For Work / Against Work
Debates on the centrality of work

References for Theme: Nietzsche Citations

  • Nietzsche, Friedrich
    • The Will to Power (1968)
      (p.175) The hypocritical show with which all civil institutions are whitewashed, as they were products of morality .g., marriage; work; one's profession; the fatherland; the family; order; law. But since they are one and all founded on the most mediocre type of man, as protection against exceptions and exceptional needs, it is only to be expected that they are full of lies. 
    • The Will to Power (1968)
      (p.195) Modest, industrious, benevolent, temperate: is that how you would have men? good men? But to me that seems only the ideal slave, the slave of the future.
    • The Will to Power (1968)
      (p.326) The presupposition of scientific work: belief in the unity and perpetuity of scientific work, so the individual may work at any part, however small, con dent that his work not be in vain. There is one great paralysis: to work in vain, to struggle in vain.
    • The Will to Power (1968)
      (p.348) The aristocracy the body, the majority of the rulers (struggle between cells and tissues). Slavery and division of labor: the higher type possible only through the subjugation of the lower, so that it becomes a function. Pleasure and pain not opposites. The feeling of power. 
    • The Will to Power (1968)
      (p.349) The French Revolution as the continuation of Christianity. Rousseau is the seducer: he again unfetters woman who is henceforth represented in an ever more interesting manner— as suffering. Then the slaves and Mrs. Beecher-Stowe. Then the poor and the workers. Then the vice addicts and the sick— all this is .moved into the foreground (even to develop sympathy for the genius one no longer knows any other way for the past five hundred years than to represent him as the bearer of great suffering!). Next come the curse on voluptuousness (Baudelaire and Schopenhauer); the most decided conviction that the lust...
    • The Will to Power (1968)
      (p.349) The French Revolution as the continuation of Christianity. Rousseau is the seducer: he again unfetters woman who is henceforth represented in an ever more interesting manner— as suffering. Then the slaves and Mrs. Beecher-Stowe. Then the poor and the workers. Then the vice addicts and the sick— all this is .moved into the foreground (even to develop sympathy for the genius one no longer knows any other way for the past five hundred years than to represent him as the bearer of great suffering!). Next come the curse on voluptuousness (Baudelaire and Schopenhauer); the most decided conviction that the lust...
    • The Will to Power (1968)
      (p.387) 730: That something longer-lasting than an individual should endure, that a work should endure which has perhaps been created by an individual: to that end, every possible kind of limitation, one-sidedness, etc., must be imposed upon the individual. By what means? Love, reverence, gratitude toward the person who created the work helps; or that our forefathers fought for it; or that my descendants will be guaranteed only if I guarantee this work (e.g., the polis). Morality is essentially the means of ensuring the duration of something beyond individuals, or rather through an enslavement of the individual. It is obvious that...
    • The Will to Power (1968)
      (p.400) 763: From the future of the worker. Workers should learn to feel like soldiers. honorarium, an income, but no pay! No relation between payment and achievement! But the individual, each according to his kind, should be so placed that he can achieve the highest that lies in power. 764: The workers shall live one day as the bourgeois do now-but above them, distinguished by their freedom from wants, the higher caste : that is to say, poorer and simpler, but in possession of power. For lower men the reverse valuation obtains; it is a question of implanting "virtues" in them. Absolute commands; terrible means...
    • The Will to Power (1968)
      (p.48) 73: Overwork, curiosity and sympathy-our modern vices. 
    • The Will to Power (1968)
      (p.518) How do men attain great strength and a great task? All the virtues and efficiency of body and soul are acquired laboriously and little by little, through much industry, self-constraint, limitation, through much obstinate, faithful repetition of the same labors, the same renunciations; but there are men who are the heirs and masters of this slowly-acquired manifold treasure of virtue and efficiency—because, through fortunate and reasonable marriages, and also through fortunate accidents, the acquired and stored-up energies of many generations have not been squandered and dispersed but linked together by a firm ring and by will. In the end there...
    • The Will to Power (1968)
      (p.58) The French Revolution as the continuation of Christianity. Rousseau is the seducer: he again unfetters woman who is henceforth represented in an ever more interesting manner— as suffering. Then the slaves and Mrs. Beecher-Stowe. Then the poor and the workers. Then the vice addicts and the sick— all this is .moved into the foreground (even to develop sympathy for the genius one no longer knows any other way for the past five hundred years than to represent him as the bearer of great suffering!). Next come the curse on voluptuousness (Baudelaire and Schopenhauer); the most decided conviction that the lust...
