“He had already understood that he would never leave that room, for it was foreseen that the city of mirrors (or mirages) would be wiped out by the wind and exiled from the memory of men at the precise moment when Aureliano Babilonia would finish deciphering the parchments, and that everything written on them was unrepeatable since time immemorial and forever more, because races condemned to one hundred years of solitude did not have a second opportunity on earth.”
—Gabriel Garcia Marquez
One Hundred Years of Solitude
1967
“Truth as holding-to-be-true, committing oneself to a once-and-for-all fixed and decided "it is thus," cannot be life's highest form, because it denies life's vitality, its will to self-transcendence and becoming. To concede to life its vitality, that it might come to be something becoming as becoming and not merely be as a being, that is, life fixed as something at hand--that is what that valuation evidently aims for compared with which truth can only be a deposed value.”
—Martin Heidegger, on Nietzsche. Nietzsche: Volume III: The Will to Power as Knowledge and as Metaphysics. Page 66.
“Passion has nothing to do with sheer desire. It is not a matter of the nerves, of ebullition and dissipation. All of that, no matter how excited its gestures, Nietzsche reckons as attrition of the will. Will is what it is only as willing out beyond itself, willing more. Great will shares with great passion that serenity of unhurried animation that is slow to answer and react, not out of insecurity and ponderousness, but out of the broadly expansive authority and inner buoyancy of what is superior.”
—M. Heidegger — The Will to Power as Art (via ice and sunfire)
NIETZSCHE QUOTE OF THE DAY (5/19/2011)
“And do you know what ‘the world’ is to me? Shall I show it to you in my mirror? This world: a monster of energy, without beginning, without end; a firm, iron magnitude of force that does not grow bigger or smaller, that does not expand itself but only transforms itself; as a whole, of unalterable size, a household without expenses or losses, but likewise without increase or income; enclosed by ‘nothingness’ as by a boundary; not something blurry or wasted, not something endlessly extended, but set in a definite space as a definite force, and not a space that might be ‘empty’ here or there, but rather as a force throughout, as a play of forces and waves of forces, at the same time one and many, increasing here and and at the same time decreasing there; a sea of forces flowing and rushing together, eternally changing, eternally flooding back, with tremendous years of recurrence, with an ebb and a flood of its forms…..”
From Nietzsche’s notebooks, circa 1885. Found in the Kaufmann/Hollingdale edition of The Will to Power.
