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comment by kleinbl00

Hate on Nietzche. He was an asshole.

    To those human beings who are of any concern to me I wish suffering, desolation, sickness, ill-treatment, indignities β€” 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 β€” that one endures.

Not so facebooky, is it? That's also Nietzsche, also from The Will to Power, the book of notes that Nietzsche wanted to call The Antichrist: The Revaluation of All Values but he'd long since died of brain cancer/syphilis (jury's out) and his Nazi brother-in-law was busy carving up his works to enrage Der Vaterland into beating the shit out of Russia. Nietzsche was a big fan of Der Vaterland, by the way:

    β€œIt is my fate to have to be the first decent human being. I have a terrible fear that I shall one day be pronounced holy.”

Whenever you see a Nietzsche quote, hear it in the voice of Stewie Griffin, or if you prefer, Ren from Ren & Stimpy. He never married, relied on his sister for money and spent his life hating on everyone around him. He was an ass. If he hadn't written so copiously about the Ubermensch he would be long forgotten by now.

As far as the payload of the quote, it's this:

    There is no success without hardship.

- Sophocles

Or if you prefer

    Thy fate is the common fate of all, Into each life some rain must fall,

- Longfellow

Or

    Great art was born of great terrors, great loneliness, great inhibitions, instabilities, and it always balances them.

- Anais Nin

All of which say about the same thing: an easy life is a boring life. Nietzsche didn't come up with that, he just made it vile and verbose.

And now maybe I won't have to spell "Nietzsche" again for another several months. Buy a vowel, fucker.





_refugee_  ·  3590 days ago  ·  link  ·  

On a side note, 8bit, something tells me maybe your Boulder friend is going through some shit - revelation inspired by klein's remark about how the middle of that quote isn't exactly so "Facebooky."

user-inactivated  ·  3590 days ago  ·  link  ·  

Nah, we call people like her the Daily Grace because she always feels the need to grace us with whatever wisdom she seems to have on that particular evening through quotes or preachy BS.

This is an outlier because it actually caused me to think a little more and doubt myself. If I used all of her content, I'd have askhubski prompts for months.

That being said, thanks for the response, to you and Klein. "Buy a vowel, fucker" had me cracking up in the hallway I was sitting in.

JethroTulli  ·  3586 days ago  ·  link  ·  

Brilliant!!

user-inactivated  ·  3590 days ago  ·  link  ·  

If you hate Nietzsche, I'd love it if you read Paul Johnson's Intellectuals.

blackbootz  ·  3579 days ago  ·  link  ·  

Looks really interesting :) thanks

user-inactivated  ·  3579 days ago  ·  link  ·  

It is. So is this but it's like 750 pages and very slow going.