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Simply More: A Book for Anyone Who Has Been Told They're Too Much

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Cynthia Erivo

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“Meanwhile, all I wanted to say is that there are certain states of consciousness known to ascetics that are unknown to people who aren't ascetics.' 'No doubt. And if you treat your body in the way nature meant you to, as an equal, you attain to states of consciousness unknown to the vivisecting ascetics.' 'But the states of the vivisectors are better than the states of the indulgers.' 'In other words, lunatics are better than sane men. Which I deny. The sane, harmonious, Greek man gets as much as he can of both sets of states. He's not such a fool as to want to kill part of himself. He strikes a balance. It isn't easy of course; it's even damnably difficult. The forces to be reconciled are intrinsically hostile. The conscious soul resents the activities of the unconscious, physical, instinctive part of the total being The life of the one is the other's death and vice versa. But the sane man at least tries to strike a balance. The Christians, who weren't sane, told people that they'd got to throw half of themselves in the waste-paper basket. And now the scientists and business men come and tell us that we must throw away half of what the Christians left us. But I don't want to be three-quarters dead. I prefer to be alive, entirely alive. It's time there was a revolt in favour of life and wholeness.”

HarmonyChristiansAscetics
Book:point counter point
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“Here we should quote especially those sections from Nietzsche's central morality-critical work The Genealogy of Morals that deal with their subject in a diction of Olympian clarity. In the decisive passage he discusses the practice forms of that life-denial or world-weariness which, according to Nietzsche, exemplifies the morphological circle of sick asceticisms in general: 'The ascetic [of the priestly-sick type] treats life as a wrong path on which one must walk backwards till one comes to the place where it starts; or he treats it as an error which one may, nay must, refute by action: for he demands that he should be followed; he enforces, where he can, his valuation of existence. What does this mean? Such a monstrous valuation is not an exceptional care, or a curiosity recorded in human history: it is one of the broadest and longest facts that exist. Reading from the vantage point of a distant star the capital letters of our earthly life would perchance lead to the conclusion that the earth was the truly ascetic planet, a den of discontented, arrogant and repulsive creature creatures, who never got rid of a deep disgust of themselves, of the world, of all life, and did themselves as much hurt as possible out of pleasure in hurting - presumably their one and only pleasure.”

NietzscheAsceticismPriestFriedrich NietzscheAscetics
Book:Du mußt dein Leben ändern
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“In his differentiation between asceticisms, Nietzsche posited a clear divide between the priestly varieties on the one side, illuminated by his vicious gaze, and the disciplinary rules of intellectual workers, philosophers and artists as well as the exercises of warriors and athletes on the other side. If the former are concerned with what one might call a pathogogical asceticism - an artful self-violation among an elite of sufferers that empowers them to lead other sufferers and induce the healthy to become co-sick - the latter only impose their regulations on themselves because they see them as a means of reaching their optimum as thinkers and creators of works.”

NietzscheAsceticismFriedrich NietzscheAscetics
Book:Du mußt dein Leben ändern
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“In the monotheistic age, God was viewed as the one who causes and does everything, and hence humans were not entitled to make something, let alone a great deal, of themselves. In humanistic epochs, by contrast, man is considered the being responsible for causing and doing everything - but consequently no longer has the right to make little or nothing of himself. Whether people now make nothing or much of themselves, they commit - according to traditional forms of logic - an inexplicable and unpardonable error. There is always a surplus of differences that cannot be integrated into any of the prescribed systems of life-interpretation. In a world that belongs to God, human beings make too much of themselves as soon as they raise their heads; in a world that belongs to humans, they repeatedly make too little of themselves. The possibility that the inequality between humans might be due to their asceticisms, their different stances towards the challenges of the practising life - this idea has never been formulated in the history of investigations into the ultimate causes of difference between humans. If one follows this trail, it opens up perspectives that, being unthought-of, are literally unheard-of.”

GodSecularAsceticismAscetics
Book:Du mußt dein Leben ändern
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“[Nietzsche's] questions - transcend, but where to; ascend, but to what height? - would have answered themselves if he had calmly kept both feet on the ascetic ground. He was too sick to follow his most important insight: that the main thing in life is to take the minor things seriously. When minor things grow stronger, the danger posed by the main thing is contained; then climbing higher in the minor things means advancing in the main thing.”

Life LessonsLife PhilosophyNietzscheAsceticismFriedrich NietzscheAscetics
Book:Du mußt dein Leben ändern
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“As one advances in life, one realises more and more that the majority of men- and of women- are incapable of any other effort than that strictly imposed on them as a reaction to external compulsion. And for that reason, the few individuals we have come across who are capable of a spontaneous and joyous effort stand out isolated, monumentalised, so to speak, in our experience. These are the select men, the nobles, the only ones who are active and not merely reactive, for whom life is a perpetual striving, an incessant course of training. Training = askesis. These are the ascetics.”

Ascetics
Author:Ortega y Gasset
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