Nietzche: Why I Am So Wise

He who knows how to breathe the air of my writings knows that it is an air of the heights, a robust air.  One has to be made for it.  Otherwise, there is no small danger one will catch cold.  The ice is near, the solitude is terrible- but how peacefully all things lie in the light!  How freely one breathes! How much one feels beneath one!  Philosophy, as I have hitherto understood and lived it, is a voluntary living in ice and high mountains- a seeking after everything strange and questionable in existence, all that has hitherto been excommunicated by morality.  From the lengthy experience afforded by such a wandering in the forbidden I learned to view the origin of moralizing and idealizing very differently from what might be desirable: the hidden history of the philosophers, the psychology of their great names came to light for me.  

How much truth can a spirit bear?  How much truth can a spirit dare?  That became for me more and more of the real measure of value.  Error (belief in the ideal) is not blindness.  Error is cowardice... every acquisition, every step forward in knowledge is the result of courage, of severity toward oneself, of cleanliness with respect to oneself... I do not refute ideals, I merely draw on gloves in their presence... Nitimur in vetitum.  We strive after the forbidden (Ovid):  In this sign my philosophy will one day conquer, for what has hitherto been forbidden on principle has never been anything but the truth. 

The man of knowledge must be able not only to love his enemies, but to hate his friends.  One repays a teacher badly if he remains a pupil.  You may be my believers, but of what impotance are all believers?  You had not yet sought yourselves when you found me.  Thus do all believers; therefore all belief is of so little account. 

Now I bid you lose me and find yourselves; and only when you have denied me will I return to you...

-Friedrich Nietzche