    • The Gay Science (1974)
      (p.260) If sociability and the arts still offer any delight, it is the kind of delight that slaves, weary of their work,devise for themselves. How frugal our educated people … have become regarding ‘joy’! How they arebecoming increasingly suspicious of all joy! More and more, work enlists all good conscience on its side;the desire for joy already calls itself a ‘need to recuperate’ and is becoming ashamed of itself. ‘One owesit to one’s health’ – that is what people say when they are caught on an excursion into the country. Soonwe may well reach the point where people can no longer...
    • On the Genealogy of Morals and Ecce Homo (1989)
      (p.100) In such a case as this, embarrassing in many ways, my view is—and it is a typical case—that one does best to separate an artist from his work, not taking him as seriously as his work. He is, after all, only the precondition of his work, the womb, the soil, sometimes the dung and manure on which, out of which, it grows and therefore in most cases something one must forget if one is to enjoy the work itself. Insight into the origin of a work concerns the physiologists and vivisectionists of the spirit; never the aesthetic man, the artist!...
    • On the Genealogy of Morals and Ecce Homo (1989)
      (p.134) Mechanical activity and what goes with it—such as absolute regularity, punctilious and unthinking obedience, a mode of life fixed once and for all, fully occupied time, a certain permission, indeed training for "impersonality," for self-forgetfulness, for "incuria sui"—: how thoroughly, how subtly the ascetic priest has known how to employ them in the struggle against pain! When he was dealing with sufferers of the lower classes, with work-slaves or prisoners (or with women—who are mostly both at once, work- slaves and prisoners), he required hardly more than a little ingenuity in name-changing and rebaptizing to make them see benefits and...
    • On the Genealogy of Morals and Ecce Homo (1989)
      (p.258) I do not know any other way of associating with great tasks than play: as a sign of greatness, this is an essential presupposition. The least compulsion, a gloomy mien, or any harsh tone in the throat are all objections to a man; how much more against his work!- One must not have any nerves. Suffering from solitude is also an objection l have suffered only from "multitudes."
    • On the Genealogy of Morals and Ecce Homo (1989)
      (p.276) The second Untimely One (1874) brings to light what is dangerous and gnaws at and poisons life in our kind of traffic with science and scholarship—how life is made sick by this dehumanized and mechanical grinding of gears, the "impersonality" of the laborer, the false economy of the "division of labor." The aim is lost, genuine culture-and the means, the modem traffic with science, barbarized. In this essay the "historical sense" of which this century is proud was recognized for the first time as a disease, as a typical symptom of decay.
    • On the Genealogy of Morals and Ecce Homo (1989)
      (p.303) There is something I call the rancune of what is great: everything great—a work, a deed—is no sooner accomplished than it turns against the man who did it. By doing it, he has become weak; he no longer endures his deed, he can no longer face it. Something one was never permitted to will lies behind one, something in which the knot in the destiny of humanity is tied—and now'one labors under it! —It almost crushes one. —The rancune of what is great.
    • On the Genealogy of Morals and Ecce Homo (1989)
      (p.37) One should not overlook the almost benevolent nuances that the Greek nobility, for example, bestows on all the words it employs to distinguish the lower orders from itself; how they are continuously mingled and sweetened with a kind of pity, consideration, and forbearance, so that finally almost all the words referring to the common man have remained as expressions signifying "unhappy," "pitiable" (campore deilos, deilaios, poneros, mochthêros, the last two of which properly designate the common man as work-slave and beast of burden)—and how on the other hand "bad," "low," "unhappy" have never ceased to sound to the Greek ear...
    • On the Genealogy of Morals and Ecce Homo (1989)
      (p.58)  This precisely is the long story of how responsibility originated. The task of breeding an animal with the right to make promises evidently embraces and presupposes as a preparatory task that one first makes men to a certain degree necessary, uniform, like among like, regular, and consequently calculable. The tremendous labor of that which I have called "morality of mores" (Dawn, sections 9, 14, 16}—the labor performed by man upon himself during the greater part of the existence of the human race, his entire prehistoric labor, finds in this its meaning, its great justification, notwithstanding the severity, tyranny, stupidity, and...
