Fragments from Ecce Homo

Fragments from Ecce Homo


"One has deprived reality of its value, its meaning, its truthfulness, to precisely the extent to which one has mendaciously invested an ideal world." Mankind worships the values that are opposite to the ones that would guarantee health and its future (p. 218). 

"The aggressive pathos belongs just as necessarily to strength as vengefulness and rancor belong to weakness" (p. 232). 

"My whole Zarathustra is a dithyramb on solitude or, if I have been understood, on cleanliness" (p. 234).
  • What does Nietzsche mean be cleanliness? - the values of the herd are contrary to the needs of the individual, through solitude are we able to be free from the ideas that infect our minds. Social media is a good example on how by isolating yourself from it your mind becomes more transparent, more clear, or as Nietzsche would put it, more clean. 

"Scholars who at bottom do little but thumb books ultimately lose entirely their capacity to think for themselves. They respond to a stimulus whenever they think - in the end, they do nothing but react. Scholars spend all of their energies on saying Yes and No, on criticism of what others have thought - they themselves no longer think." (p. 253). 

"My formula for greatness in a human being is amor fati: that one wants nothing to be different, not forward, not backward, not in all eternity. Not merely bear what is necessary, still less conceal it - all idealism is mendaciousness in the face of what is necessary - but love it" (p. 258).

"Ultimately, nobody can get more out of things, including books, that he already knows. For what one lacks access to from experience one will have no ear." (p. 261).

"One must have acquired hardness as a habit to be cheerful and in good spirits in the midst of nothing but hard truths" (p. 264). 

"All to many are condemned to choose vocations too early, and then to waste away under a burden they can no longer shake off" (p. 287). 

"Definition of morality: the idiosyncrasy of decadents, with the ulterior motive of revenging oneself against life - successfully." (p. 333).


Nietzsche, F. Kaufmann, W. (1989). The Genealogy of Morals and Ecce Homo. Vintage Books Edition. 


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