Friedrich Nietzsche - quotes

The greatest weight.—

What, if some day or night a demon were to steal after you in your loneliest loneliness and say to you:

"This life as you now live it and have lived it, you will have to live once more and innumerable times more; and there will be nothing new in it, but every pain and every joy and every thought and sigh and everything unutterably small or great in your life will have to return to you, all in the same succession and sequence—even this spider and this moonlight between the trees, and even this moment and I myself. The eternal hourglass of existence is turned upside down again and again—and you with it, speck of dust!"

Would you not throw yourself down and gnash your teeth and curse the demon who spoke thus? Or have you once experienced a tremendous moment when you would have answered him: "You are a god and never have I heard anything more divine!" If this thought gained possession of you, it would change you as you are or perhaps crush you; the question in each and every thing, "Do you desire this once more, and innumerable times more?" would lie upon your actions as the greatest weight! Or how well disposed would you have to become to yourself and to life to crave nothing more fervently than this ultimate eternal confirmation and seal?
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A traveler, who had visited many lands and peoples and seen several of the earth's continents, was asked what quality in men he had found everywhere. He said: they tend to be lazy.
To others, it seems that he should have said, more rightly and significantly: they are all fearful. They hide themselves behind customs and opinions. At bottom every man knows quite well that, being unique, he will be in the world only once and that no outlandish coincidence will shake together, a second time, such a marvelously variegated multiplicity into unity as he is: he knows it but hides it like a bad conscience—why?
For fear of his neighbor, who demands conformity and cloaks himself with it. But what is it that forces the individual to fear his neighbor, to think and act like a member of a herd, and to have no joy in himself? Shamefacedness, perhaps, in a few rare cases. For most it is idleness, inertia, in short that tendency to laziness of which the traveler spoke. He is right: men are even lazier than fearful, and fear most of all the burdensome nuisance of absolute honesty and nakedness.
Artists alone hate this lazy procession in borrowed manners and left-over opinions and they reveal everyone's secret bad conscience, the law that every man is a unique miracle; they dare to show us man as he is, unique even unto each move of his muscles; even more, that by strictly in consequence of this uniqueness, he is beautiful and worth regarding, new and incredible, as every work of nature, and never boring. When the great thinker despises human beings, he despises their laziness: for it is on account of their laziness that men seem like factory goods, indifferent, unworthy to be associated with or instructed.
Human beings who do not want to belong to the mass need only to stop being comfortable; follow their conscience, which cries out: "Be yourself! All that you are now doing, thinking, and desiring, that isn't you at all."
Every youthful soul hears this call day and night and trembles at it; for it has a premonition of its eternally fated lot of happiness, when it contemplates its true liberation: a happiness it can never attain to, so long as it lies in chains of fear and convention. And how desolate and senseless life can be without this liberation! There is no more unpleasant and adverse a creature in this world than the man who has evaded his genius and who now looks peers left and right, squinting behind him and all about. In the end, one cannot come to grips with such a man, since he is all exterior without a core; befallen, bedaubed, baggy robes, a trimmed ghost that cannot provoke even fear and certainly not pity.
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The madman.

Have you not heard of that madman who lit a lantern in the bright morning hours, ran to the market place and cried incessantly: "I seek God! I seek God!"
As many of those who did not believe in God were standing around just then, he provoked much laughter. Has he got lost? asked one. Did he lose his way like a child? asked another. Or is he hiding? Is he afraid of us? Has he gone on a voyage? emigrated? Thus they yelled and laughed.
The madman jumped into their midst and pierced them with his eyes. "Whither is God?" he cried. "I will tell you. We have killed him—you and I! All of us are his murderers! But how did we do this? How could we drink up the sea? Who gave us the sponge to wipe away the entire horizon? What were we doing when we unchained this earth from its sun? Whither is it moving now? Whither are we moving? Away from all suns? Are we not plunging continually? And backward, sideward, forward, in all directions? Is there still any up or down? Are we not straying as through an infinite nothing? Do we not feel the breath of empty space? Has it not become colder? Is not night continually closing in on us? Do we not need to light lanterns in the morning? Do we not hear nothing as yet of the noise of the gravediggers who are burying God? Do we smell nothing as yet of the divine decomposition?—Gods, too, decompose! God is dead! God remains dead! And we have killed him! How shall we comfort ourselves, the murderers of all murderers? What was holiest and mightiest of all that the world has yet owned has bled to death under our knives,—who will wipe this blood off us? What water is there for us to clean ourselves? What festivals of atonement, what sacred games shall we have to invent? Is not the greatness of this deed too great for us? Must we ourselves not become gods simply to appear worthy of it? There has never been a greater deed,—and whoever is born after us, for the sake of this deed he will belong to a higher history than all history hitherto!"
Here the madman fell silent and looked again at his listeners: they, too, were silent and stared at him in astonishment. At last he threw his lantern to the ground, and it broke into pieces and went out. "I have come too early," he said then; "my time is not yet. This tremendous event is still on its way, still wandering—it has not yet reached the ears of men. Lightning and thunder require time; the light of the stars requires time; deeds, though done, still require time to be seen and heard. This deed is still more distant from them than the most distant stars—and yet they have done it themselves!"— It has been related further that on the same day the madman forced his way into several churches and there struck up his requiem aeternam deo . Led out and called to account, he is said always to have replied nothing but: "What after all are these churches now if they are not the tombs and sepulchers of God?"