Beyond Good and Evil by Friedrich Nietzsche (most life changing books txt) 📕
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Beyond Good and Evil, one of Nietzsche’s four “late period” works, is a philosophical treatise organized into nine parts and 296 short individual sections. In it he explores the concept of morality as taken for granted by contemporary philosophers, and whether “good” and “evil” should be considered just two sides of the same coin.
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- Author: Friedrich Nietzsche
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It betrays corruption of the instincts—apart from the fact that it betrays bad taste—when a woman refers to Madame Roland, or Madame de Stael, or Monsieur George Sand, as though something were proved thereby in favour of “woman as she is.” Among men, these are the three comical women as they are—nothing more!—and just the best involuntary counterarguments against feminine emancipation and autonomy.
234Stupidity in the kitchen; woman as cook; the terrible thoughtlessness with which the feeding of the family and the master of the house is managed! Woman does not understand what food means, and she insists on being cook! If woman had been a thinking creature, she should certainly, as cook for thousands of years, have discovered the most important physiological facts, and should likewise have got possession of the healing art! Through bad female cooks—through the entire lack of reason in the kitchen—the development of mankind has been longest retarded and most interfered with: even today matters are very little better. A word to High School girls.
235There are turns and casts of fancy, there are sentences, little handfuls of words, in which a whole culture, a whole society suddenly crystallises itself. Among these is the incidental remark of Madame de Lambert to her son: “Mon ami, ne vous permettez jamais que des folies, qui vous feront grand plaisir”—the motherliest and wisest remark, by the way, that was ever addressed to a son.
236I have no doubt that every noble woman will oppose what Dante and Goethe believed about woman—the former when he sang, “ella guardava suso, ed io in lei,” and the latter when he interpreted it, “the eternally feminine draws us aloft”; for this is just what she believes of the eternally masculine.
237 Seven Apophthegms for WomenHow the longest ennui flees,
When a man comes to our knees!
Age, alas! and science staid,
Furnish even weak virtue aid.
Sombre garb and silence meet:
Dress for every dame—discreet.
Whom I thank when in my bliss?
God!—and my good tailoress!
Young, a flower-decked cavern home;
Old, a dragon thence doth roam.
Noble title, leg that’s fine,
Man as well: Oh, were he mine!
Speech in brief and sense in mass—
Slippery for the jenny-ass!
Woman has hitherto been treated by men like birds, which, losing their way, have come down among them from an elevation: as something delicate, fragile, wild, strange, sweet, and animating—but as something also which must be cooped up to prevent it flying away.
238To be mistaken in the fundamental problem of “man and woman,” to deny here the profoundest antagonism and the necessity for an eternally hostile tension, to dream here perhaps of equal rights, equal training, equal claims and obligations: that is a typical sign of shallow-mindedness; and a thinker who has proved himself shallow at this dangerous spot—shallow in instinct!—may generally be regarded as suspicious, nay more, as betrayed, as discovered; he will probably prove too “short” for all fundamental questions of life, future as well as present, and will be unable to descend into any of the depths. On the other hand, a man who has depth of spirit as well as of desires, and has also the depth of benevolence which is capable of severity and harshness, and easily confounded with them, can only think of woman as Orientals do: he must conceive of her as a possession, as confinable property, as a being predestined for service and accomplishing her mission therein—he must take his stand in this matter upon the immense rationality of Asia, upon the superiority of the instinct of Asia, as the Greeks did formerly; those best heirs and scholars of Asia—who, as is well known, with their increasing culture and amplitude of power, from Homer to the time of Pericles, became gradually stricter towards woman, in short, more Oriental. How necessary, how logical, even how humanely desirable this was, let us consider for ourselves!
239The weaker sex has in no previous age been treated with so much respect by men as at present—this belongs to the tendency and fundamental taste of democracy, in the same way as disrespectfulness to old age—what wonder is it that abuse should be immediately made of this respect? They want more, they learn to make claims, the tribute of respect is at last felt to
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