Meta and Meta

Growing Up

"The wrathful and reverent attitudes characteristic of youth do not seem to permit themselves any rest until they have forged men and things in such a way that these attitudes may be vented on them--after all, youth in itself has something of forgery and deception. Later, when the young soul, tortured by all kinds of disappointments, finally turns suspiciously against itself, still hot and wild, even in its suspicion and pangs of conscience--how wroth it is with itself now! how it tears itself to pieces, impatiently! how it takes revenge for its long self-delusion, just as if it had been a deliberate blindness! In this transition one punishes oneself with mistrust against one's own feelings; one tortures one's own enthusiasm with doubts; indeed, one experiences even a good conscience as a danger, as if it were a way of wrapping oneself in veils and the exhaustion of subtler honesty--and above all one takes sides, takes sides on principle, against "youth."-- Ten years later one comprehends that all this, too--was still youth."
--Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil, Part Two ("The Free Spirit"), 31.

The Rest Of Us Put It On Our Blogs

"I write one page of masterpiece to ninety one pages of shit. I try to put the shit in the wastebasket."
--Ernest Hemingway

Heart

"[T]he folks that trust you, that just won't hear no bad about you nor even think it, those are the ones that are hard to fool. You can't put your heart in the job."
--From Jim Thompson's The Killer Inside Me.

Franklin on Cod and Reason

This New Yorker story on the history of vegetarianism ends with the following quotation of Franklin:

Our People set about catching Cod, & haul’d up a great many. Hitherto I had stuck to my Resolution of not eating animal Food; and on this Occasion, I consider’d . . . the taking every Fish as a kind of unprovok’d Murder, since none of them had or ever could do us any Injury that might justify the Slaughter. All this seem’d very reasonable. But I had formerly been a great Lover of Fish, & when this came hot out of the Frying Pan, it smeled admirably well. I balanc’d some time between Principle & Inclination: till I recollected, that when the Fish were opened, I saw smaller Fish taken out of their Stomachs: Then thought I, if you eat one another, I don’t see why we mayn’t eat you. So I din’d upon Cod very heartily and continu’d to eat with other People, returning only now & then occasionally to a vegetable Diet.

So convenient a thing it is to be a reasonable Creature, since it enables one to find or make a Reason for everything one has a mind to do. [Italics in original; paragraph break mine.]

(Via Arts & Letters Daily.)

 

Immoral Quotations

Three related Nietzsche quotations from Robert Guay's excellent paper, "How to be an Immoralist":

“I sought after great human beings; I always found only the apes of their ideals.” (Twilight of the Idols, “Maxims and Arrows,” 39.)

“May your virtue be too elevated for the familiarity of names.” (Thus Spake Zarathustra, “Von den Freuden- und Leidenschaften.”)

“But there is no doubt that a 'thou shalt' still speaks to us too, that we too still obey a severe law set over us ... namely, that we do not want to go back to that which we consider outlived and decrepit,...be it called God, virtue, truth, justice, altruism; that we do not allow ourselves any bridges of lies to old ideals….” (Daybreak, pref 4.)

I'll Say

"[I]t is at least possible that on this point error has prevailed." (Kant, Religion Within the Limit of Reason Alone)

As Free as the Wind Blows

"In a deep metaphysical sense, I don't think free will exists. But we...can make choices, and that's real enough...."
--Peter Singer

Quoth...

...Nietzsche: "[R]idendo dicere severum." ("Through what is laughable say what is somber.")

Quoth...

...Nietzsche: "Lieber will noch der Mensch das Nichts, als nicht wollen."

Kaufmann translates this as "Man would rather will nothingness than not will." I think substituting 'naught' for Kaufmann's 'nothingness' better captures Nietzsche's Wortspiel. (Thus: "Man would rather will naught than not will.")

Quoth...

...Nietzsche: "[S]oul is only a word for something about the body."