They Muddy The Water, To Make It

Through Searching Out Origins, One Becomes A Crab. The Historian Looks Backwards, And Finally He Also Believes Backwards.

At A Certain Place In Beethoven's Ninth Symphony, For Example, He Might Feel That He Is Floating Above The Earth In A Starry Dome, With The Dream Of Immortality In His Heart; All The Stars Seem To Glimmer Around Him, And The Earth Seems To Sink Ever Deeper Downwards.

It Is Only Great Pain--that Slow, Sustained Pain That Takes Its Time, In Which We Are, As It Were, Burned With Smoldering Green Firewood--that Forces Us Philosophers To Sink To Our Ultimate Profundity And To Do Away With All The Trust, Everything Good-natured, Veil-imposing, Mild And Middling, On Which We May Have Previously Based Our Humanity. I Doubt That Such A Pain Makes Us 'better'--but I Know That It Makes Us Deeper.

The Man Of The Future Who Will Redeem Us Not Only From The Hitherto Reigning Ideal But Also From That Which Was Bound To Grow Out Of It, The Great Nausea, The Will To Nothingness, Nihilism; This Bell Stroke Of Noon And Of The Great Decision That Liberates The Will Again And Restores Its Goal To The Earth And His Hope To Man; This Antichrist And Anti-nihilist; This Victor Over God And Nothingness - He Must Come One Day.

When We Are Tired, We Are Attacked By Ideas We Conquered Long Ago.