by eightbitsamurai

You have the choice: either as little displeasure as possible, painlessness in brief…or as much displeasure as possible as the price for the growth of an abundance of subtle pleasures and joys that have rarely been relished yet? If you decide for the former and desire to diminish and lower the level of human pain, you also have to diminish and lower the level of their capacity for joy.

To those human beings who are of any concern to me I wish suffering, desolation, sickness, ill-treatment, indignities — I wish that they should not remain unfamiliar with profound self-contempt, the torture of self-mistrust, the wretchedness of the vanquished: I have no pity for them, because I wish them the only thing that can prove today whether one is worth anything or not — that one endures.

Examine the lives of the best and most fruitful people and peoples and ask yourselves whether a tree that is supposed to grow to a proud height can dispense with bad weather and storms; whether misfortune and external resistance, some kinds of hatred, jealousy, stubbornness, mistrust, hardness, avarice, and violence do not belong among the favorable conditions without which any great growth even of virtue is scarcely possible.

-Friedrich Nietzsche

Quote that somebody posted on my Facebook. I hate Nietzsche and think he's a huge asshole that people mistakenly believe aligns with their liberal viewpoints when that's not the case at all. But I wonder about the quote.

I suppose I could be projecting a bit - the quote was posted from someone in Boulder. Now if you told one of the homeless people we pretend don't exist there that "hardship makes a person better", it'd come across as disingenuous. And with you coming off as a huge asshole. I think it's easy to say both phrases posted in the title above when you have time for archery and horse-riding lessons, and your definition of hardship is PRing your rock-climbing time.

But I also try to take everything as learning experience, or at least a method of viewing a different perspective. So, what do you all feel about the quote? kleinbl00, thenewgreen, lil, insomniasexx, _refugee_, because I value your opinions. Of course I think that of everyone on Hubski, but something tells me you'll have particular words on the subject.