More than twenty years ago I went to the Stars and Stripes bookstore on Osan Air Base, Korea and bought a book called The Portable Nietzsche (edited and translated by Walter Kaufmann, Penguin Books, New York, 1977).  I don’t know why I bought it, but I took it home and started to read:

When Zarathustra was thirty years old he left his home and the lake of his home and went into the mountains….

I had heard Nietzsche’s name, of course, but had never read any of his works.  Well, about three pages into Thus Spoke Zarathustra I ran into this nifty little passage:

But when Zarathustra was alone he spoke thus to his heart: “Could it be possible?  This old saint in the forest has not yet heard anything of this, that God is dead!”

Woo hoo!  I was hooked.  And thus began a twenty-year struggle with Herr Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche (1844-1900).  His writing style is undeniably gorgeous; his comments are incisive, iconoclastic, and often juvenile in nature.  His views about women are the antithesis of modern political correctness.  And every couple of years I have to pick him up and read him again.  I particularly enjoy his aphorisms.  I don’t want to leave you hanging, so here are a few for your enjoyment:

• A casual stroll through the lunatic asylum shows that faith does not prove anything.
• A great value of antiquity lies in the fact that its writings are the only ones that modern men still read with exactness.
• A subject for a great poet would be God’s boredom after the seventh day of creation.
• After coming into contact with a religious man I always feel I must wash my hands.
• Ah, women. They make the highs higher and the lows more frequent.
• All credibility, all good conscience, all evidence of truth come only from the senses.
• All things are subject to interpretation.  Whichever interpretation prevails at a given time is a function of power and not truth.
• All truth is simple… is that not doubly a lie?
• At times one remains faithful to a cause only because its opponents do not cease to be insipid.
• Believe me! The secret of reaping the greatest fruitfulness and the greatest enjoyment from life is to live dangerously!
• Convictions are the more dangerous enemy of truth than lies.
• Distrust everyone in whom the impulse to punish is powerful!
• Faith: not wanting to know what is true.
• Fear is the mother of morality.
• God is a thought who makes crooked all that is straight.
• I cannot believe in a God who wants to be praised all the time.
• In Christianity neither morality nor religion come into contact with reality at any point.
• In individuals, insanity is rare; but in groups, parties, nations and epochs, it is the rule.
• Morality is the herd-instinct in the individual.
• The Christian resolution to find the world ugly and bad has made the world ugly and bad.
• The surest way to corrupt a youth is to instruct him to hold in higher esteem those who think alike than those who think differently.
• There are no facts, only interpretations.
• What does not destroy me makes me stronger.

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