"How poor the human mind would be without vanity! It resembles a well stocked and ever renewed ware-empo-rium that attracts buyers of every class: they can find almost everything, have almost everything, provided they bring with them the right kind of money — admiration."
Human, All Too Human: A Book for Free Spirits is a book by 19th-century philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche, originally published in 1878. A second part, Assorted Opinions and Maxims, was published in 1879, and a third part, The Wanderer and his Shadow, followed in 1880.
"Often enough, and always with great consternation, people have told me that there is something distinctive in all my writings...All of them, I have been told, contain snares and nets for careless birds, and an almost constant, unperceived challenge to reverse ones habitual estimations and esteemed habits. "Whats that? Everything is only—human, all too human?"
Human, All Too Human"So weiss jeder aus Erfahrung, wie schnell der Traeumende einen starken an ihn dringenden Ton, zum Beispiel Glockenlaeuten, Kanonenschuesse in seinen Traum verflicht, das heisst aus ihm hinterdrein erklaert, so dass er zuerst die veranlassenden Umstaende, dann jenen Ton zu erleben meint."
Human, All Too Human"Here lies the antagonism between the individual regions of science and philosophy. The latter wants, as art does, to bestow on life and action the greatest possible profundity and significance; in the former one seeks knowledge and nothing further -- and does in fact acquire it."
Human, All Too Human"Ein wesentlicher Nachtheil, welchen das Aufhoeren metaphysischer Ansichten mit sich bringt, liegt darin, dass das Individuum zu streng seine kurze Lebenszeit ins Auge fasst und keine staerkeren Antriebe empfaengt, an dauerhaften, fuer Jahrhunderte angelegten Institutionen zu bauen."
Human, All Too Human"Man glaubt einer Philosophie etwas Gutes nachzusagen, wenn man sie als Ersatz der Religion fuer das Volk hinstellt."
Human, All Too Human"It is still a long way from this morbid isolation, from the desert of these experimental years, to that enormous, overflowing certainty and health which cannot do without even illness itself, as an instrument and fishhook of knowledge; to that mature freedom of the spirit which is fully as much self-mastery and discipline of the heart, and which permits paths to many opposing ways of thought. It is a long way to inner spaciousness and cosseting of a superabundance which precludes the danger and the sprit might lose itself on its own paths and fall in love and stay put, intoxicated, in some nook; a long way to that excess of vivid healing, reproducing, reviving power, the very sign of great health, an excess that gives free spirit the dangerous privilege of being permitted to live experimentally."
Human, All Too Human"Gentlemen, no fighting please. This is, after all, a council of war. (p. 26)"
Discworld"I should say that when people talk about capitalism its a bit of a joke. Theres no such thing. No country, no business class, has ever been willing to subject itself to the free market, free market discipline. Free markets are for others. Like, the Third World is the Third World because they had free markets rammed down their throat. Meanwhile, the enlightened states, England, the United States, others, resorted to massive state intervention to protect private power, and still do. Thats right up to the present. I mean, the Reagan administration for example was the most protectionist in post-war American history. Virtually the entire dynamic economy in the United States is based crucially on state initiative and intervention: computers, the internet, telecommunication, automation, pharmaceutical, you just name it. Run through it, and you find massive ripoffs of the public, meaning, a system in which under one guise or another the public pays the costs and takes the risks, and profit is privatized. Thats very remote from a free market. Free market is like what India had to suffer for a couple hundred years, and most of the rest of the Third World."
"The Dwarf sees farther than the Giant, when he has the Giants shoulders to mount on."
Samuel Taylor Coleridge"If civilization has an opposite, it is war."
"A word of the faith that never balks, Here or henceforward it is all the same to me, I accept Time absolutely. It alone is without flaw, it alone rounds and completes all, That mystic baffling wonder alone completes all. (23)"
"I am dominated by one thing, an irresistible, burning attraction towards the abstract. The expression of human feelings and the passions of man certainly interest me deeply, but I am less concerned with expressing the motions of the soul and mind than to render visible, so to speak, the inner flashes of intuition which have something divine in their apparent insignificance and reveal magic, even divine horizons, when they are transposed into the marvellous effects of pure plastic art."
Gustave Moreau