The wittiest authors raise the very slightest of smiles.
— Human, All Too Human
Friedrich Nietzsche was a German philosopher and writer who began his career as a classical philologist. In 1869, at age 24, he was appointed Professor of Classical Philology at the University of Basel, but health problems led him to resign in 1879.
He then lived as an independent writer, often in solitude and financial insecurity, moving between Switzerland, Italy and southern France, and completed much of his core writing in the following decade. His work spans poetry, cultural criticism and philosophical essays, with a fondness for aphorisms and irony. In 1889, aged 44, he suffered a neurological collapse and lived his remaining 11 years in the care of his mother and later his sister. Thus Spoke Zarathustra and Beyond Good and Evil are his most quoted works in our library.
He then lived as an independent writer, often in solitude and financial insecurity, moving between Switzerland, Italy and southern France, and completed much of his core writing in the following decade. His work spans poetry, cultural criticism and philosophical essays, with a fondness for aphorisms and irony. In 1889, aged 44, he suffered a neurological collapse and lived his remaining 11 years in the care of his mother and later his sister. Thus Spoke Zarathustra and Beyond Good and Evil are his most quoted works in our library.
Marriage as a long conversation. - When marrying you should ask yourself this question: do you believe you are going to enjoy talking with this woman into your old age? Everything else in a marriage is transitory, but most of the time that you're together will be devoted to conversation.
— Human, All Too Human
Well-meaning, helpful, good-natured attitudes of mind have not come to be honored on account of their usefulness, but because they are states of richer souls that are capable of bestowing and have their value in the feeling of the plenitude of life.
— The Will to Power
A thinker sees his own actions as experiments and questions--as attempts to find out something. Success and failure are for him answers above all.
If something is to stay in the memory it must be burned in: only that which never ceases hurting stays in the memory.
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.
— On the Advantage and Disadvantage of History for Life