple than simplicity itself; in spite of the many clever wrinkles on his parchment face, and the masterly play of his fingers in unravelling the knots.Friedrich Nietzsche
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A thing can only live through a pious illusion.Friedrich Nietzsche