    • The Genealogy of Morals (1989)
      (p.134) ‘mechanical activity’ is a kind of ‘training’ that ‘alleviates’ an existence of suffering to a not inconsiderabledegree: this fact is today called, somewhat dishonestly, ‘the blessing of work’ … Mechanical activity andwhat goes with it – such an absolute regularity, punctilious and unthinking obedience, a mode of life fixedonce and for all, fully occupied time … how thoroughly the ascetic priest has known how to employ themagainst pain! When he was dealing with sufferers of the lower class, with work-slaves or prisoners … herequired hardly more than a little ingenuity in name-changing and re-baptizing to make them see benefitsand a...
    • Human, All Too Human: A Book for Free Spirits (1996)
      (p.116) 243: The future of the physician. - There is at present no profession capable of being so greatly advanced as is that of the physician; especially now that the spiritual physicians, the so-called curers of souls, may no longer carry on their sorceries to the sound of public approval and are avoided by all educated people. A physician has not now attained the highest degree of training of which he is capable when he knows the best and most recent remedies and is practised in applying them, and can draw those quick conclusions from effects to causes that make the...
    • Human, All Too Human: A Book for Free Spirits (1996)
      (p.118) — But must man­ners continue to go downhill for ever? It seems to me, rather, that man­ners are describing a curve and that we are approaching its nadir. Once society has grown more certain of its objectives and principles, so that they act constructively (whereas now the manners we have acquired, constructed as they were by circumstances that have ceased to exist, are being acquired and inherited ever more feebly), manners and deportment in social intercourse will necessarily be as natural and simple as these objectives and principles are. An improvement in the division of time and work, gymnastic exercise...
    • Human, All Too Human: A Book for Free Spirits (1996)
      (p.131) 282: Lamentation. -- It is perhaps the advantages of our age that bring with them a decline in and occasionally an undervaluation of the vita contem­plativa. But one has to admit to oneself that our age is poor in great moral­ists, that Pascal, Epictetus, Seneca and Plutarch are little read now, that work and industry—formerly adherents of the great goddess health—sometimes seem to rage like an epidemic. Because time for thinking and quietness in thinking are lacking, one no longer ponders deviant views: one contents oneself with hating them. With the tremendous acceleration of life mind and eye have become...
    • Human, All Too Human: A Book for Free Spirits (1996)
      (p.162) 170: Art in the age of work. -- We possess the conscience of an industrious age: and this conscience does not permit us to bestow our best hours and mornings on art, however grand and worthy this art may be. To us art counts as a leisure, a recreational activity: we devote to it the remnants of our time and energies. -- This is the most general circumstance through which the relationship of art to life has been altered: when it makes its grand demands on the time and energy of the recipients of art it has the conscience of...
    • Human, All Too Human: A Book for Free Spirits (1996)
      (p.167) 170: Art in the age of work. -- We possess the conscience of an industrious age: and this conscience does not permit us to bestow our best hours and mornings on art, however grand and worthy this art may be. To us art counts as a leisure, a recreational activity: we devote to it the remnants of our time and energies. -- This is the most general circumstance through which the relationship of art to life has been altered: when it makes its grand demands on the time and energy of the recipients of art it has the conscience of...
    • Human, All Too Human: A Book for Free Spirits (1996)
      (p.167) 170: Art in the age of work. -- We possess the conscience of an industrious age: and this conscience does not permit us to bestow our best hours and mornings on art, however grand and worthy this art may be. To us art counts as a leisure, a recreational activity: we devote to it the remnants of our time and energies. -- This is the most general circumstance through which the relationship of art to life has been altered: when it makes its grand demands on the time and energy of the recipients of art it has the conscience of...
    • Human, All Too Human: A Book for Free Spirits (1996)
      (p.168) 462: My utopia. - In a better ordering of society the heavy work and exigencies of life will be apportioned to him who suffers least as a consequence of them, that is to say to the most insensible, and thus step by step up to him who is most sensitive to the most highly sublimated species of suffering and who therefore suffers even when life is alleviated to the greatest degree possible. 
    • Human, All Too Human: A Book for Free Spirits (1996)
      (p.176) 478: Industriousness in south and north. - Industriousness originates in two quite different ways. Workmen in the south are industrious, not from a desire for gain, but because others are always in need. Because someone always comes along who wants a horse shod, a cart repaired, the smith is always industrious. If no one came along, he would lounge about in the market-place. To feed himself in a fruitful country requires no great effort: a very moderate amount of work will suffice, in any event he has no need for industriousness; ultimately he would be quite content to beg. --...
