Nietzsche ponderingThe perspectives of Nietzsche

Love


Love-matches.-- Marriages contracted from love (so-called love-matches) have error for their father and need for their mother.

from Nietzsche's Human, all too Human, s.389, R.J. Hollingdale transl.


Friendship with women.-- Women are quite able to make friends with a man; but to preserve such a friendship - that no doubt requires the assistance of a slight physical antipathy.

from Nietzsche's Human, all too Human, s.390, R.J. Hollingdale transl.


Masks.-- There are women who, however you may search them, prove to have no content but are purely masks. The man who associates with such almost spectral, necessarily unsatisfied beings is to be commiserated with, yet it is precisely they who are able to arouse the desire of the man most strongly: he seeks for her soul -- and goes on seeking.

from Nietzsche's Human, all too Human, s.405, R.J. Hollingdale transl.


The shortsighted are in love.-- Sometimes it requires only a stronger pair of spectacles to cure the lover, and he who had the imagination to picture a face, a figure twenty years older would perhaps pass through life very undisturbed.

from Nietzsche's Human, all too Human, s.413, R.J. Hollingdale transl.


Cause of 'altruism'.-- Men have on the whole spoken of love with such emphasis and so idolized it because they have had little of it and have never been allowed to eat their fill of this food: thus it became for them 'food of the gods'. Let a poet depict a utopia in which there obtains universal love, he will certainly have to describe a painful and ludicrous state of affairs the like of which the earth has never yet seen - everyone worshipped, encumbered and desired, not by one lover, as happens now, but by thousands, indeed by everyone else, as the result of an uncontrollable drive which would then be as greatly execrated and cursed as selfishness had been in former times; and the poets in that state of things - provided that they were left alone long enough to write - would dream of nothing but the happy, loveless past, of divine selfishness, of how it was once possible to be alone, undisturbed, unloved, hated, despised on earth, and whatever else may characterize the utter baseness of the dear animal world in which we live.

from Nietzsche's Daybreak,s. 147, R.J. Hollingdale transl.


Remedium amoris.-- The cure for love is still in most cases that ancient radical medicine: love in return.

from Nietzsche's Daybreak, s. 415, R.J. Hollingdale transl


Forbidden generosity.-- There is not enough love and goodness in the world for us to be permitted to give any of it away to imaginary things.

from Nietzsche's Human, all too Human, s.129, R.J. Hollingdale transl.