When Nietzsche Wept: A Novel of Obsession

by Irvin D. Yalom

No one desires, he believes, to help another: instead, people wish only to dominate and increase their own power.
“But we are free-thinking idealists who reject socially imposed restrictions. We believe in our capability to create our own moral structure.”
“I have a why of living and can put up with any how. I have a ten-year point of living, a mission. I am pregnant, here”—he tapped his temple—“with books, books almost fully formed, books only I can deliver. Sometimes I think of my headaches as cerebral labor pains.”
Truth is arrived at through disbelief and skepticism, not through a childlike wishing something were so!
“Evolutionary theory scientifically demonstrates God’s redundancy—though Darwin himself had not the courage to follow his evidence to its true conclusion. Surely, you must realize that we created God, and that all of us together now have killed him.”
Hope is the final evil!
“Dying is hard. I’ve always felt the final reward of the dead is to die no more!”
One does not, strictly speaking, choose or select a disease; but one does choose stress—and it is stress that chooses the disease!
Great thinkers always choose their own company, think their own thoughts, undisturbed by the herd.
Perhaps you think of those you love. Dig deeper, and you will learn that you do not love them: what you love is the pleasant sensations such love produces in you! You love desire, not the desired.
“You assume your own attitudes are universal and then you try to comprehend for all mankind what you cannot comprehend about yourself.”
Look deeper, and you will see that lust is also a lust for dominance over all others. The ‘lover’ is not one who ‘loves’: instead, he aims for sole possession of his loved one. His wish is to exclude the entire world from some precious good. He is as mean-spirited as the dragon guarding his golden hoard! He does not love the world—on the contrary, he is utterly indifferent to all other living creatures.
‘Sensuality is a bitch that nips at our heels! And how nicely this bitch knows how to beg for a piece of spirit when denied a piece of meat.’
“Great passion is required to defeat passion! Too many men have been broken on the wheel of lesser passion.”
You want to fly, but you cannot begin to fly by flying. I must first teach you to walk, and the first step in learning to walk is to understand that he who does not obey himself is ruled by others. It is easier, far easier, to obey another than to command oneself.
If you choose science, if you choose to be liberated from the soothing chains of the supernatural, if, as you claim, you choose to eschew belief and embrace godlessness, then you cannot in the same breath yearn for the small comforts of the believer! If you kill God, you must also leave the shelter of the temple.
“If you choose to be one of those few who partake of the pleasure of growth and the exhilaration of godless freedom, then you must prepare yourself for the greatest pain. They are bound together and cannot be experienced apart! If you want less pain, then you must shrink, as the stoics did, and forgo the highest pleasure.”
“A cosmic perspective always attenuates tragedy. If we climb high enough, we will reach a height from which tragedy ceases to look tragic.”
The paradox, your paradox, is that you dedicate yourself to the search for truth but cannot bear the sight of what you discover.
“Live when you live! Death loses its terror if one dies when one has consummated one’s life! If one does not live in the right time, then one can never die at the right time.”
What is immortal is this life, this moment. There is no afterlife, no goal toward which this life points, no apocalyptic tribunal or judgment. This moment exists forever, and you, alone, are your only audience.
“Nothing is everything! In order to grow strong you must first sink your roots deep into nothingness and learn to face your loneliest loneliness.”