    • Human, All Too Human: A Book for Free Spirits (1996)
      (p.177) 479: Wealth as the origin of a nobility of birth . -- Wealth necessarily engenders an aristocracy of race, for it permits one to select the fairest women, pay the best teachers, grants to a man cleanliness, time for physical exercises, and above all freedom from deadening physical labour. To this extent it creates all the conditions for the production over a few generations of a noble and fair demeanour, even noble and fair behaviour, in men: greater freedom of feeling, the absence of the wretched and petty, of abase¬ment before breadgivers, of penny-pinching. -- It is precisely these nega¬tive...
    • Human, All Too Human: A Book for Free Spirits (1996)
      (p.193) 611: Boredom and play. -- Need compels us to perform work with the proceeds of which the need is assuaged; need continually recurs and we are thus accustomed to working. In the intervals, however, during which our needs have been assuaged and are as it were sleeping, we are overtaken by boredom. What is this? It is our habituation to work as such, which now asserts itself as a new, additional need; and the more strongly habituated we are to working, perhaps even the more we have suffered need, the stronger this new need will be. To elude boredom man...
    • Human, All Too Human: A Book for Free Spirits (1996)
      (p.237) 107: Three-quarter strength. - If a work is to make an impression of health its originator must expend at most three-quarters of his strength on it. If, on the contrary, he has gone to the limit of his capacity, the tension in the work produces in its audience a feeling of agitation and distress. All good things have something easygoing about them and lie like cows in the meadow. 
    • Human, All Too Human: A Book for Free Spirits (1996)
      (p.259) 186: Cult of culture. -To great spirits there has been joined the repellent all-too-human aspects of their nature, their blindnesses, deformities, extravagances, so that their mighty influence, that can easily grow all too mighty, shall be kept within bounds by the mistrust these qualities inspire. For the system of all that which humanity has need of for its continued existence is so comprehensive, and lays claim to so many and such varying forces, that humanity as a whole would have to pay heavily for any onesided preference, whether it be science or the state or art or trade, to which...
    • Human, All Too Human: A Book for Free Spirits (1996)
      (p.314) 25: A fair exchange. - An exchange is honest and just only when each of those participating demands as much as his own object seems worth to him, including the effort it cost to acquire it, its rarity, the time expended, etc., together with its sentimental value. As soon as he sets the price with reference to the need of the other he is a subtler brigand and extortioner. -- If money is the exchange object it must be considered that a shilling in the hand of a rich heir, a day-labourer, a shop-keeper, a student are quite different things:...
    • Human, All Too Human: A Book for Free Spirits (1996)
      (p.350) 170: Art in the age of work. -- We possess the conscience of an industrious age: and this conscience does not permit us to bestow our best hours and mornings on art, however grand and worthy this art may be. To us art counts as a leisure, a recreational activity: we devote to it the remnants of our time and energies. -- This is the most general circumstance through which the relationship of art to life has been altered: when it makes its grand demands on the time and energy of the recipients of art it has the conscience of...
    • Human, All Too Human: A Book for Free Spirits (1996)
      (p.378) 280: More respect for those who know! - Given the present competitive nature of selling, the public is necessarily the judge of the product of work: but the public has no particular specialist knowledge and judges according to the appearance of quality. As a consequence, the art of producing an appearance (and perhaps that of developing taste) is bound to be enhanced, and the quality of the product to decline, under the dominance of the competitive market. Consequently, if we are to continue to be reasonable we shall at some time have to put an end to this competitive market...
    • Human, All Too Human: A Book for Free Spirits (1996)
      (p.382) The value of work. - If we wanted to determine the value of work by how much time, effort, good or ill will, compulsion, inventiveness or laziness, honesty or deception has been expended on it, then the valuation can never be just; for we would have to be able to place the entire person on the scales, and that is impossible. Here the rule must be 'judge not!' But it is precisely to justice that they appeal who nowadays are dissatisfied with the evaluation of work. If we reflect further we find that no personality can be held accountable for...
    • Human, All Too Human: A Book for Free Spirits (1996)
      (p.383) 288: To what extent the machine abases us. -- The machine is impersonal, it deprives the piece of work of its pride, of the individual goodness and faultiness that adheres to all work not done by a machine - that is to say, of its little bit of humanity. In earlier times all purchasing from artisans was a bestowing of a distinction on individuals, and the things with which we surrounded ourselves were the insignia of these distinctions: household furniture and clothing thus became symbols of mutual esteem and personal solidarity, whereas we now seem to live in the midst...
