Permission to speak! – The demagogic character and the intention to appeal to the masses is at present common to all political parties: on account of this intention they are all compelled to transform their principles into great al fresco stupidities and thus to paint them on the wall. This is no longer alterable, indeed it would be pointless to raise so much as a finger against it; for in this domain there apply the words of Voltaire: quand la populace se mêle de raisonner, tout est perdu. Since this has happened one has to accommodate oneself to the new conditions as one accommodates oneself when an earthquake has displaced the former boundaries and contours of the ground and altered the value of one's property. Moreover, if the purpose of all politics really is to make life endurable for as many as possible, then these as-many-as-possible are entitled to determine what they understand by an endurable life; if they trust to their intellect also to discover the right means of attaining this goal, what good is there in doubting it? They want for once to forge for themselves their own fortunes and misfortunes; and if this feeling of self-determination, pride in the five or six ideas their head contains and brings forth, in fact renders their life so pleasant to them they are happy to bear the calamitous consequences of their narrow-mindedness, there is little to be objected to, always presupposing that this narrow-mindedness does not go so far as to demand that everything should become politics in this sense, that everyone should live and work according to such a standard.

‘Human, All Too Human is the monument of a crisis.’ With these apt words Nietzsche began his own reflection, in his autobiographical Ecce Homo (1888), on this remarkable collection of almost 1,400 aphorisms published in three instalments, the first of which had appeared in 1878, ten years earlier. The crisis to which he refers was first and foremost a crisis of multiple dimensions in his own life. Human, All Too Human was the extended product of a period of devastating health problems that necessitated Nietzsche's resignation in 1879 from his professorship in classical philology at Basel University. These problems were to plague him for the remaining decade of his brief productive life (which ended with his complete physical and mental collapse in January 1889, at the age of 44, from which he never recovered in the eleven years of marginal existence that remained to him before his death in 1900). Human, All Too Human also marked Nietzsche's transition from the philologist and cultural critic he had been into the kind of philosopher and writer he came to be.

But the crisis was above all a crisis in Nietzsche's intellectual development; and although it was very much his own, it presaged the larger crisis toward which he came to see our entire culture and civilization moving, and subsequently came to call ‘the death of God’.

Ennoblement through degeneration. – History teaches that the branch of a nation that preserves itself best is the one in which most men have, as a consequence of sharing habitual and undiscussable principles, that is to say as a consequence of their common belief, a living sense of community. Here good, sound custom grows strong, here the subordination of the individual is learned and firmness imparted to character as a gift at birth and subsequently augmented. The danger facing these strong communities founded on similarly constituted, firm-charactered individuals is that of the gradually increasing inherited stupidity such as haunts all stability like its shadow. It is the more unfettered, uncertain and morally weaker individuals upon whom spiritual progress depends in such communities: it is the men who attempt new things and, in general, many things. Countless numbers of this kind perish on account of their weakness without producing any very visible effect; but in general, and especially when they leave posterity, they effect a loosening up and from time to time inflict an injury on the stable element of a community. It is precisely at this injured and weakened spot that the whole body is as it were innoculated with something new; its strength must, however, be as a whole sufficient to receive this new thing into its blood and to assimilate it. Degenerate natures are of the highest significance wherever progress is to be effected.

One should speak only when one may not stay silent; and then only of that which one has overcome – everything else is chatter, ‘literature’, lack of breeding. My writings speak only of my overcomings: ‘I’ am in them, together with everything that was inimical to me, ego ipsissimus, indeed, if a yet prouder expression be permitted, ego ipsissimum. One will divine that I already have a great deal – beneath me … But it has always required time, recovery, distancing, before the desire awoke within me to skin, exploit, expose, ‘exhibit’ (or whatever one wants to call it) for the sake of knowledge something I had experienced and survived, some fact or fate of my life. To this extent, all my writings, with a single though admittedly substantial exception, are to be dated back – they always speak of something ‘behind me’ –: some, as with the first three Untimely Meditations, even to a period earlier than that in which I experienced and produced a book published before them (the Birth of Tragedy in the case mentioned: as a more subtle observer and comparer will be able to tell for himself).

Enemies of truth. – Convictions are more dangerous enemies of truth than lies.

Upside down world. – One criticizes a thinker more severely when he advances a proposition we find unpleasing; and yet it would be more reasonable to do so when his proposition pleases us.

Full of character. – A man appears full of character much more often because he always obeys his temperament than because he always obeys his principles.

The one thing needful. – There is one thing one has to have: either a cheerful disposition by nature or a disposition made cheerful by art and knowledge.

