“No longer path! Abyss and silence chilling!”
Thy fault! To leave the path thou wast too willing!
Now comes the test! Keep cool—eyes bright and clear!
Thou Art lost for sure, if thou permittest—fear.
Friedrich Nietzsche, “The Wanderer”, The Joyful Wisdom
“Only that which has no history is definable.”
Friedrich Nietzsche, On the Genealogy of Morality, Second Treatise 13, 268.
– You old friends! Look! How pale and shocked are you,
Full of love and fear!
No, leave! Don’t be angry! You could not – live here:
between remotest cliffs of icy blue –
Here you must be hunter and chamois too.
Friedrich Nietzsche, “From Lofty Mountains,” Beyond Good and Evil
“Thrown into a noisy and rabble-like age, with whom he does not wish to eat from the same bowl, he could easily perish from hunger and thirst or, if he were to ‘dig in’ at last – of sudden nausea. – Perhaps all of us at one time have sat at tables where we did not belong; and precisely the most spiritual among us, those hardest to feed, know the dangerous dyspepsia that stems from a sudden insight and disappointment about our food and our table mates – the nausea of dessert. Friedrich Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil 282
“Turning thought into something aggressive, active and affirmative. Creating free men, that is to say men who do not confuse the aims of culture with the benefit of the State, morality or religion. Fighting the ressentiment and bad conscience which have replaced thought for us. Conquering the negative and its false glamour. The use of philosophy is to sadden.” Gilles Deleuze, Nietzsche and Philosophy, 106.
“What is clear for Nietzsche is that society cannot be an ultimate authority. The ultimate authority is creation, it is art: or rather, art represents the absence and the impossibility of an ultimate authority.” Gilles Deleuze, Desert Islands, 129.
“Life making thought active, thought making life affirmative.” Gilles Deleuze, Nietzsche and Philosophy, 101.
“The form is fluid, the ‘meaning’ [Sinn] even more so. It is no different inside any individual organism: every time the whole grows appreciably, the ‘meaning’ of the individual organs shifts, sometimes the partial destruction of organs, the reduction in their number (for example, by the destruction of intermediary parts) can be a sign of increasing vigour and perfection. To speak plainly: even the partial reduction in usefulness, decay and degeneration, loss of meaning and functional purpose, in short death, make up the conditions of true progressus: always appearing, as it does, in the form of the will and way to greater power and always emerging victorious at the cost of countless smaller forces.” Friedrich Nietzsche, On the Genealogy of Morality, Essay II:12, 51.
“The will to power is essentially creative and giving: it does not aspire, it does not seek, it does not desire, above all it does not desire power. It gives: power is something inexpressible in the will (something mobile, variable, plastic); power is in the will as “the bestowing virtue”, through power the will itself bestows sense and value.” Gilles Deleuze, Nietzsche and Philosophy, 85.
Derelict Space 