Since then I've had difficulty coming up with any of the tenderness and protectiveness I've so long felt toward you. Förster has not yet severed his connection with the anti-Semitic movement. I've seen proof, black on white, that Herr Dr.My problems are new, my psychological horizon frighteningly comprehensive, my language bold and clear there may well be no books written in German which are richer in ideas and more independent than mine. So far no one had had enough courage and intelligence to reveal me to my dear Germans.Letter to Mathilde Mayer, July 16, 1878, cited in Karl Jaspers, Nietzsche (Baltimore: 1997), p.I now myself live, in every detail, striving for wisdom, while I formerly merely worshipped and idolized the wise.Letter to Carl Fuchs (14 December 1887).It was a highly dangerous experiment now that I know it did not ruin me, I also know what significance it had for me - it was the most severe test of my character. Likewise, I now regard my having been a Wagnerian as eccentric. In Germany there is much complaining about my "eccentricities." But since it is not known where my center is, it won't be easy to find out where or when I have thus far been "eccentric." That I was a philologist, for example, meant that I was outside my center (which fortunately does not mean that I was a poor philologist).Culture is liberation, the removal of all the weeds, rubble and vermin that want to attack the tender buds of the plant. That is the secret of all culture: it does not provide artificial limbs, wax noses or spectacles-that which can provide these things is, rather, only sham education. Popular usage: There are no facts, only interpretations.Against that positivism which stops before phenomena, saying "there are only facts," I should say: no, it is precisely facts that do not exist, only interpretations.Quoted in Walter Kaufmann, The Faith of a Heretic (opening epigram). Here the ways of men part: if you wish to strive for peace of soul and pleasure, then believe if you wish to be a devotee of truth, then inquire.Postcard to Franz Overbeck, Sils-Maria (30 July 1881), as translated by Walter Kaufmann in The Portable Nietzsche (1954).Already six severe attacks of two or three days each. Exceptional weather here too! Eternal change of atmospheric conditions! - that will yet drive me out of Europe! I must have clear skies for months, else I get nowhere. Strange! Incidentally, I am not at all as well as I had hoped. In summa: my lonesomeness, which, as on very high mountains, often made it hard for me to breathe and make my blood rush out, is now at least a twosomeness. Even though the divergencies are admittedly tremendous, they are due more to the difference in time, culture, and science. I am utterly amazed, utterly enchanted! I have a precursor, and what a precursor! I hardly knew Spinoza: that I should have turned to him just now, was inspired by "instinct." Not only is his overtendency like mine-namely to make all knowledge the most powerful affect - but in five main points of his doctrine I recognize myself this most unusual and loneliest thinker is closest to me precisely in these matters: he denies the freedom of the will, teleology, the moral world-order, the unegoistic, and evil.Quotes It is precisely facts that do not exist, only interpretations. 1.15 Bartlett's Familiar Quotations, 10th ed.1.14 Philosophy in the Tragic Age of the Greeks (posthumous).1.8 On the Genealogy of Morality (1887).1.6 Daybreak - Thoughts on the Prejudices of Morality (1881).1.3 On Truth and Lie in an Extra-Moral Sense (1873).
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