Passion for causes. – He who directs his passion upon causes (the sciences, the common weal, cultural interests, the arts) deprives his passion for people (even when they are advocates of these causes, as statesmen, philosophers, artists are advocates of their creations) of much of its fire.

Composure in action. – Just as a waterfall grows slower and more lightly suspended as it plunges down, so the great man of action usually acts with greater composure than the fierceness of his desires before he acted had led us to expect.

Not too deep. – People who comprehend a thing to its very depths rarely stay faithful to it for ever. For they have brought its depths into the light of day: and in the depths there is always much that is unpleasant to see.

To the disappointed of philosophy – If you have hitherto believed that life was one of the highest value and now see yourselves disappointed, do you at once have to reduce it to the lowest possible price?

Spoiled. – It is possible to be spoiled even in regard to clarity of concepts: how repulsive one then finds it to traffic with the half-obscure, hazy, aspiring, portentous! How ludicrous and yet not at all cheering an effect is produced by their everlasting fluttering and snatching while being unable to fly or to capture!

The wooer of reality. – He who finally sees how long and how greatly he has been made a fool of embraces in defiance even the ugliest reality: so that, viewing the way of the world as a whole, the latter has at all times had the best of all wooers – for it is the best who have always been most thoroughly deceived.

Progress of free-spiritedness. – The difference between free-spiritedness as it used to be and as it is now cannot be made clearer than by recalling that proposition for the recognition and expression of which the previous century had to summon up all its intrepidity but which, judged from the present posture of knowledge, nonetheless sinks to being a piece of involuntary naivety – I mean Voltaire's proposition: ‘croyez moi, mon ami, l'erreur aussi a son mérite’.

The twofold struggle against an ill. – When we are assailed by an ill we can dispose of it either by getting rid of its cause or by changing the effect it produces on our sensibilities: that is to say by reinterpreting the ill into a good whose good effects will perhaps be perceptible only later. Religion and art (and metaphysical philosophy too) endeavour to bring about a change of sensibility, partly through changing our judgement as to the nature of our experiences (for example with the aid of the proposition: ‘whom God loveth he chastiseth’), partly through awakening the ability to take pleasure in pain, in emotion in general (from which the art of tragedy takes its starting-point). The more a man inclines towards reinterpretation, the less attention he will give to the cause of the ill and to doing away with it; the momentary amelioration and narcoticizing, such as is normally employed for example in a case of toothache, suffices him in the case of more serious sufferings too. The more the domination of the religions and all the arts of narcosis declines, the stricter attention men pay to the actual abolition of the ill: which is, to be sure, a bad lookout for the writers of tragedies – for there is less and less material for tragedy, because the realm of inexorable, implacable destiny is growing narrower and narrower – but an even worse one for the priests: for these have hitherto lived on the narcoticizing of human ills.

What is perfect is supposed not to have become. – In the case of everything perfect we are accustomed to abstain from asking how it became: we rejoice in the present fact as though it came out of the ground by magic. Here we are probably still standing under the after-effect of a primeval mythological invention. We still almost feel (for example in a Greek temple such as that at Paestum) that a god must one morning have playfully constructed his dwelling out of these tremendous weights: at other times that a stone suddenly acquired by magic a soul that is now trying to speak out of it. The artist knows that his work produces its full effect when it excites a belief in an improvisation, a belief that it came into being with a miraculous suddenness; and so he may assist this illusion and introduce those elements of rapturous restlessness, of blindly groping disorder, of attentive reverie that attend the beginning of creation into his art as a means of deceiving the soul of the spectator or auditor into a mood in which he believes that the complete and perfect has suddenly emerged instantaneously. – The science of art has, it goes without saying, most definitely to counter this illusion and to display the bad habits and false conclusions of the intellect by virtue of which it allows the artist to ensnare it.

The perfect woman. – The perfect woman is a higher type of human being than the perfect man: also something much rarer. – The natural science of the animals offers a means of demonstrating the truth of this proposition.

Friendship and marriage. – The best friend will probably acquire the best wife, because a good marriage is founded on the talent for friendship.

Continuance of the parents. – The unresolved dissonances between the characters and dispositions of the parents continue to resound in the nature of the child and constitute the history of his inner sufferings.

From the mother. – Everyone bears within him a picture of woman derived from his mother: it is this which determines whether, in his dealings with women, he respects them or despises them or is in general indifferent to them.

Correcting nature. – If one does not have a good father one should furnish oneself with one.

Fathers and sons. – Fathers have much to do to make amends for having sons.

Error of noble women. – Noble women think that a thing does not exist if it is not possible to speak about it in company.

A male sickness. – For the male sickness of self-contempt the surest cure is to be loved by a clever woman.

A kind of jealousy. – Mothers are easily jealous of the friends of their sons when these enjoy particular success.