No one now dies of fatal truths: there are too many antidotes to them.

Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche was born at approximately 10:00am on October 15, 1844 in a small German town, located in a rural farmland area southwest of Leipzig,.
The date coincided with the 49th birthday of the Prussian King, Friedrich Wilhelm IV, after whom Nietzsche was named, and who had been responsible for Nietzsche's father's appointment as town minister - a Lutheran like his grandfathers.
His paternal grandfather, Friedrich August Ludwig Nietzsche, was a Protestant scholar, one of whose books (1796) affirmed the 'everlasting survival of Christianity....

What are man's truths ultimately? Merely his irrefutable errors.

Mystical explanations are considered deep. The truth is that they are not even superficial.

His father died of a brain ailment when Nietzsche was 4 years old, and shortly afterwards his little brother died. He, his mother and sister moved to relatives in nearby Naumburg an der Saale.
From the ages of 14 to 19, Nietzsche attended an excellent boarding school, Schulpforta, located not far from Naumburg, where he prepared for university studies. He is said to have been seduced in his dormitory by an older woman and to have conducted an affaire with her for a year or so.



What, if some day or night a demon were to steal after you into your loneliest loneliness and say to you: 'This life as you now live it and have lived it, you will have to live once more and innumerable times more; and there will be nothing new in it, but every pain and every joy and every thought and sigh and everything unutterably small or great in your life will have to return to you, all in the same succession and sequence - even this spider and this moonlight between the trees, and even this moment and I myself. The eternal hourglass of existence is turned upside down again and again, and you with it, speck of dust!' Would you not throw yourself down and gnash your teeth and curse the demon who spoke thus?...

During his summers in Naumburg, Nietzsche led a small music and literature club named 'Germania,' and became acquainted with Richard Wagner's music through the club's subscription to the Zeitschrift für Musik.
When Nietzsche began his studies at the University of Bonn in 1864 his interests gravitated towards philology - which at that time involved the interpretation of classical and biblical texts.
In 1865 Nietzsche moved to the University of Leipzig - which was closer to Naumburg - and there he quickly established an academic reputation through published essays on Aristotle, Theognis and Simonides.
During that year Nietsche accidentally discovered Arthur Schopenhauer's The World as Will and Representation (1818) in a local bookstore. He was then 21. Schopenhauer's atheistic and turbulent vision of the world, in conjunction with his highest praise of music as an art form, captured Nietzsche's imagination, and the extent to which Schopenhauer's world-view affected Nietzsche's thinking is still a matter of scholarly debate.
In 1867, aged 22 Nietzsche was conscripted, and was posted to an equestrian field artillery regiment close to Naumburg, during which time he lived at home with his mother.

Custom represents the experiences of men of earlier times as to what they supposed useful and harmful - but the sense for custom (morality) applies, not to these experiences as such, but to the age, the sanctity, the indiscussability of the custom. And so this feeling is a hindrance to the acquisition of new experiences and the correction of customs: that is to say, morality is a hindrance to the development of new and better customs.

While attempting to mount a rather wild steed, he suffered a serious chest injury and was put on sick leave (Horses feature strongly in his life.)

He returned shortly thereafter to the University of Leipzig, and in November of 1868, met the composer Richard Wagner (1813-1883) at the home of Hermann Brockhouse, an Orientalist who was married to Wagner's sister, Ottilie. Wagner and Nietzsche shared an enthusiasm for Schopenhauer, and Nietzsche -- who had been composing piano, choral and orchestral music since he was a teenager -- admired Wagner for his musical genius and magnetic personality. Wagner was exactly the age as Nietzsche's father would have been, and Wagner had also attended the University of Leipzig many years before.
The University of Basel, offered Nietzsche a professorship when he was only 24. He had been recommended by an
admiring teacher. At Basel, he established closer intellectual ties with the historians Franz Overbeck and Jacob Burkhardt, whose lectures he attended. Nietzsche also continued to cultivate his friendship with Wagner; Wagner was at that time in Switzerland, too in Tribschen, near Lucerne.

What is new, however, is always evil, being that which wants to conquer and overthrow the old boundary markers and the old pieties; and only what is old is good. The good men are in all ages those who dig the old thoughts, digging deep and getting them to bear fruit - the farmers of the spirit. But eventually all land is depleted, and the ploughshare of evil must come again and again

Nietzsche served from August until October 1870 as a hospital attendant during the Franco-Prussian War (1870-71).
The war itself was horrifying;he had to treat the wounded; he also caught diphtheria and dysentery; his health never fully recovered.
Nietzsche's enthusiasm for Schopenhauer, his studies in classical philology, his inspiration from Wagner, his reading of Lange, and
his frustration with the contemporary German culture, were all synthesised in his first book -- The Birth of Tragedy (1872),
published when he was 28.
Wagner raved about the book, but it was panned by the young and promising philologist, Ulrich von Wilamowitz-Mˆllendorff (1848-1931).
By now Wagner had a new home - in Bayreuth, Germany.

