Aphorisms on Love and Hate - Friedrich Nietzsche  ## Metadata - Author: **Friedrich Nietzsche** - Full Title: Aphorisms on Love and Hate - Category: #books ## Highlights - *Economy of kindness*. Kindness and love, the most curative herbs and agents in human intercourse, are such precious finds that one would hope these balsamlike remedies would be used as economically as possible; but this is impossible. Only the boldest Utopians would dream of the economy of kindness ([View Highlight](https://read.readwise.io/read/01hdaswhg983mw3mk0pz6qbg2v)) ## New highlights added March 22, 2025 at 11:13 AM - *Censor vitae*.[*](private://read/01ha2ygz55jxzfjgb6jcxzthqh/#aph0000203fn) For a long time, the inner state of a man who wants to become free in his judgments about life will be characterized by an alternation between love and hatred; he does not forget, and resents everything, good as well as evil. Finally, when the whole tablet of his soul is written full with experiences, he will neither despise and hate existence nor love it, but rather lie above it, now with a joyful eye, now with a sorrowful eye, and, like nature, be now of a summery, now of an autumnal disposition. ([View Highlight](https://read.readwise.io/read/01jpp8vmkejw7h1bcmc5r75zk1)) - *Secondary result*. Whoever seriously wants to become free, will in the process also lose, uncoerced, the inclination to faults and vices; he will also be prey ever more rarely to annoyance and irritation. For his will desires nothing more urgently than knowledge, and the means to it – that is, the enduring condition in which he is best able to engage in knowledge. ([View Highlight](https://read.readwise.io/read/01jpp8wfsvmpqxyw0mprwgc07p)) - *Lack of intimacy*. Lack of intimacy among friends is a mistake that cannot be censured without becoming irreparable. ([View Highlight](https://read.readwise.io/read/01jpp9088wpgq3072e83v7z0ya)) - *The friend’s secret*. There will be but few people who, when at a loss for topics of conversation, will not reveal the more secret affairs of their friends. ([View Highlight](https://read.readwise.io/read/01jpp93mrtn0n6nxhq6n5kd0aq)) - *Women’s friendship*. Women can very well enter into a friendship with a man, but to maintain it – a little physical antipathy must help out. ([View Highlight](https://read.readwise.io/read/01jpp99fvxkpfxt4s9xzw4t1eq)) - *Proteus nature*. For the sake of love, women wholly become what they are in the imagination of the men who love them. ([View Highlight](https://read.readwise.io/read/01jpp9bf621eeecmb980f7fw0b)) - *Loving and possessing*. Women usually love an important man in such a way that they want to have him to themselves. They would gladly put him under lock and key, if their vanity, which wants him to appear important in front of others, too, did not advise against it. ([View Highlight](https://read.readwise.io/read/01jpp9d6ph9m6jtbpw5g4yk2sg)) - *Marriage as a long conversation*. When entering a marriage, one should ask the question: do you think you will be able to have good conversations with this woman right into old age? Everything else in marriage is transitory, but most of the time in interaction is spent in conversation. ([View Highlight](https://read.readwise.io/read/01jpp9evwq7w4bc0jgfsnkc2ra)) - *Short-sighted people are amorous*. Sometimes just a stronger pair of glasses will cure an amorous man; and if someone had the power to imagine a face or form twenty years older, he might go through life quite undisturbed. ([View Highlight](https://read.readwise.io/read/01jpp9gebty162mmwt9rp3gw7s)) - For one’s twenties, marriage is a necessary institution; for one’s thirties, it is useful, but not necessary; for later life, it often becomes harmful and promotes a husband’s spiritual regression. ([View Highlight](https://read.readwise.io/read/01jpre4a8rwfqqahgas8dgm40s)) - *Tragedy of childhood*. Not infrequently, noble-minded and ambitious men have to endure their harshest struggle in childhood, perhaps by having to assert their characters against a low-minded father, who is devoted to pretense and mendacity, or by living, like Lord Byron, in continual struggle with a childish and wrathful mother. If one has experienced such struggles, for the rest of his life he will never get over knowing who has been in reality his greatest and most dangerous enemy. ([View Highlight](https://read.readwise.io/read/01jpre5w7ema4z5fkp5vk9e4fb)) - . That is why the free spirit hates all habits and rules, everything enduring and definitive; that is why, again and again, he painfully tears apart the net around him, even though he will suffer as a consequence from countless large and small wounds – for he must tear those fibres *away from himself*, from his body, his soul. He must learn to love where he used to hate, and vice versa. Indeed, nothing may be impossible for him, not even to sow dragons’ teeth on the same field where he previously emptied the cornucopias of his kindness. From this one can judge whether he is cut out for the happiness of marriage. ([View Highlight](https://read.readwise.io/read/01jpreacmja2nzcfztcjhrrytt)) - *Too close*. If we live in too close proximity to a person, it is as if we kept touching a good etching with our bare fingers; one day we have poor, dirty paper in our hands and nothing more. A human being’s soul is likewise worn down by continual touching; at least it finally *appears* that way to us – we never see its original design and beauty again. One always loses by all-too-intimate association with women and friends; and sometimes one loses the pearl of his life in the process. ([View Highlight](https://read.readwise.io/read/01jpreb918kg2wykb5yb5gg0ss)) - *Passion for things*. He who directs his passion to things (the sciences, the national good, cultural interests, the arts) takes much of the fire out of his passion for people (even when they represent those things, as statesmen, philosophers, and artists represent their creations). ([View Highlight](https://read.readwise.io/read/01jpreebpyp5dedsde9e0a0zwg)) - *The right profession*. Men seldom endure a profession if they do not believe or persuade themselves that it is basically more important than all others. Women do the same with their lovers. ([View Highlight](https://read.readwise.io/read/01jpreez45n5k04dwkvs7p5xpd)) - *Punctum saliens*[*](private://read/01ha2ygz55jxzfjgb6jcxzthqh/#aph0000350ofn) *of passion*. He who is about to fall into a state of anger or violent love reaches a point where his soul is full like a vessel; but it needs one more drop of water: the good will to passion (which is generally also called the bad will). Only this little point is necessary; then the vessel runs over. ([View Highlight](https://read.readwise.io/read/01jprj80h1qa36v31rjxdvq8p5)) - *The hour-hand of life*. Life consists of rare, isolated moments of the greatest significance, and of innumerably many intervals, during which at best the silhouettes of those moments hover about us. Love, springtime, every beautiful melody, mountains, the moon, the sea – all these speak completely to the heart but once, if in fact they ever do get a chance to speak completely. For many men do not have those moments at all, and are themselves intervals and intermissions in the symphony of real life. ([View Highlight](https://read.readwise.io/read/01jprjb2ppxnma3pvt61qyqecm)) - *Learning to love*. We must learn to love, learn to be kind, and this from earliest youth; if education or chance give us no opportunity to practice these feelings, our soul becomes dry and unsuited even to understanding the tender inventions of loving people. Likewise, hatred must be learned and nurtured, if one wishes to become a proficient hater: otherwise the germ for that, too, will gradually wither. ([View Highlight](https://read.readwise.io/read/01jprjejwfv259v1adnjjcbb1r)) - *all in all, nothing human is worth taking very seriously; nevertheless* … ([View Highlight](https://read.readwise.io/read/01jprjnbvwahz7kt23h7mqew7b))