    • Daybreak. Thoughts on the Prejudices of Morality (1997)
      (p.104) Those who commend work. - In the glorification of ‘work’, in the unwearied talk of the ‘blessing of work’, I see the same covert idea as in the praise of useful impersonal actions: that of fear of everything individual. Fundamentally, one now feels at the sight of work - one always means by workthat hard industriousness from early till late- that such work is the best policeman, that it keeps everyone in bounds and can mightily hinder the development of reason, covetousness, desire for independence. For it uses up an extraordinary amount of nervous energy, which is thus denied to reflection, brooding, dreaming, worrying, loving, hating; it sets a...
    • Twilight of the Idols (1997)
      (p.77) The question of the working class … I just cannot see what one wants to do with the European worker now that one has made a question out of him … What has one done? [One] has destroyed the very basis of the instincts thanks to which a worker becomes possible as a class, becomes possible for himself. One has made the worker eligible for military service, one has given him the right to unionize, the right to vote: so no wonder that today the worker already experiences his existence as a crisis … But what does one will? If...
    • Beyond Good and Evil: Prelude to a Philosophy of the Future (2002)
      (p.51) Has anyone really noticed the extent to which being outwardly idle or half-idle is necessary for a genuinely religious life (and for its favorite job of microscopic self-examination just as much as for that tender state of composure which calls itself “prayer” and is a constant readiness for the “coming of God”)? – I mean an idleness with a good conscience, passed down over the ages, through the bloodline, an idleness that is not entirely alien to the aristocratic feeling that work is disgraceful, which is to say it makes the soul and the body into something base. And has...
    • Beyond Good and Evil: Prelude to a Philosophy of the Future (2002)
      (p.79) 189: The industrious races find it extremely difficult to tolerate idleness: it was a stroke of genius on the part of the English instinct to spend Sundays in tedium with a te deum so that the English people would unconsciously lust for their week- and workdays. It is the same type of cleverly invented, cleverly interpolated period of fasting that you find all over the ancient world (although there, as is often the case with southern peoples, it is not exactly associated with work –). There need to be many types of fasts; and wherever powerful drives and habits rule,...
    • Thus Spoke Zarathustra (2006)
      (p.10) One still works, for work is a form of entertainment. But one sees to it that the entertainment is not a strain. One no longer becomes poor and rich: both are too burdensome. Who wants to rule anymore? Who wants to obey anymore? Both are too burdensome. No shepherd and one herd! Each wants the same, each is the same, and whoever feels differently goes voluntarily into the insane asylum. 
    • Thus Spoke Zarathustra (2006)
      (p.128) And so I am in the middle of my work, going to my children and returning from them; for the sake of his children Zarathustra must complete himself. For at bottom one loves only one’s own child and work; and where there is great love for oneself it is the hallmark of pregnancy – this is what I found. My children are still greening in their first spring, standing close to one another and shaken by a common wind, the trees of my garden and best plot of soil. 
    • Thus Spoke Zarathustra (2006)
      (p.191) But they want to get free of life; what do they care that they bind others still tighter with their chains and gifts!And you too, for whom life is hectic work and unrest: are you not very weary of life? Are you not very ripe for the sermon of death?All of you who are in love with hectic work and whatever is fast, new, strange – you find it hard to bear yourselves, your diligence is escape and the will to forget yourself.If you believed more in life, you would hurl yourself less into the moment. But you do not have...
    • Thus Spoke Zarathustra (2006)
      (p.191) But they want to get free of life; what do they care that they bind others still tighter with their chains and gifts!And you too, for whom life is hectic work and unrest: are you not very weary of life? Are you not very ripe for the sermon of death?All of you who are in love with hectic work and whatever is fast, new, strange – you find it hard to bear yourselves, your diligence is escape and the will to forget yourself.If you believed more in life, you would hurl yourself less into the moment. But you do not have...
    • Thus Spoke Zarathustra (2006)
      (p.266) – And once more Zarathustra became immersed in himself and sat down again on the great stone, and he reflected. Suddenly he jumped to his feet – “Pity! Pity for the higher men!” he cried, and his face transformed to bronze. “Well then! That – has its time! My suffering and my pity – what do they matter! Do I strive for happiness? I strive for my work! Well then! The lion came, my children are near, Zarathustra became ripe, my hour came – This is my morning, my day is beginning: up now, up, you great noon! ” – Thus spoke Zarathustra and he...
    • Thus Spoke Zarathustra (2006)
      (p.32) But they want to get free of life; what do they care that they bind others still tighter with their chains and gifts!And you too, for whom life is hectic work and unrest: are you not very weary of life? Are you not very ripe for the sermon of death?All of you who are in love with hectic work and whatever is fast, new, strange – you find it hard to bear yourselves, your diligence is escape and the will to forget yourself.If you believed more in life, you would hurl yourself less into the moment. But you do not have...