Speaking in a parable.--A Jesus Christ was possible only in a Jewish landscape--I mean one over which the gloomy and sublime thunder cloud of the wrathful Yahweh was brooding continually. Only here was the rare and sudden piercing of the gruesome and perpetual general day-night by a single ray of the sun experienced as if it were a miracle of 'love' and the ray of unmerited 'grace.' Only here could Jesus dream of his rainbow and his ladder to heaven on which God descended to man. Everywhere else good weather and sunshine were considered the rule and everyday occurrences. from Nietzsche's The Gay Science, s.137, Walter Kaufmann transl The first Christian. All the world still believes in the authorship of the 'Holy Spirit' or is at least still affected by this belief: when one opens the Bible one does so for 'edification.'... That it also tells the story of one of the most ambitious and obtrusive of souls, of a head as superstitious as it was crafty, the story of the apostle Paul--who knows this , except a few scholars? Without this strange story, however, without the confusions and storms of such a head, such a soul, there would be no Christianity... That the ship of Christianity threw overboard a good deal of its Jewish ballast, that it went, and was able to go, among the pagans--that was due to this one man, a very tortured, very pitiful, very unpleasant man, unpleasant even to himself. He suffered from a fixed idea--or more precisely, from a fixed, ever-present, never-resting question: what about the Jewish law? and particularly the fulfillment of this law? In his youth he had himself wanted to satisfy it, with a ravenous hunger for this highest distinction which the Jews could conceive - this people who were propelled higher than any other people by the imagination of the ethically sublime, and who alone succeeded in creating a holy god together with the idea of sin as a transgression against this holiness.

In 1876, at age 32, Nietzsche made an unsuccessful marriage proposal to a Dutch piano student in Geneva named Mathilde Trampedach. During this time, Nietzsche completed his series of four studies on contemporary German culture - Unfashionable Observations (1873-76), in which Schopenhauer and Wagner were discussed, as well as questions of history and culture.
Near the end of his university career, Nietzsche completed Human, All-Too-Human (1878) - a book which marked a turning point
in his philosophical style. It also featured an attack upon 'the artist.' It was clear who was meant by this, and the book ended Nietzsche's friendship with Wagner.
Nietzsche's books were not well-received but he could have remained a professor forever; he was highly respected, but by now he was most unwell: he suffered from severe eyesight problems, migraines and vomiting and was forced to resign from the university in June, 1879.

.... it has been demonstrated in many instances how the errors of the greatest philosophers usually have their point of departure
in a false explanation of certain human actions and sensations; ...a false ethics is erected, religion and mythological monsters are then in turn called to buttress it, and the shadow of these dismal spirits in the end falls even across physics and the entire perception of the world.

From 1880 until his collapse in January 1889, Nietzsche led a wandering, gypsy-like existence as a 'stateless' person (having given up his German citizenship, and not having acquired Swiss citizenship. roaming between his mother's house in Naumburg and various French, Swiss, German and Italian cities. His travels took him through Nice, the Swiss alpine village of Sils-Maria, Leipzig, Turin, Genoa, Recoaro, Messina, Rapallo, Florence, Venice, and Rome.

To admit a belief merely because it is a custom - but that means to be dishonest, cowardly, lazy!

On a visit to Rome in 1882, Nietzsche, now at age thirty-seven, met Lou Salomé, a twenty-one-year-old Russian woman who was studying philosophy and theology in Zurich. He soon fell in love with her, and offered his hand in marriage. She declined.In the years to follow, Salomé would become an associate of Sigmund Freud, and would write with psychological insight of her association with Nietzsche.
These nomadic years were the occasion of Nietzsche's main works, among which are Daybreak (1881), The Gay Science (1882), b(1883-85), Beyond Good and Evil (1886), and On the Genealogy of Morals (1887).
Nietzsche's final active year, 1888, saw the completion of The Case of Wagner (May-August 1888), Twilight of the gods(August-September 1888), The Antichrist (September 1888), Ecce Homo (October-November 1888) and Nietzsche Contra Wagner (December 1888).

The he encountered the horse being whipped.

After a brief hospitalization in Basel, he spent 1889 in a sanatorium in Jena at the Binswanger Clinic.
In March 1890 his mother took him back home to Naumburg, where he lived under her care for the next seven years.

His sister Elisabeth returned home from Paraguay. She had been working there with her husband Bernhard Fˆrster to establish an Aryan, anti-Semitic German colony called 'New Germany' ('Nueva Germania')
She assumed responsibility for Nietzsche's welfare.
In an effort to promote his philosophy, she rented a large house on a hill in Weimar, called the 'Villa Silberblick' and moved both Nietzsche and his collected manuscripts to the residence.
This became the new home of the Nietzsche Archives. It was here that Elisabeth received visitors who wanted to observe the now-incapacitated philosopher.
On August 25, 1900, Nietzsche died in the villa as he approached his 56th birthday, apparently of pneumonia in combination with a stroke.
H is body was then transported to the family gravesite directly beside the church in Rûcken bei Lützen, where his mother and sister now also rest.


During his creative years, Nietzsche struggled to bring his writings into print.

He never doubted that his books would last

'I teach you the Ubermensch - Superman.
Man is something that shall be overcome. What have you done to overcome him?
All beings so far have created something beyond themselves; and do you want to be the ebb of this great flood and even go back to the beasts rather than overcome man?
What is the ape to man? A laughingstock or a painful embarrassment. And man shall be just that for the Ubermensch: a laughingstock or a painful embarrassment...
Behold, I teach you the Ubermensch. The Ubermensch is the meaning of the earth.
Let your will say: the Ubermensch shall be the meaning of the earth!
I beseech you, my brothers, remain faithful to the earth, and do not believe those who speak to you of otherworldly hopes!
Poison-mixers are they, whether they know it or not. Despisers of life are they, decaying and poisoned themselves, of whom the earth is weary: so let them go. Once the sin against God was the greatest sin; but God died