Quotes By Letter: N

“I shall soon fall prey to rot.
Though it's hard to die, it's good to die;
I shall ask for no one's pity,
And there's no one who would pity me.

With my lyre I won no glory
For my noble family name;
And I die as distant from my people
As the day that I began to live.

Ties of friendship, unions of the heart-
All are broken: from my youth,
Fate has sent me foes implacable,
While my friends all perished in the struggle.

Their prophetic songs were left unfinished,
They fell victim to misfortune, were betrayed
In the bloom of life; and now their portraits watch me
From the walls, reproachfully.”

-I Shall Soon Fall Prey to Rot, Nikolay Alekseyevich Nekrasov

~

“As he listened to her, he lightly tapped the back of his boots with his riding crop. He turned toward his soldiers and gave them a good dressing down. Lucile realised he was ordering them to get the house back in order, to fix what had been broken, to polish the floors and the furniture. His voice, when he spoke German, especially with that commanding tone, took on a sharp, resonant quality. Hearing it gave Lucile the same pleasure that a slightly rough kiss might - the kind of kiss that ends with a little bite.”

-Suite Francaise, Irène Némirovsky

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“(Je suis le Ténébreux, - le Veuf, - l'Inconsolé, Le Prince d'Aquitaine à la Tour abolie)

I am the man of shadow, the widowed, the unconsoled, the Prince of Aquitaine at the ruined tower.”

-El Desdichado, Gérard de Nerval

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“It doesn't matter if you have all the people in the world to talk to, you still have to find the strength to say in words, what you would normally say on your skin.”

-

~

“Razors and knives, horrible things,
Explanations, slip my mind,
Press and drag, for comforting stings,
Soon, addiction's what you find.
No longer can you wait a day,
An hour's far too long,
Despite what you hear them say,
You still don't think it's wrong.
You like the sting, it makes you smile,
While the blood dripping down makes you snicker,
Finally, something worth your while,
As the lines grow thicker and thicker..”

-Nicole

~

“The problem with defending the purity of the English language is that English is about as pure as a cribhouse whore. We don't just borrow words; on occasion, English has pursued other languages down alleyways to beat them unconscious and rifle their pockets for new vocabulary.”

-The Woman In The Dunes, James D. Nicoll

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“(Als die Nazis die Kommunisten holten,
habe ich geschwiegen;
ich war ja kein Kommunist.

Als sie die Sozialdemokraten einsperrten,
habe ich geschwiegen;
ich war ja kein Sozialdemokrat.

Als sie die Gewerkschafter holten,
habe ich nicht protestiert;
ich war ja kein Gewerkschafter.

Als sie mich holten,
gab es keinen mehr, der protestieren konnte.)

When the Nazis came for the communists,
I remained silent;
I was not a communist.

When they locked up the social democrats,
I did not speak out;
I was not a social democrat.

When they came for the trade unionists,
I did not speak out;
I was not a trade unionist.

When they came for me,
there was no one left to speak out.”

-First they came..., Friedrich Gustav Emil Martin Niemöller

~

“Everything in the world displeases me: but, above all, my displeasure in everything displeases me.”

-Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche

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“There cannot be a God because if there were one, I could not believe that I was not He.”

-Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche

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“We are all afraid of the truth.”

-Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche

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“What upsets me is not that you lied to me, but that from now on, I can no longer believe you.”

-Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche

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“He who fights with monsters should look to it that he himself does not become a monster. And when you gaze long into an abyss, the abyss gazes also into you.

(Aphorism 146)”

-Beyond Good and Evil, Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche

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“The thought of suicide is a powerful solace: by means of it one gets through many a bad night.

(Aphorism 157)”

-Beyond Good and Evil, Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche

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“What does not kill him, makes him stronger.”

-Ecce Homo, Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche

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“Almost everything we call 'higher culture' is based on the spiritualization of cruelty, on its becoming more profound: this is my proposition. That 'savage animal' has not really been 'mortified'; it lives and flourishes, it has merely become?divine. What constitutes the painful voluptuousness of tragedy is cruelty; what seems agreeable in so-called tragic pity, and at bottom in everything sublime, up to the highest and most delicate shudders of metaphysics, receives its sweetness solely from the admixture of cruelty. What the Roman in the arena, the Christian in the ecstasies of the cross, the Spaniard at an auto-da-fe or bullfight, the Japanese of today when he flocks to tragedies, the laborer in a Parisian suburb who feels a nostalgia for bloody revolutions, the Wagnerienne who 'submits to' Tristan and Isolde, her will suspended?what all of them enjoy and seek to drink in with mysterious ardor are the spicy potions of the great Circe, 'cruelty.'”

-Sämtliche Werke: Kritische Studienausgabe, Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche

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“For the true poet a metaphor is not a figure of speech, but a vicarious image which actually hovers before him in place of a concept. To him a character is not an aggregate composed of a number of particular traits, but an organic person pressing himself upon his attention. [...] We talk so abstractly about poetry, because we are all bad poets.”

-The Birth Of Tragedy, Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche

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“Neither necessity nor desire, but the love of power, is the demon of humankind. You may give humans everything possible - health, food, shelter, enjoyment - but they are and remain unhappy and capricious, for the demon waits and waits; and must be satisfied.”

-The Dawn of Day, Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche

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“The surest way to corrupt a youth is to instruct him to hold in higher esteem those who think alike than those who think differently.”

-The Dawn, Sec. 297, Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche

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“Thoughts are the shadows of our feelings—always darker, emptier, simpler.”

-The Gay Science, Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche

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“Man is a rope stretched between the animal and the Superman - a rope over an abyss.”

-Thus Spake Zarathustra, Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche

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“Creation - that is the great redemption from suffering, and life's becoming light. But that the creator may be, much suffering itself is needed and much change.

Yes, there must be much bitter dying in your life, you creators! Thus you are advocates and justifiers of all impermanence.”

-Thus Spoke Zarathustra, Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche

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“He who cannot obey himself is commanded...The devotion of the greatest is to encounter risk and danger, and play dice for death...And life itself confided this secret to me: 'Behold,' it said, 'I am that which must always overcome itself.'...Indeed, the truth was not hit by him who shot at it with the word of the 'will to existence': that will does not exist. For, what does not exist cannot will; but what is in existence, how could that still want existence? Only where there is life is there also will: not will to life but—thus I teach you—will to power... And whoever must be a creator in good and evil, verily, he must first be an annihilator and break values. Thus the highest evil belongs to the highest goodness: but this is creative.”

-Thus Spoke Zarathustra, Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche

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“I tell you: one must have chaos in one, to give birth to a dancing star.”

-Thus Spoke Zarathustra, Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche

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“If I wanted to shake this tree with my hands I should not be able to do it. But the wind, which we do not see, tortures and bends it in whatever direction it pleases. It is by invisible hands that we are bent and tortured worst.”

-Thus Spoke Zarathustra, Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche

Recommended by Xibalba.

~

“Two great European narcotics, alcohol and Christianity.”

-Twilight of the Idols, What the Germans lack, 2; also in The Antichrist, Sec. 60, and Gay Science, Sec. 147, Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche

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