    • Thus Spoke Zarathustra (2006)
      (p.8) I love the one who works and invents in order to build a house for the overman and to prepare earth, animals and plants for him: for thus he wants his going under. 
    • The Gay Science: With a Prelude in Rhymes and an Appendix of Songs (2010)
      (p.107) On the lack of noble manners.- Soldiers and leaders still have far better relationships with each other than workers and employers. So far at least, culture that rests on a military basis still towers above all so-called industrial culture: the latter in its present shape is altogether the most vulgar form of existence that has yet existed. Here one is at the mercy of brute need; one wants to live and has to sell oneself, but one despises those who exploit this need and buy the worker. Oddly, submission to powerful, frightening, even terrible persons, like tyrants and generals, is...
    • The Gay Science: With a Prelude in Rhymes and an Appendix of Songs (2010)
      (p.107) On the lack of noble manners.- Soldiers and leaders still have far better relationships with each other than workers and employers. So far at least, culture that rests on a military basis still towers above all so-called industrial culture: the latter in its present shape is altogether the most vulgar form of existence that has yet existed. Here one is at the mercy of brute need; one wants to live and has to sell oneself, but one despises those who exploit this need and buy the worker. Oddly, submission to powerful, frightening, even terrible persons, like tyrants and generals, is...
    • The Gay Science: With a Prelude in Rhymes and an Appendix of Songs (2010)
      (p.108) Work and boredom.- Looking for work in order to be paid: in civilized countries today almost all men are at one in doing that. For all of them work is a means and not an end in itself. Hence they are not very refined in their choice of work, if only it pays well. But there are, if only rarely, men who would rather perish than work without any pleasure in their work. They are choosy, hard to satisfy, and do not care for ample rewards, if the work itself is not the reward of rewards. Artists and contemplative men...
    • The Gay Science: With a Prelude in Rhymes and an Appendix of Songs (2010)
      (p.204) Work.- How close work and the worker are now even to the most leisurely among us! The royal courtesy of the saying "We are all workers" would have been cynical and indecent as recently as the reign of Louis XIV. 
    • The Gay Science: With a Prelude in Rhymes and an Appendix of Songs (2010)
      (p.259) Leisure and idleness.- There is something of the American Indians, something of the ferocity peculiar to the Indian blood, in the American lust for gold and the breathless haste with which they work—the distinctive vice of the new world—is already beginning to infect old Europe with its ferocity and is spreading a lack of spirituality like a blanket. Even now one is ashamed of resting, and prolonged reflection almost gives people a bad conscience. One thinks with a watch in one's hand, even as one eats one's midday meal while reading the latest news of the stock market; one lives...
    • The Gay Science: With a Prelude in Rhymes and an Appendix of Songs (2010)
      (p.260) On the lack of noble manners.- Soldiers and leaders still have far better relationships with each other than workers and employers. So far at least, culture that rests on a military basis still towers above all so-called industrial culture: the latter in its present shape is altogether the most vulgar form of existence that has yet existed. Here one is at the mercy of brute need; one wants to live and has to sell oneself, but one despises those who exploit this need and buy the worker. Oddly, submission to powerful, frightening, even terrible persons, like tyrants and generals, is...
    • The Gay Science: With a Prelude in Rhymes and an Appendix of Songs (2010)
      (p.260) On the lack of noble manners.- Soldiers and leaders still have far better relationships with each other than workers and employers. So far at least, culture that rests on a military basis still towers above all so-called industrial culture: the latter in its present shape is altogether the most vulgar form of existence that has yet existed. Here one is at the mercy of brute need; one wants to live and has to sell oneself, but one despises those who exploit this need and buy the worker. Oddly, submission to powerful, frightening, even terrible persons, like tyrants and generals, is...
    • The Gay Science: With a Prelude in Rhymes and an Appendix of Songs (2010)
      (p.337) Our slow periods.- This is how all artists and people of "works” feel, the motherly human type: at every division of their lives, which are always divided by a work, they believe that they have reached their goal; they would always patiently accept death with the feeling, "now we are ripe for it." This is not the expression of weariness—rather of a certain autumnal sunniness and mildness that the work itself, the fact that the work has become ripe. always leaves behind in the author. Then the tempo of life slows down and becomes thick like honey—even to the point...
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