Bushido on Nostr: Powerful Nietzsche Quote (on running from the inner voice): “All of us know in ...

Powerful Nietzsche Quote (on running from the inner voice):


“All of us know in individual moments how the most extensive arrangements of our own lives are made only in order to flee from our true task; how we like to hide our heads somewhere, as though our hundred-eyed conscience would not find us there; how we hasten to sell our soul to the state, to money-making, to social life, or to scholarship just so that we will no longer possess it; how even in our daily work we slave away without reflection and more ardently than is necessary to make a living because it seems to us necessary not to stop and reflect.

Haste is universal because everyone is fleeing from himself; universal, too, is the timid concealment of this haste, because we want to appear satisfied and deceive the most perceptive observers about our wretchedness; universal, as well, the need for new sounding word bells with which life can be adorned and lent an air of noisy festivity.

Everyone is familiar with the peculiar state in which unpleasant memories suddenly force themselves upon us and we make an effort to drive them out our heads by means of violent gestures and sounds; but the gestures and sounds of common life indicate that all of us always find ourselves in such a fear of memory and of turning inward.

What is it that assails us so often, what mosquito is this that refuses to let us sleep? Ghostly things are occurring ground us, every moment of life wants to tell us something, but we do not want to hear this ghostly voice.

When we are quiet and alone we are afraid that something will be whispered into our ear, and hence we despise quiet and drug ourselves with sociability.”